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mentorship

Tell me about an ML project you killed or redirected

A staff-level behavioral and project question about sunk costs, evidence thresholds, influence, and responsible stopping.

Reviewed · 2 min read · 58 of 60

Behavioral / leadership · active recall

Practice before you read

3 minutes. Answer the exact question in 90–120 seconds, then reserve detail for follow-ups.

Method and graduation rules

Behavioral / leadership · closed-book attempt

Tell me about an ML project you killed or redirected

Answer the exact question in 90–120 seconds, then reserve detail for follow-ups.

03:00recommended time

Closing or reloading clears the scratchpad. Only score, weak rubric dimensions, attempt count, and retry date can be stored locally.

Asked in: staff-level behavioral and project rounds.

The L4 story is “the model missed its accuracy bar so the team cancelled it.” The L6 story is a project you stopped on evidence, against sunk cost and your own attachment, then redirected the people and infrastructure to something higher-leverage. Killing the right project on time is a senior signal; treating only launches as impact is a junior one.

What a strong answer covers

Walk the decision, not just the outcome: why the project was rational when it started; the disconfirming evidence or the assumption that failed; why iteration was no longer the best use of resources; what you did (the discriminating experiment, the proposal, the stakeholder and transition work); the payoff (cost avoided, effort redirected, users protected, capability learned); and the earlier signal you would instrument next time.

What an L4 answer sounds like

“The model did not reach accuracy, so the team cancelled the project.”

An outcome with no judgment or ownership in it.

What an L5 answer adds

An L5 answer owns the evidence and the recommendation inside a project area: a minimum viable quality or value defined before further spend, the experiment that discriminated a broken thesis from fixable execution, a clear account of what could be reused, and a responsible transition of users, data, and infrastructure.

What an L6 answer adds

An L6 answer manages the portfolio and organizational consequences: pushing past sunk-cost and prestige incentives, aligning several teams on a new direction, keeping the trust of sponsors who backed the original bet, and changing review criteria so similar weak bets fail faster. Keep the technical detail. “I reallocated the roadmap” with no evidence behind it sounds managerial and vague.

Tells that get you a strong-hire vote

  • The original decision was reasonable, not an obvious straw man.
  • You name the assumption that failed.
  • The stopping criteria were evidence-based.
  • You handled the people and transition costs with care.
  • You account for both avoided waste and lost opportunity.

Tells that get you down-leveled

  • The project died because another team cancelled it, not because of you.
  • You take credit for hindsight.
  • No one who disagreed is represented fairly.
  • “We pivoted” hides the specific decision.
  • Nothing you learned changed how you invest next time.

Common follow-ups

  • Why not iterate for another quarter?
  • Who disagreed, and what evidence did they have?
  • How much had already been invested?
  • What parts of the work were reusable?
  • Tell me about a time you stopped too early, or held on too long.

Related: decide what to work on, scope an ambiguous problem, and L5 vs L6 calibration.