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Interview questions

The hard ones

What to say when they ask about working with unclear direction.

This question is about your default setting when nobody tells you what to do. Here's how to pick the right story, tell it in about a minute, and show that you move without going rogue.

Why they ask it

Somebody on that team is about to hand you a thin brief. Maybe the manager is stretched, maybe the company is reorganizing, maybe the work is new and nobody has done it yet. They're asking because they already know the job comes with fog, and they want to see what you do inside it.

There are really three answers they're sorting for. Do you freeze and wait. Do you charge off in a direction and hide it until it's too late to fix. Or do you make a reasonable call, write it down, and give someone the chance to correct you early. They're hiring for the third one.

There's a second thing happening too. This question is often a quiet warning about the role. If it comes up, ask about it later. "What does the first ninety days actually look like for this role?" is a fair question, and asking it makes you look like someone who has survived this before.

What not to say

"I went to my manager and asked for clarification, and then I had what I needed."

That's a story about your manager, not you. Asking is fine and you should mention it, but the question is specifically about what you did when clarity didn't arrive. If your story resolves in the first ten seconds because someone told you the answer, you haven't answered the question.

Telling a story about a hard project that wasn't actually ambiguous.

A tight deadline isn't unclear direction. A difficult coworker isn't unclear direction. Interviewers notice the swap, and it reads as either not listening or not having an example. Pick a moment where you genuinely did not know what success looked like.

Spending the story on how disorganized the company was.

Even when it's completely true, it lands as "I need a clean environment to do good work." That's the opposite of what they're screening for. You can name the mess in one flat sentence, then spend the rest of the time on what you did about it.

"I'm pretty self-directed, I just figure things out."

That's a trait claim with no evidence behind it. Everyone says it. It scores nothing. One specific thing you did on one specific Tuesday beats any adjective you could pick.

The story where you guessed, told nobody, and got lucky.

You think it shows initiative. They hear risk. If your story has no moment where you surfaced your assumption to someone, add that moment — and if it genuinely wasn't there, say what you'd do differently now.

How to build a strong answer

  1. Pick a story where nobody knew the answer, not just you.
    The best examples sound like: a one-line assignment with no definition of done, a project whose sponsor left, a problem that fell between two teams, a situation the policy didn't cover. Small is fine. A summer intern whose manager went on leave has a real story here. Scale matters less than whether the fog was real.
  2. Name the fog in one sentence, then stop describing it.
    "I was told to fix onboarding. That was the whole brief — no owner, no budget, no definition of fixed." One sentence. Don't build the case for how unreasonable it was. The listener gets it faster than you think, and every extra sentence about the chaos is a sentence you're not spending on yourself.
  3. Show the specific first move you made to shrink the unknown.
    This is the part they're actually listening for, so make it concrete. Did you talk to five users? Write a one-page definition of the problem? Pick the smallest version you could finish in two weeks and ship that? Say the actual action, with the actual number when you have it. "I made a plan" is invisible. "I interviewed six people who'd been hired in the last quarter" is a thing they can see.
  4. Include the checkpoint — the moment you made it easy to correct you.
    Say who you told, what you told them, and what happened. "I sent my director a one-pager that said here's what I think we're solving and here's what I'm not doing. Tell me if I'm pointed wrong, otherwise I start Monday." This single beat is what separates decisive from reckless. If they changed something, say so. Being corrected early is the win, not the failure.
  5. Land it with the outcome and one sentence about how you work.
    Give the result, honestly, even if it's modest — "it cut the wait from [X] days to [Y]," or "it didn't solve the whole thing, but it got the top complaint off the list." Then one line on your default: "When direction's unclear, I write down my best guess and make it cheap for someone to correct me." Then stop talking. Silence after a good answer is fine.

Examples to adapt

These are shapes, not scripts. Say them in your own words with your own facts — anything in brackets is a detail only you know, and it has to be the true one.

Mid-career, laid off, had real scope in your last role. Adapt this — don't memorize it.

At [company] I got handed "fix onboarding." That was the whole brief. No owner, no budget, no definition of fixed. So the first thing I did was decide what fixed would mean, because nobody else was going to. I spent about a week talking to [number] people who'd been hired that quarter and their managers, and the pattern was obvious — new hires sat waiting on system access for their first [number] days and couldn't do anything. So I wrote a one-page memo: here's the problem I think we're solving, here's what I'm going to do about it, here's what I'm deliberately not touching. I sent it to my director and said, tell me if I'm aimed at the wrong thing, otherwise I start Monday. She changed one line and said go. That page became the thing I checked myself against every couple of weeks. By [timeframe], time-to-access went from [X] to [Y]. The honest lesson is that waiting for clarity is how six weeks disappear. I'd rather write down my best guess and let someone correct it fast.

The fog gets one sentence. The rest is action, a real checkpoint, and a number. The closing line states a working habit instead of a personality trait, and it quietly answers the question underneath the question — you won't stall waiting on them.

Early career. One internship, maybe a part-time job. Your example will be smaller, and that's fine.

During my internship at [company], my manager went on leave about two weeks in, and the project I'd been given kind of lost its sponsor. Nobody reassigned me. I could have quietly coasted for six weeks and nobody would have noticed. Instead I went to the two people who actually used the [report] I was working on and asked what they'd want out of it if they could pick. Then I built the smallest useful version of that. And every Friday I sent a short email to my manager's manager: here's what I did this week, here's what I'm doing next, here's where I'm stuck. That email is what saved me — week three, someone wrote back and said the section I'd spent two days on didn't matter to anyone, but the thing I'd treated as a side note was the part they needed. So I turned the whole thing around with five weeks left. By the end, [what actually happened with it]. It wasn't a big project. But I learned that when nobody's directing you, showing your work every week gets you corrected early instead of at the end.

It doesn't pretend to be bigger than it was. It shows judgment — going to users when the boss is gone — and it includes the correction, which reads as honest and coachable rather than as failure. The Friday email is a specific, repeatable habit a manager can picture you bringing to their team.

You come from a structured place — clinical, regulated, trades, accounting — and you're worried every example you have came with a procedure.

Most of my work at [employer] had a written procedure, which is part of why I remember this one. In [month/year] our [scheduling system] went down for [length of time] and there was no fallback documented. First hour, nobody above me was on site. So I made three calls: we'd go to paper logs, we'd handle [priority group] first, and one person would own all communication out so we weren't giving people three different answers. I wrote those three things on the whiteboard so everyone did it the same way, and I kept a running list of every decision I made and what time I made it, because I knew somebody would need to review it later. When my director got in, I handed her the list and said here's what I chose and here's the one I'd change. She kept two of the three and changed the third. [What the outcome was.] I'm not somebody who freezes without a procedure. I make a call, I write down why, and I get it reviewed as soon as there's someone to review it.

It turns the apparent weakness — a structured background — into the setup for the story. The decision log is a real, unusual detail that shows judgment under pressure. Volunteering the one decision she changed is the strongest move in the answer, because it proves you can be wrong out loud.

What comes next

Answer this one well and the interviewer usually goes here:

  • What would you have done if your manager had disagreed with your one-pager?
  • How do you decide when to just make the call versus when to escalate?
  • Tell me about a time you guessed wrong about what somebody wanted.
  • How long do you wait for an answer before you move without one?
  • What do you do when two people give you conflicting direction?
  • How would you approach your first thirty days here, knowing this role isn't fully defined yet?
  • Can you give me an example where the ambiguity was about priorities rather than the task itself?

Say it out loud before it counts.

Reading a good answer and giving one are different skills, and the gap shows up in the room. Offer asks you this question out loud, on a clock, and tells you what landed. The first one is free.

Practice this out loud

You've almost certainly done this before — most people have, they just never thought of it as a story — so find the real moment, tell it in a minute, and let it stand.