Eight months into a multi-year deployment, the executive who sponsored the whole thing resigns. What now?

Interviewers ask this because it is the most common way a technically successful deployment dies, and because the honest answer contains an uncomfortable admission: if the value case lived only in the sponsor's head, the account was always one resignation from over. Candidates who say they would 'schedule an intro call with the new leader' have not understood the incentive. A successor inherits no credit for a predecessor's win and all of the blame for their failure, so the default rational move is to quietly starve the project. You are working against that clock.