Interview drill 12Interview-style design round
First week: discovery with a sceptical operations manager
- 45 minutes
- Every elective
- No real companies
Hypothetical. No affiliation with or endorsement by the companies named. Public facts as of 6 October 2026; sources at the end of the brief.
The prompt
"This round is a role-play. I'm the operations manager at a mid-size US distributor. My team handles order exceptions by hand: orders that fail checks and sit in a queue until someone fixes them. My VP brought your company in. I didn't ask for you, and the last automation project here made more work for my people, not less. You have 30 minutes of my time this morning. Run the first discovery conversation however you like. I'll answer as I would in real life, which means I won't volunteer much. In the last 15 minutes, step out of the role: tell me what you heard, what you'll do this week and what you'll write to my VP tonight."
The clock
- Clarify0–5 min
- Discovery plan5–15 min
- Design15–30 min
- Risks and evals30–40 min
- Rollout and the ask40–45 min
Lessons for this drill
Pro drill
The rest of this drill is in Pro.
What to know going in, the curveballs on the clock, a strong answer, the common mistakes and the rubric.
- Every stage and specialisation, in full
- Every lab and every role project
- Halden weeks 2–10, on your record
- Every drill, live in the playground
- All solutions, plus the server judge
- Lab Assistant and every Teach with AI