Cross-Functional Project Under a Hard Deadline (Data Scientist)

Context: Share one concrete project where you partnered across at least three functions (e.g., product, design, engineering, risk, legal). Assume the interviewer wants to assess how you drive decisions with data, influence without authority, and trade off speed, risk, and user experience.

Instructions: Use a single project and be specific. Quantify where possible. A STAR structure (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is encouraged.

1. Business Goal and Constraint

• What exact business outcome were you targeting? (e.g., approvals, revenue, loss rate, latency)
• What immovable constraint did you face? (e.g., regulatory deadline, media launch date, limited engineering bandwidth)

2. Toughest Cross‑Functional Conflict

• Which functions disagreed and why?
• How did you resolve it without formal authority? (tools, experiments, decision memo, trade‑off analysis)

3. Data and Key Decision

• Datasets used (sources, time window, join keys).
• Metrics and definitions (be precise). Include caveats (bias, leakage, label lag).
• One non‑obvious insight that changed the plan.

4. Most Significant Achievement

• Quantify impact on core KPI(s) and business value.
• What was your unique contribution versus the team’s?

5. Interface Decision You Disagreed With

• What design choice did you oppose? On what heuristic or user evidence?
• How did you adapt once overruled, and what did you learn?

6. Example of Helping a Teammate

• What did you do, how did it change outcomes, and how did it grow you?

7. Failure and Recovery

• Brief root‑cause analysis of an underperforming initiative (e.g., co‑brand or partner promo).
• What you tried next and the measurable change afterward.

8. Hindsight

• One or two changes you’d make to deliver a better result faster.