A lesson I learned as a PM on how to answer Complexity and Ambiguity questions in REAL interviews

A failed answer and a successful answer

Ram Pulipati
3 min readFeb 4, 2023

Failed answer

I interviewed for this e-commerce company in India and when they asked me this question, I think i failed miserably. But the interviewer was nice enough to ask me the other questions and carry on with the rest of the interview.

Question:

Tell me the most ambiguous and complex problem i solved.

Answer:

Here, I will write a very brief answer — here was a time when at Wildtrails we were doing Fashion business. A customer ordered a t-shirt but we sent a wrong size t-shirt to him. So we raised a return for the t-shirt, the shipping vendor failed 2 times to pickup the t-shirt and it was during covid time. We were helpless, our customer was angry, but the third time it was successful — i did a trick and it worked.

I explained the whole situation.

This is a cakewalk to a failure interview.

Result:

I failed the interview.

Why its a failed answer

  1. When asked for this question — talk about an IT product, not an e-commerce return process :) especially something that’s manual.
  2. Know what complexity means: complexity is something about layers. when a problem…

--

--

Ram Pulipati
Ram Pulipati

Written by Ram Pulipati

10yrs exp as a PM, Dev and Co-founder. Studied, lived & worked in US, Canada & India. Want a FREE PM resume consultation? -> www.linkedin.com/in/janakiramvit.

No responses yet