A practice prompt we wrote. No company or candidate report names it, so it carries no company tag.
How to answer
Sarah Khalid, an Director at Salesforce, said in Salesforce’s newsroom in March 2026 that the work on an insurance engagement she recalled was more judgment, trust and communication skills than coding. Source 1How Forward Deployed Engineers Are Proving AI Makes Tech Jobs More HumanPublisherSalesforce NewsroomSource typecompany blog This question tests all three: the judgment is your decision rule, and the trust and communication are in how you told the customer who lost.
Build it in five parts:
- The conflict, concretely. What each customer asked for, and why both could not be built: one team and one release window, or two behaviors that contradict each other. Make both requests reasonable: a conflict with an obviously wrong side is not a decision.
- The rule. The test you applied, stated as something you would apply again: which request blocks a go-live you already committed to, which carries a safety or compliance risk, which has a workable fallback, which helps other customers. If contract size weighed in, say where it sat.
- Who decided. You, your manager or product. If it was you, say how you got it backed before telling anyone.
- Telling the one who lost. Live, and before they hear it anywhere else. The reason in their terms, never the other customer’s details, what they get instead, and the date you would and would not commit to.
- After. What the losing customer did next, in actions.
Say the rule in one sentence before you say who won: “I ranked them first by which gap stopped a go-live we had committed to, then by which customer had no fallback, and only one failed both.” Stated first, the rule reads as a principle; after the winner, as a justification.
The traps: “the bigger account won” presented as reasoning, and the clever compromise in which both got everything, meaning there was never a conflict.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- What would you have done if both requests had passed your first test?
- How did the losing customer react when you told them, and what did you say next?
- Who else could have made this call, and why was it yours?
Where answers go wrong
- Gives “the bigger account won” as the reasoning, or dresses it in a principle invented afterward, so there is no rule the interviewer can see applied.
- Tells a compromise story in which both customers got what they asked for, so nothing was decided and nobody lost.
- Lets an email or the account team deliver the news to the customer who lost.
- Explains the loss by describing the winning customer’s problems, which hands one customer another customer’s business.
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 was the deployed engineer for a field-service dispatch product at two utilities, a water utility and a gas utility, both going live on the same spring release. I had about four weeks of engineering before the release freeze, and each customer had asked for something that would take most of it.