Case Study Templates for Technical Portfolios¶
Structured Impact Documentation
Transform your technical achievements into compelling case studies that showcase your problem-solving abilities, leadership impact, and engineering excellence for Amazon L6/L7 interviews.
Overview¶
Case studies are the foundation of your technical portfolio, providing concrete evidence of your capabilities and impact. This guide offers proven frameworks and complete examples for documenting your most significant contributions.
STAR+ Format for Technical Stories¶
The STAR+ framework extends the traditional STAR method with additional focus areas critical for technical leadership roles.
STAR+ Components¶
S - Situation - Business context and constraints - Technical landscape and challenges - Team composition and dynamics - Timeline and external pressures
T - Task - Specific responsibilities and ownership - Success criteria and metrics - Stakeholder expectations - Technical requirements
A - Action - Technical approaches and decisions - Leadership and influence activities - Problem-solving methodologies - Implementation strategies
R - Result - Quantified business impact - Technical improvements achieved - Team and organizational benefits - Long-term outcomes
+ - Plus (Additional Elements) - Leadership Impact: How you influenced others - Trade-off Analysis: Decisions made and alternatives considered - Lessons Learned: What you would do differently - Future Applications: How this experience guides future decisions
Problem-Solution-Impact Framework¶
An alternative structure that emphasizes the engineering problem-solving process.
Framework Structure¶
1. Problem Definition (25%)¶
- Business Problem: What business need was not being met?
- Technical Challenge: What technical obstacles existed?
- Constraints: What limitations did you work within?
- Stakeholders: Who was affected by this problem?
2. Solution Development (50%)¶
- Analysis: How did you investigate and understand the problem?
- Options: What approaches did you consider?
- Decision Process: How did you choose the final approach?
- Implementation: How did you execute the solution?
- Leadership: How did you drive adoption and overcome resistance?
3. Impact Measurement (25%)¶
- Technical Metrics: Performance, reliability, scalability improvements
- Business Metrics: Cost savings, revenue impact, efficiency gains
- Organizational Impact: Process improvements, knowledge transfer
- Long-term Benefits: Ongoing value and learnings
Complete L6 Case Studies¶
L6 Case Study 1: Microservice Performance Optimization¶
Duration: 4 months
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Team Size: 6 engineers
Technologies: Java Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes
Situation¶
Our e-commerce platform's order processing service was experiencing significant performance degradation during peak traffic periods. Response times increased from 200ms to 3+ seconds, causing cart abandonment rates to spike by 23%. The service handled 50,000 orders per day during normal periods but struggled with Black Friday traffic of 200,000+ orders per day. The existing monolithic order service had grown to handle multiple responsibilities including order validation, inventory checks, payment processing, and notification sending.
Task¶
As the lead engineer for the order service, I was tasked with improving performance to handle 4x peak traffic while maintaining sub-500ms response times. Success criteria included: - Reduce average response time to <300ms under peak load - Maintain 99.9% uptime during traffic spikes - Support horizontal scaling without major architecture changes - Implement monitoring and alerting for proactive issue detection
Action¶
Technical Analysis: I conducted a comprehensive performance analysis using APM tools (New Relic) and identified three primary bottlenecks: 1. Database connection pool exhaustion under high concurrent requests 2. Synchronous external API calls blocking request threads 3. Inefficient database queries causing table locks
Solution Implementation:
- Database Optimization:
- Increased connection pool size from 10 to 50 connections
- Implemented connection pooling with HikariCP
- Added database read replicas for order history queries
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Optimized 12 critical queries, reducing execution time by 60%
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Asynchronous Processing:
- Converted synchronous inventory and payment calls to async operations
- Implemented event-driven architecture using RabbitMQ
- Added circuit breakers for external service calls using Hystrix
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Created fallback mechanisms for non-critical operations
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Caching Strategy:
- Implemented Redis caching for frequently accessed product data
- Added application-level caching for user preferences
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Implemented cache warming strategies for peak periods
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Monitoring and Alerting:
- Set up custom metrics in DataDog for response times and error rates
- Created automated alerts for performance degradation
- Implemented distributed tracing to identify bottlenecks
Leadership Activities: - Coordinated with infrastructure team to provision additional database resources - Led design reviews with senior architects to validate approach - Mentored two junior engineers on performance testing techniques - Collaborated with product team to prioritize non-critical features for async processing
Result¶
Technical Improvements: - Reduced average response time from 3+ seconds to 180ms (94% improvement) - Achieved 99.97% uptime during Black Friday peak traffic - Successfully handled 250,000 orders per day with room for additional growth - Eliminated timeout errors completely (previously 5% of requests)
Business Impact: - Cart abandonment rate decreased by 18% during peak periods - Increased Black Friday revenue by $2.3M due to improved conversion rates - Reduced customer support tickets related to slow checkout by 85% - Enabled marketing team to run more aggressive promotional campaigns
Technical Metrics: - P95 response time: 380ms (down from 5.2 seconds) - Database CPU utilization: 45% (down from 95%) - Memory usage optimized by 30% - Error rate reduced from 2.1% to 0.03%
Leadership Impact¶
- Established performance testing as standard practice for the team
- Created knowledge-sharing sessions on async programming patterns
- Influenced architecture decisions for three other microservices
- Mentored team members on database optimization techniques
Lessons Learned¶
- Proactive Monitoring: Implementing comprehensive monitoring before problems occur is crucial
- Incremental Changes: Making smaller, measurable changes allowed us to identify what worked
- Cross-team Collaboration: Early involvement of infrastructure and QA teams accelerated delivery
- Documentation: Detailed performance testing documentation helped future optimization efforts
L6 Case Study 2: API Security Enhancement¶
Duration: 3 months
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Team Size: 5 engineers
Technologies: Node.js, Express, OAuth2, JWT, AWS API Gateway
Situation¶
Our customer-facing API had been experiencing security incidents, including two instances of unauthorized data access and increasing bot traffic that was affecting legitimate users. The API served 2 million requests per day from web and mobile applications, with no comprehensive security framework in place. Security scans revealed multiple vulnerabilities including insufficient rate limiting, weak authentication mechanisms, and potential SQL injection vectors.
Task¶
I was assigned to lead a comprehensive API security overhaul with the following objectives: - Implement robust authentication and authorization mechanisms - Add comprehensive rate limiting and DDoS protection - Eliminate identified security vulnerabilities - Maintain backward compatibility for existing clients - Achieve compliance with SOC 2 security requirements
Action¶
Security Assessment: Conducted thorough security analysis using OWASP guidelines and identified critical areas: 1. Authentication: Basic API keys with no expiration or rotation 2. Authorization: Coarse-grained permissions with admin/user roles only 3. Input Validation: Insufficient sanitization leading to injection risks 4. Rate Limiting: No protection against abuse or DDoS attacks
Implementation Strategy:
- Authentication Modernization:
- Migrated from API keys to OAuth2 with JWT tokens
- Implemented token refresh mechanisms with short expiry times
- Added multi-factor authentication for sensitive operations
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Created secure token storage and rotation procedures
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Fine-grained Authorization:
- Designed role-based access control (RBAC) system
- Implemented resource-level permissions
- Added context-aware authorization for sensitive data access
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Created admin tools for permission management
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Input Validation and Sanitization:
- Implemented comprehensive input validation using Joi schemas
- Added SQL injection protection with parameterized queries
- Created request sanitization middleware
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Implemented content security policies
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Rate Limiting and Protection:
- Deployed AWS API Gateway with rate limiting rules
- Implemented distributed rate limiting using Redis
- Added CAPTCHA for suspicious traffic patterns
- Created IP-based blocking for malicious actors
Leadership and Coordination: - Collaborated with security team to define security requirements - Led technical discussions on backward compatibility strategies - Coordinated with mobile and web teams for client-side changes - Created security awareness training for the development team
Result¶
Security Improvements: - Eliminated all critical and high-severity vulnerabilities - Reduced unauthorized access attempts by 99.2% - Achieved SOC 2 Type II certification compliance - Decreased bot traffic by 87% through intelligent rate limiting
Business Impact: - Prevented potential data breach costs estimated at $500K+ - Enabled expansion into regulated markets requiring strict security - Increased customer trust and confidence in platform security - Reduced security incident response time from 4 hours to 30 minutes
Technical Metrics: - Authentication success rate: 99.8% (improved from 94%) - API response time maintained at 150ms despite additional security layers - Successfully handled DDoS attack of 100K requests/minute with no downtime - Zero security incidents in 6 months post-implementation
Leadership Impact¶
- Established security-first development practices for the team
- Created security code review checklist adopted by 3 other teams
- Influenced company-wide API security standards
- Mentored junior developers on secure coding practices
Lessons Learned¶
- Security by Design: Integrating security considerations from the design phase is more effective than retrofitting
- Gradual Migration: Phased rollout allowed us to identify and fix compatibility issues early
- Team Education: Regular security training sessions improved overall code quality
- Automation: Automated security testing in CI/CD pipeline prevented regressions
Complete L7 Case Studies¶
L7 Case Study 1: Platform Migration and Modernization¶
Duration: 18 months
Role: Principal Engineer / Technical Lead
Team Size: 25 engineers across 4 teams
Technologies: Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Go, Python, Java, PostgreSQL, Redis
Situation¶
Our company was running critical business applications on legacy infrastructure that was becoming increasingly expensive to maintain and limiting our ability to scale. The existing platform consisted of monolithic applications deployed on physical servers with manual deployment processes. This architecture was causing: - 72-hour deployment cycles with 15% failure rate - $2.8M annual infrastructure costs with poor resource utilization (30%) - Frequent outages due to single points of failure - Unable to scale for seasonal traffic spikes without over-provisioning - Developer productivity hampered by complex local development setup
The executive team mandated a complete platform modernization to support 10x growth while reducing operational costs by 40%.
Task¶
As Principal Engineer, I was responsible for architecting and leading the complete platform migration from legacy infrastructure to a modern, cloud-native platform. Key responsibilities included: - Design overall migration strategy and timeline - Lead technical decision-making across multiple engineering teams - Ensure zero-downtime migration for customer-facing services - Achieve 40% cost reduction while improving performance and reliability - Establish new development and deployment practices - Mentor team leads and drive adoption of new technologies
Action¶
Strategic Planning and Architecture:
- Assessment and Strategy Development:
- Conducted comprehensive audit of existing applications and dependencies
- Analyzed traffic patterns and performance requirements for each service
- Developed phased migration plan with clear milestones and rollback procedures
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Created cost-benefit analysis for different cloud providers and deployment models
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Technology Selection and Standards:
- Chose Kubernetes on AWS EKS for container orchestration
- Standardized on Docker for containerization across all applications
- Selected Terraform for infrastructure as code
- Implemented GitOps deployment model with ArgoCD
- Established monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and AlertManager
Migration Execution:
- Infrastructure Modernization:
- Built new Kubernetes clusters with multi-AZ deployment for high availability
- Implemented auto-scaling policies for both cluster nodes and application pods
- Created standardized Helm charts for application deployment
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Established CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD
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Application Modernization:
- Led decomposition of monolithic applications into microservices
- Implemented API gateway pattern for service communication
- Added distributed tracing and centralized logging
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Created shared libraries for common functionality across teams
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Data Platform Migration:
- Migrated databases to managed AWS RDS with read replicas
- Implemented database migration strategies with minimal downtime
- Set up automated backup and disaster recovery procedures
- Created data pipeline for analytics using AWS services
Leadership and Team Management:
- Cross-team Coordination:
- Established architecture review board with representatives from each team
- Created shared documentation and best practices wiki
- Implemented weekly technical sync meetings across all teams
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Coordinated with product teams to prioritize migration work
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Skill Development and Training:
- Organized Kubernetes and cloud-native training programs
- Mentored 8 senior engineers on architectural decision-making
- Created internal certification program for platform technologies
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Established communities of practice for each technology stack
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Risk Management:
- Implemented feature flags for gradual rollout of new platform
- Created comprehensive testing strategies including chaos engineering
- Established incident response procedures for migration issues
- Maintained parallel infrastructure during transition period
Result¶
Technical Achievements: - Successfully migrated 47 applications to new platform with zero customer-facing downtime - Reduced deployment time from 72 hours to 15 minutes with 99.8% success rate - Achieved 99.95% uptime SLA (improved from 99.2%) - Implemented auto-scaling supporting 10x traffic spikes without manual intervention - Reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR) from 4 hours to 20 minutes
Business Impact: - Reduced annual infrastructure costs by 43% ($2.8M to $1.6M) - Increased developer productivity by 65% measured by feature delivery velocity - Enabled rapid expansion into 3 new geographic markets - Reduced time-to-market for new features from 6 weeks to 2 weeks - Achieved SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance enabling enterprise sales
Organizational Impact: - Established platform engineering as a core competency - Created reusable platform components adopted by 5 other business units - Influenced hiring strategy to focus on cloud-native skills - Established culture of automation and infrastructure as code
Key Metrics: - Infrastructure utilization: 85% (up from 30%) - Deployment frequency: 15 deploys/day (up from 2/week) - Lead time for changes: 2 days (down from 21 days) - Change failure rate: 0.2% (down from 15%)
Leadership Impact¶
- Technical Strategy: Established cloud-first technology strategy adopted company-wide
- Team Development: Promoted 6 engineers to senior roles through mentoring and skill development
- Process Innovation: Created DevOps practices and tooling used across all engineering teams
- Knowledge Sharing: Presented migration learnings at 3 industry conferences, enhancing company reputation
Trade-off Analysis¶
Technology Choices: - Kubernetes vs. Serverless: Chose Kubernetes for better control and cost predictability despite higher complexity - Multi-cloud vs. Single cloud: Selected AWS for simplicity and team expertise, accepting vendor lock-in risk - Microservices vs. Modular monolith: Chose microservices for team autonomy despite increased operational complexity
Lessons Learned¶
- Gradual Migration: Phased approach with feature flags was crucial for managing risk and maintaining team confidence
- Team Alignment: Regular cross-team communication prevented duplicate work and ensured consistent architectural decisions
- Investment in Training: Upfront investment in team skills paid dividends in execution speed and quality
- Automation First: Prioritizing automation over manual processes early in the migration prevented technical debt
L7 Case Study 2: Real-time Data Platform at Scale¶
Duration: 12 months
Role: Staff Engineer / Platform Architect
Team Size: 30+ engineers across 6 teams
Technologies: Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Elasticsearch, AWS Kinesis, PostgreSQL, Cassandra
Situation¶
Our rapidly growing fintech platform needed to process real-time financial transactions and provide instant fraud detection, risk assessment, and customer insights. The existing batch processing system introduced 6-24 hour delays in critical business decisions, resulting in: - $1.2M monthly losses due to delayed fraud detection - Customer churn from slow transaction approvals (48-hour SLA) - Inability to provide real-time customer support - Regulatory compliance issues due to delayed transaction reporting - Limited ability to perform real-time risk assessment for lending decisions
The business required a complete real-time data platform capable of processing 1M+ transactions per minute with sub-second latency for critical use cases.
Task¶
As Staff Engineer and Platform Architect, I was responsible for designing and implementing a comprehensive real-time data platform to support: - Real-time fraud detection with <100ms decision time - Instant transaction approval/rejection workflows - Real-time customer analytics and personalization - Regulatory reporting with real-time compliance monitoring - ML model inference at scale for risk assessment - Supporting 10x growth in transaction volume over 2 years
Action¶
Platform Architecture and Design:
- Requirements Analysis and Architecture Design:
- Collaborated with product, risk, and compliance teams to define detailed requirements
- Designed event-driven architecture with clear separation of concerns
- Created comprehensive data governance framework for financial data
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Established data quality and SLA requirements for each use case
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Technology Stack Selection:
- Chose Apache Kafka for event streaming with guaranteed delivery
- Selected Apache Flink for real-time stream processing and windowing
- Implemented Elasticsearch for real-time search and analytics
- Used Cassandra for high-throughput time-series data storage
- Integrated AWS Kinesis for managed scaling and monitoring
Implementation Strategy:
- Event Streaming Infrastructure:
- Built multi-region Kafka clusters with 99.99% availability
- Implemented event schema evolution with backward compatibility
- Created dead letter queues and error handling mechanisms
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Established monitoring and alerting for stream health
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Real-time Processing Engine:
- Developed Flink applications for fraud detection algorithms
- Implemented complex event processing for transaction pattern analysis
- Created real-time aggregation pipelines for customer insights
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Built ML model serving infrastructure for instant predictions
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Data Storage and Retrieval:
- Designed hot/warm/cold data storage strategy
- Implemented real-time indexing in Elasticsearch for customer support
- Created time-series data models in Cassandra for analytics
- Built caching layer with Redis for ultra-low latency access
Cross-team Leadership and Coordination:
- Platform Team Leadership:
- Led architecture decisions across data engineering, backend, and ML teams
- Established data platform standards and best practices
- Created shared tooling and libraries for stream processing
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Implemented platform-as-a-service model for other engineering teams
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Stakeholder Management:
- Coordinated with risk management team on fraud detection requirements
- Worked with compliance team to ensure regulatory reporting capabilities
- Collaborated with product teams to define customer-facing features
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Partnered with infrastructure team on capacity planning and scaling
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Quality and Reliability:
- Implemented comprehensive testing strategies including chaos engineering
- Created data quality monitoring and anomaly detection
- Established disaster recovery and backup procedures
- Built automated failover mechanisms for critical components
Result¶
Technical Achievements: - Successfully processed 1.5M transactions per minute with 99.99% reliability - Achieved <50ms latency for fraud detection decisions (target was <100ms) - Implemented real-time analytics with <1 second data freshness - Built auto-scaling infrastructure supporting 10x traffic spikes - Achieved 99.95% data accuracy with automated quality monitoring
Business Impact: - Reduced fraud losses by 78% ($1.2M to $264K monthly) - Decreased transaction approval time from 48 hours to <1 second - Increased customer satisfaction scores by 34% due to instant approvals - Enabled real-time personalization resulting in 23% increase in product adoption - Achieved real-time regulatory compliance reducing audit costs by 60%
Platform Adoption: - 12 different teams built applications on the platform - Supported 25+ real-time use cases across the organization - Processed 2.1 billion events per day across all use cases - Enabled launch of 4 new product features requiring real-time data
Technical Metrics: - End-to-end latency P99: 89ms (target: <100ms) - Platform uptime: 99.97% (including scheduled maintenance) - Data processing accuracy: 99.98% - Query response time P95: 45ms for customer support dashboards
Leadership Impact¶
- Technical Vision: Established real-time-first data strategy adopted across all product development
- Team Scaling: Hired and mentored 15 engineers specializing in stream processing and data engineering
- Industry Recognition: Presented platform architecture at Kafka Summit and Strata Data Conference
- Knowledge Transfer: Created internal training program on stream processing, graduating 40+ engineers
Organizational Transformation¶
- Cultural Change: Shifted organization from batch-thinking to real-time-first mindset
- Process Innovation: Established data mesh principles with domain-owned data products
- Technical Standards: Created company-wide standards for event-driven architecture
- Business Enablement: Platform became foundation for 3 new revenue-generating product lines
Trade-off Analysis¶
Technical Decisions: - Kafka vs. Cloud-native: Chose self-managed Kafka for cost control and data sovereignty over managed services - Flink vs. Spark Streaming: Selected Flink for lower latency despite team familiarity with Spark - Consistency vs. Availability: Chose eventual consistency model for better performance in fraud detection - Build vs. Buy: Built custom ML serving layer instead of using cloud ML services for latency requirements
Lessons Learned¶
- Start with Use Cases: Designing around specific business use cases prevented over-engineering
- Invest in Observability: Comprehensive monitoring was crucial for managing complex distributed systems
- Data Quality First: Automated data quality checks prevented costly errors in financial decisions
- Team Structure: Creating dedicated platform teams accelerated adoption across the organization
- Incremental Rollout: Gradual migration from batch to real-time reduced risk and maintained business continuity
Metrics and Quantification Guide¶
Technical Metrics to Track¶
Performance Metrics¶
- Latency: Response time percentiles (P50, P95, P99)
- Throughput: Requests/transactions per second
- Availability: Uptime percentage and downtime minutes
- Error Rates: Failed requests as percentage of total
- Resource Utilization: CPU, memory, disk, network usage
Quality Metrics¶
- Code Quality: Test coverage, static analysis scores
- Deployment Success: Deployment success rate and rollback frequency
- Time to Recovery: Mean time to detect and resolve incidents
- Change Lead Time: Time from code commit to production deployment
Scalability Metrics¶
- Auto-scaling Effectiveness: Time to scale and accuracy of scaling decisions
- Resource Efficiency: Cost per transaction or request
- Capacity Planning: Usage predictions vs. actual consumption
Business Impact Metrics¶
Financial Impact¶
- Cost Savings: Specific dollar amounts with calculation methodology
- Revenue Impact: Direct revenue attribution where possible
- Efficiency Gains: Time savings converted to cost savings
- Risk Reduction: Potential losses avoided (security, compliance)
Operational Impact¶
- Process Improvements: Time reduction in manual processes
- Team Productivity: Delivery velocity, feature cycle time
- Customer Impact: User satisfaction scores, support ticket reduction
- Compliance: Audit findings, regulatory adherence metrics
Quantification Best Practices¶
Before and After Comparisons¶
Always provide baseline measurements:
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Confidence Intervals¶
When possible, provide measurement confidence:
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Time-bound Measurements¶
Specify measurement periods:
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Methodology Transparency¶
Explain how metrics were calculated:
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Case Study Documentation Template¶
Use this template to structure your case studies consistently:
Remember: Your case studies should demonstrate not just what you accomplished, but how you think about problems, make decisions, and drive impact through both technical excellence and leadership influence. Focus on quantifiable results and emphasize the transferable lessons that showcase your potential impact in future roles.