Tell me about a time you had to balance cost, time, and quality in your project planning. What trade-offs did you make, and how did you explain those trade-offs to your stakeholders?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

I led a re-platforming effort where we had three constraints: a fixed $750K budget, a six-month timeline driven by a contract expiration, and strong expectations around performance and reliability. Hitting all three perfectly wasn’t realistic, so I framed the discussion around what “good enough” looked like in each dimension.

I proposed we prioritize time and core quality over scope. We trimmed about 25% of non-critical features for phase one and reused existing components where it wouldn’t hurt performance. That kept us within budget and allowed us to hit the six-month deadline, with 99.95% uptime and a 30% performance improvement on critical flows.

With stakeholders, I used simple trade-off visuals: three release options with clear impacts on cost, date, and risk. Once they saw that keeping every feature meant either +$200K or a two-month slip, they backed the phased approach. Post-launch, we delivered the remaining features over the next two quarters, funded by savings from decommissioning the old system.

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