Tell me about a months-long piece of work you kept moving while shorter, louder things competed for your attention. What kept it from stalling?
Why this works
Long work rarely gets killed; it just stops getting touched. The question surfaces whether the candidate runs actual machinery for momentum — visible interim milestones, a standing cadence, protected time — and whether they can spot drift before a quarter quietly disappears.
Follow-up probes
- What did a normal week of progress look like?
- When did it come closest to stalling, and what restarted it?
- How did you notice drift before it got expensive?
What good looks like
A cadence that made progress inspectable by others, interim milestones that shipped something real, an honest near-stall story with the restart, and early-warning signals they were genuinely watching.
Red flags
Momentum credited to passion with no mechanism behind it, months without anything shippable and no alarm raised, a claim that it never came close to stalling, or the work only moved once a deadline finally made it urgent.
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