Describe a piece of work where the expectations and rules were never made clear. How did you decide what good enough looked like?
Why this works
Ambiguity can't be answered from process memory — the candidate has to show how they built their own scaffolding: what they inferred, what they asked, what they simply tried. It also locates their stalling point: how long they can keep moving without certainty before freezing or escalating everything.
Follow-up probes
- Where did you look for guidance before inventing your own?
- What call did you get wrong, and how did you catch it?
- How did the people relying on you know where things stood?
What good looks like
Guidance hunted down before being invented — precedent, adjacent teams, the assigner's intent — provisional calls made and revisited without drama, and their own working rules made explicit for whoever came next.
Red flags
Stalled until instructions arrived, every judgment escalated upward, or the opposite: weeks of confident work in a direction nobody wanted, with no checkpoint along the way.
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