A dataset lands in your lap with a one-week deadline attached. Most candidates start exploring the data. The ones who pass start by working out which questions this data physically cannot answer.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A dataset lands in your lap with a one-week deadline attached. Most candidates start exploring the data. The ones who pass start by working out which questions this data physically cannot answer.
What separates answers here is whether you notice the survivorship problem unprompted. The file contains completed trips, so every passenger who waited and gave up is invisible, which quietly rules out the demand-prediction product most candidates propose in the first two minutes. Saying 'this dataset cannot see unmet demand, so I will not build a product that depends on it' is the single highest-scoring sentence available in this round. The one-week constraint is doing work too: it is there to see whether you can pick one user and one decision instead of describing a platform.
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