Tell me about a time you had to navigate ambiguity or uncertainty in a project or role

In my first few months at work, I was asked to add an alert for failed file uploads, but the ticket only said to 'notify users better' and didn't define when an upload counted as failed or who should be notified. I first checked the current code path and found three different failure cases, then wrote down the questions I couldn't answer from the code or docs. I asked my mentor and the product manager a short list of specific questions, and I suggested that for the first version we only handle the two user-visible failures and leave internal retry issues for later. While implementing it, I tested one assumption with a small prototype and found that one error never reached the UI, so I changed the approach before finishing the feature. We shipped the smaller version on time, and afterward I documented the failure cases in the ticket so the next person wouldn't start from the same confusion.

During a part-time internship at a local nonprofit, I was asked to help update a donor spreadsheet that had been built by several different volunteers over the years, and nobody could explain which fields were actually still being used. Instead of guessing, I spent the first day comparing the spreadsheet to the monthly reports and asked the staff member who used it most often to walk me through how she made decisions from it. I found that some columns were duplicates and a few formulas were pulling from old tabs, so I drafted a simple cleanup plan and checked it with her before changing anything. A couple of details were still unclear, like whether certain past donations should stay in the same categories, so I left those untouched and flagged them for the next meeting. In the end, I only updated the parts I could verify, which made the report easier to use and avoided breaking something important for a team that relied on it every week.