What do you build first, and what does it prove?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you asked who uses it before naming what you would build it with.
Your team of three has two weeks (illustrative) before a demo of the online store to an investor. The tech lead proposes: week one, the data model and all migrations; week two, the API; the frontend "when we get to it". You are asked whether you agree.
React to this
Say what you would question, what you would keep, and what you would need to know first.
Tech lead's plan for the two weeks (illustrative)
Week 1
Mon–Wed full data model: products, variants, carts, orders, payments,
customers, addresses, discounts, inventory, shipments
Thu–Fri migrations, seed data, ORM models
Week 2
Mon–Wed REST API for all of the above
Thu frontend "if we get to it"
Fri demo
Not in the plan: deployment, the payment provider's test mode, anything
a person could click before Thursday of week two.What it is really testing
Whether the candidate can tell a horizontal plan from a vertical one, say what a walking skeleton proves and — the discriminating part — what it does not, and pick the first slice by risk and dependency rather than by comfort.