← Temporal
Temporal role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
Open-source platform and managed cloud that keeps code running reliably through failures, so developers don't write retry and recovery logic by hand.
Who you'd be calling
Engineering managers, platform and backend leads, architects and CTOs at companies running complex, long-running workflows
Your opener
“Hi Chris, this is Alex from Temporal. I'm calling because we help engineering teams make multi-step processes, like payments or orders, survive crashes without custom retry code. Does your team deal with workflows that break halfway?”
Problems you solve for them
- Processes fail halfway and leave data in a broken state
- Teams spend time writing custom retry and error-handling code
- Long-running jobs like payments or orders are hard to debug
Discovery questions to ask
- What are the most critical multi-step processes your team runs, like payments, onboarding or data pipelines?
- How do you handle retries and failures today: queues, cron jobs, or custom code?
- When one of those processes fails midway, how long does it take to find and fix?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy.”
→ Got it, engineers are always busy. Can I ask one question about how you handle failed workflows, and you tell me if it's worth a real conversation?
“Not interested.”
→ Fair enough. Is reliability for long-running processes already solved, or is it something your team patches as it goes?
“We already built this ourselves or use queues.”
→ That's common, and it works until it gets complicated. How much engineering time goes into maintaining it?
“Send me an email.”
→ Sure. Would a short technical overview or a customer example be more useful to you?
Competitors worth knowing
AWS Step Functions, Camunda, Apache Airflow
Interview tips for this company
- Developers dislike hype. Be honest about what you don't know, and offer to bring in a technical teammate.
- Learn one plain-English example: a payment that is charged but the order never gets saved. Temporal makes sure the process picks up where it stopped.
Written from public information about Temporal to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.