Walk me through a problem that was too big or tangled to attack head-on. How did you break it down, and where did you start?

Anyone can describe a solved problem; the skill lives in the middle — what they split, what they parked, why they started where they did. Asking for the decomposition forces the messy part a rehearsed story skips straight past.

• What made the obvious approach a bad idea?
• Why start where you started?
• What part of your first framing didn't survive?

A named structure — pieces, sequence, what was deliberately set aside — a reason behind the first move, and a moment where the framing changed as evidence came in.

The "complex" problem is routine work told slowly, the story jumps from mess to solution with no middle, or the method amounts to working hard until it clicked.