Tell me about a time you had an ambiguous charter.
- 1 min — the vague charter and the competing ideas
- 2 min — research, the metric, the sequence
- 1 min — the dissenting director and the alternative offered
- 1 min — results, regret
Ambiguity tests whether you can create the problem statement yourself: talk to users, pick a measurable goal, choose what not to do, and get explicit agreement before building.
'Make us AI-first', 'figure out agents for support', 'improve search with LLMs' — common charters with no metric attached.
Staff answers show the charter written down and agreed by stakeholders, a portfolio with explicit bets and kills, and the decision of what not to do defended in public.
What the answer sounds like at each level
Clarified an unclear ticket by asking the right people and proposing scope.
Turned a vague team charter into a metric and a sequenced plan with stakeholder agreement.
Defined an org-level strategy from ambiguity, chose explicit non-goals, and aligned competing directors.
Follow-ups the interviewer will push
1Why that metric and not deflection rate?
Deflection counts users who gave up. Resolved-without-human with a CSAT floor counts only good outcomes.
2What did you say no to?
The config-changing agent, publicly, with the 4% data and the risk of a wrong action. It became a read-only diagnostic.
Red flags interviewers listen for
- Started building before defining success.
- Tried to satisfy all three directors and shipped nothing.
- No user or data research behind the chosen direction.
How it's scored
| Dimension | What strong looks like |
|---|---|
| Problem framing | Data from real tickets drives the plan. |
| Prioritisation | Explicit non-goals defended with risk reasoning. |
| Alignment | Written charter signed by the stakeholders. |
Turning 'AI for support' into one metric
Illustrative exampleLeadership gave me and three engineers a charter of 'use AI to transform customer support' for a developer-tools company handling ~22,000 tickets a month. No metric, no budget line, and three directors each with a different idea: a chatbot, auto-triage, and an agent that fixes customer configs.
Turn it into a plan with a measurable goal within six weeks, and get the three directors to agree.
I spent two weeks reading 500 tickets with two support leads and tagging them. 38% were answerable from existing docs, 21% needed account data, and only 4% needed a config change. I proposed one metric — tickets resolved without a human, with a satisfaction floor — and a sequence: docs-grounded answers first, account-aware triage second, config agent deferred. The director who wanted the config agent objected strongly. I showed that the 4% slice was where a wrong action could break production for a customer, and proposed a read-only diagnostic for it instead. I wrote the charter; the directors signed it.
Phase one resolved 24% of tickets without a human at CSAT 4.3/5 against a 4.2 baseline within one quarter, measured on ~66,000 tickets. Triage cut first-response time by 40%. My regret: I let the charter omit an explicit cost-per-ticket target, and we spent a month later justifying model spend that a target would have pre-approved.