# Describe a Time When a Project Lacked Key Information Aced (formerly Exponent) publishes a public search API over its indexed pages; the guide is at https://www.aced.io/agents/agent-access. Source: https://www.aced.io/questions/2147/handling-project-lacking-information Source observed: 2026-11-05T00:02:58.613Z Last checked: 2026-11-05T00:02:58.613+00:00 Indexed: 2026-11-05T20:42:36.47+00:00 --- # Describe a Time When a Project Lacked Key Information We publish this as a **Technical Program Manager** behavioral interview question for **Google**. The page records one interview, reported as last asked 5 years ago, and includes **2 community answers**. Detailed company statistics are available through [Upgrade](https://www.aced.io/upgrade?src=questions). ## Community answer: Ravi P. [Ravi P.](https://www.aced.io/users/de873765-f03d-4348-90cf-9125cbef7027) — May 14, 2024; 122 karma. Ravi describes an engineering-manager example involving a homepage widget showing sellers how much sales they had made that day. - The system listened to order-placed events, aggregated the data, and displayed it to sellers. - Orders could later be cancelled by the user, seller, or because of policy breaches. - Cancellations could occur through multiple channels that were not audited, so the team could not cover every edge case immediately. - Ravi contacted project managers and agreed on an interim approach: show a last-updated timestamp and explicitly note that returns and cancellations were not included. - The interim figure had an error of almost **20 percent**. - The team planned to correct the data retrospectively after **24 hours**. This example demonstrates how to proceed when event coverage is incomplete: identify the missing information, communicate the limitation in the product, align with project managers, and establish a later correction process. ## Community answer: Esther S. [Esther S.](https://www.aced.io/users/773ca760-3d9a-4817-8968-69e29cd3dc3c) — May 2, 2025; 35 karma. Esther describes a planning-phase example in which several initiatives lacked clarity about the request and its dependencies. Actions taken: 1. Synced with Product and Engineering to clarify the request. 2. Identified missing information, including why the work was needed and which teams depended on it. 3. Contacted teams that owned the dependent domains. 4. Learned that the initiative involved a legacy page with a different repository and access model. 5. Determined that only a limited number of engineers could modify the legacy page. 6. Updated the initiative with the dependency and notified the owning engineering teams that at least one resource would be needed to support the change and the pull-request process. 7. Shared the roadmap. 8. Coordinated A/B tests so they would not interfere with one another or corrupt analytics. The investigation showed that the work would take longer than the original engineering estimate. Esther’s coordination clarified the initiative for both Product and Engineering. ## Related questions - [Describe a time when your project failed.](https://www.aced.io/questions/932/time-when-project-failed) - [Describe a time where a project didn't meet the client's expectations.](https://www.aced.io/questions/2144/project-did-not-meet-client-expectations) - [Describe a time when you discovered inefficiency midway through a project. What did you do?](https://www.aced.io/questions/2146/handling-inefficiency-midway-project) ## Related courses ### [TPM Interview Prep](https://www.aced.io/courses/tpm) ![TPM Interview Prep](https://images.ctfassets.net/x78yjrjc11pq/3cFr05VXO4mAcuqrI861Ob/c84a83a29ab27ac67309f3e3658805da/Technical_Program_Manager_Interview_Prep_Course.jpeg?w=800&h=800&fm=webp&q=75) We prepare candidates for program-management roles at Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and other top companies through mock interviews, frameworks and advice from senior candidates. 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