You discover the pilot's success metric is being gamed, someone is cherry-picking easy test queries. What do you do?
An integrity trap with a political twist: the person gaming your metric is usually your own champion. Blowing the whistle loudly and looking away both fail, here's the third path.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
An integrity trap with a political twist: the person gaming your metric is usually your own champion. Blowing the whistle loudly and looking away both fail, here's the third path.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
