A practice prompt we wrote. No company or candidate report names it, so it carries no company tag.
How to answer
Answer with a week you could put on a calendar, not a philosophy. Colin Jarvis, then OpenAI’s head of forward deployed engineering, was quoted by The Pragmatic Engineer, in August 2025, as saying that what customers describe in scoping often does not match the data and system reality on the ground. Source 1What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (Gergely Orosz)PublisherThe Pragmatic EngineerSource typenews report So your week ends on their real data, not on the request.
Walk through it by day.
- Monday: turn the problem into a decision, and file the access request. Ask the sponsor what they would do differently if this were solved, and what number would tell them. “Claims take too long” becomes “cut time to first payment for simple claims”. Access runs on someone else’s calendar, so request it now. If it will take weeks, ask for the export the operators already keep, the spreadsheet beside the system, and build on that.
- Monday to Tuesday: map the people and watch the work. The sponsor, the people doing the work, the data owner, and whoever can block you: security, IT, legal. Watch them work. Build toward the sponsor’s number, but describe the work as they describe it; where the versions disagree, put that in Friday’s write-up rather than choosing silently.
- Wednesday to Thursday: measure the baseline yourself, from their records, not from the slide that started the project.
- Friday: ship something small. A problem statement they sign off on, including what you are not doing; the baseline; one thin slice on real data, such as a query or a crude dashboard; and the next few weeks with a decision point.
Say out loud where the stated problem and the real one diverged, and what moved you. The trap is a week of meetings ending in a deck; the opposite trap is a prototype of the sponsor’s first sentence.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- What do you have in their hands by Friday?
- The sponsor and the people doing the work describe the problem differently. Whose version do you build for?
- Data access will take three weeks. What do you do in the meantime?
Where answers go wrong
- Describing a week of stakeholder interviews and a slide deck, with nothing running on the customer’s data by the end of it.
- Starting to build the thing the sponsor named on day one, before anyone has checked whether it is the lever.
Answer this in two minutes
Write the answer you would say out loud. The clock starts with your first word.
Illustrative answer about a fictional project
“I’ll walk through the last one I did, because the week is the answer. The customer was a building-supplies distributor, and the request came from their VP of customer service: ‘Our customer service team is drowning.