C8: Team Showcase

Challenge Info

⏱️ 60 min · 🏆 10 pts · 🤖 optional: 04-Design · 📄 Live presentation using all prior artifacts

Objective

• Do now: Build and deliver a stakeholder-ready story from the artifacts you created in C1-C7.
• Input: Requirements, architecture assessment, diagram, IaC evidence, ADR, load-test report, documentation, and diagnostics card.
• Output: A live presentation and Q&A backed by your actual artifacts.
• Required to finish: Explain the solution, justify the trade-offs, show evidence, and handle questions credibly.
• Decisions now: Which artifacts tell the clearest story, which trade-offs you must defend, who presents what, and how honest you will be about gaps.
• Next: Workshop wrap-up, facilitator scoring, and shared reflection across teams.

This challenge is the capstone. The goal is not to look perfect. The goal is to prove that your team can explain what it built, why it made those choices, and how the solution would operate in the real world.

The Business Challenge

You are presenting to a stakeholder panel that wants confidence, not just technical detail. They need to understand why your solution fits FreshConnect, how you handled cost, security, reliability, and the DR curveball, and whether your team can answer hard questions without hiding trade-offs.

Your Tasks

1. Build a short story around problem, solution, evidence, and next steps.
2. Assign presenters so the team can explain architecture, delivery evidence, and business trade-offs without overlap.
3. Show the artifacts that matter most: architecture diagram, key decisions, delivery evidence, DR response, and operational readiness.
4. Prepare to answer two or three fair stakeholder questions with direct, evidence-based answers.
5. When you are the stakeholder team, ask questions that test business fit and decision quality.

What to Present

• The business problem, key constraints, and the Azure decisions those constraints forced.
• The final architecture and why it fits the workload, budget, security, and DR goals.
• The delivery path: what you deployed, what stayed on paper, and what the evidence proves.
• The operational story: load testing, documentation, diagnostics, and what you would improve next.
• The trade-offs you made deliberately and the risks you still own.

Key Decisions

• Which three artifacts best prove that your solution is real, not just aspirational?
• Which trade-offs must you defend clearly: cost, security, reliability, or delivery risk?
• What unfinished work should you acknowledge openly rather than trying to gloss over?
• How will you connect technical choices back to FreshConnect’s business goals?

Deliverables

• Live showcase or slide deck built from your existing artifacts.
• Architecture diagram that matches your final design.
• Evidence for implementation and DR, whether deployed or documented on paper.
• Load-test, documentation, and diagnostics highlights that show operational maturity.
• Clear speaking roles and a prepared answer path for stakeholder questions.

Success Criteria

Focus	What good looks like	Evidence
Technical clarity	The team explains the solution without losing the audience	Architecture, delivery path, and key services are described clearly
Stakeholder handling	Questions are answered directly and credibly	Responses use actual artifacts, constraints, and trade-offs
Solution justification	Major decisions are defensible	Cost, security, reliability, and DR choices are backed by evidence
Team coordination	The team presents as one group instead of isolated speakers	Roles are clear and handoffs feel intentional

Tips / Hints

Lean presentation outline and question prompts

Use a five-part structure:

1. The business challenge and key constraints.
2. The architecture and why you chose it.
3. What happened in implementation and DR.
4. What the evidence says about operations, load, and documentation.
5. What you would do next with more time.

Useful stakeholder questions:

• Why this service choice over a simpler or cheaper alternative?
• What happens if the primary region fails?
• Where does GDPR or security risk show up in the design?
• What would you improve first after MVP?

Watch Out

• Do not turn the presentation into a walkthrough of every artifact you created.
• Do not hide gaps; explain them and show how you would address them.
• Do not let the DR change, load testing, or diagnostics disappear from the story.
• Stakeholder questions should be tough but relevant, not performative.

Artifact Handoff

Item	Value
Input from	All prior artifacts from C1-C7
Your output	Live presentation and Q&A using your diagram, decisions, evidence, and operational artifacts
Next step	Workshop wrap-up, facilitator scoring, and shared reflection across teams

Next Step

This is the final challenge. Use it to show not only what you built, but how your team made decisions under constraints and what evidence supports those decisions.