A practice prompt we wrote. No company or candidate report names it, so it carries no company tag.
How to answer
The Pragmatic Engineer reported, in August 2025, that Colin Jarvis, then OpenAI’s head of forward deployed engineering, said the team wants to “bias for moving fast, proving out any brick walls and then adjusting the scope.” Source 1What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (Gergely Orosz)PublisherThe Pragmatic EngineerSource typenews report This question asks for that adjustment and for the two parts most answers skip: who you told, and how they took it.
Five moves:
- The date, and why it could not move. What sits behind it: a board meeting, a season, a contract milestone. If it could have moved, expect “why not move the date?” and have that answer ready.
- How you chose. Rank by value to the goal the date serves, not by effort left. Say the rule you used: “Anything the auditors won’t look at on day one waits.”
- Each cut, with its cost. One sentence per cut: “I cut X, which meant Y for Z until W.” Name one thing that looked cuttable and you kept, and why; that shows the ranking was real.
- Who you told, in what order, and how early. The owner of the date first, then each person who loses something, before the team starts building the smaller plan. Quote what you said.
- The reaction, and what happened. Include the unhappy part, what you traded back in, what shipped on the date, and when the cut items came back.
The interviewer wants the cost said plainly; “we descoped some nice-to-haves” hides the trade.
Say how far behind you were in a clause; hold back the estimate for the follow-up.
The trap to avoid is the silent cut: keeping the feature list and dropping tests, monitoring or the rollback plan. That is hidden risk, not reduced scope. If you did cut testing, say so, and say what you did to contain it.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- Which cut would you reverse if you had the same date again?
- Who found out later than they should have, and what did that cost them?
- How close was your estimate of each cut’s cost to what it actually cost, and who told you?
Where answers go wrong
- Lists what was cut without the cost of each cut or who paid it, or cuts only things nobody wanted, so no trade was made.
- Tells people after the team had already rebuilt the plan, or tells only their own manager, and reports the reaction as “they understood”.
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 building bus-route assignment for a school district with about 11,000 riders. The date was fixed: route letters had to reach families two weeks before the first day of school, and the board had set the mailing date.