Describe your most impactful project
Asked at:
Rippling
DoorDash
Glovo
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What is this question about
Interviewers use this question to let you choose the evidence for your own level, judgment, and impact. They are listening for how big the problem was, what part was actually yours, how you navigated uncertainty or obstacles, and whether you can explain results clearly without overstating your role. For senior candidates and above, this is often a stealth scope-and-ownership question more than a nostalgia question about a project you liked.
“Walk me through the project you've had the biggest impact on.”
“What's a project you're most proud of, and why was it important?”
“Tell me about a piece of work that best represents the kind of impact you can have.”
“If you had to pick one project that shows your strengths best, which one would you choose?”
“What is the most significant project you've led or contributed to?”
Key Insights
- You do not get much credit for picking a famous or high-visibility project if your personal contribution is fuzzy. The strongest answers make your role, decisions, and tradeoffs unmistakably clear.
- Impact is not just launch. Explain why the work mattered, what changed because of it, and how you knew it worked; otherwise even a technically hard project can sound like activity rather than impact.
- Choose a story with scope appropriate to your level. A junior candidate can win with strong execution on a bounded problem, but a staff or senior manager candidate who tells a purely individual-contributor story often signals limited operating range.
What interviewers probe atlevel
Top Priority
You can absolutely talk about a team project, but interviewers still need to know what you specifically drove versus what others defined for you.
Good examples
🟢My lead defined the overall approach, and I owned the validation rules, error handling, and rollout for one key part of the workflow.
🟢I was one of three engineers on the project, and my part was designing and implementing the batch retry logic after I found where most failures were coming from.
Bad examples
🔴We built a new onboarding flow, and we worked closely together to get it done; I was involved throughout the implementation.
🔴My team migrated our service and I helped with the rollout, testing, and debugging, so I would say I owned a lot of it.
Strong answers separate team effort from personal contribution with precision, while weak answers hide behind 'we' and leave ownership ambiguous.
Even at junior level, interviewers like to hear how you handled uncertainty instead of waiting passively for someone else to specify everything.
Good examples
🟢The issue showed up in several places, so I compared a few examples, checked with support on which case hurt users most, and focused on that path first.
🟢I was not sure whether the bug was in our service or upstream, so I added targeted logging and used that information to narrow the fix before changing code.
Bad examples
🔴The requirements were a little unclear, so I asked my lead what to build and then followed that plan closely.
🔴There were a few possible fixes, but I picked the one that seemed simplest and moved ahead because we needed to finish.
Strong answers show the candidate reducing uncertainty with evidence and prioritization, while weak answers default to guesswork or dependency on others.
At staff level, leverage should be unmistakable: your impact should persist because multiple engineers and teams could act effectively without constant intervention from you.
Good examples
🟢I created enough clarity in architecture and responsibilities that teams could make local decisions without repeatedly escalating to me.
🟢My goal was to make the organization less dependent on one person, so I built shared mechanisms, identified leads, and let ownership sit close to the work.
Bad examples
🔴I kept the initiative on track by being involved in every major thread and making sure teams checked with me before key choices.
🔴I had the most context, so I naturally became the person who connected all the moving parts during execution.
Strong staff answers create autonomy and durable capability in others, while weak ones centralize context and decision-making.
At junior level, interviewers do not expect company-wide scope, but they do expect a real problem with visible user, team, or operational value.
Good examples
🟢I owned a small but important part of our signup flow that was causing support tickets, and fixing it reduced repeated customer issues for the team.
🟢I implemented a reporting tool for our operations team that replaced a manual spreadsheet step they were doing every day, which saved time and reduced mistakes.
Bad examples
🔴The most impactful thing I did was clean up some old tests because they were messy, and after that the codebase felt better to work in.
🔴I built an internal demo page during onboarding and people liked using it to try things out, so I would say that was my biggest impact.
Strong answers tie the project to a concrete pain point that mattered beyond the candidate's personal learning, while weak answers confuse convenient work or cleanup with meaningful impact.
Valuable
Interviewers want to see that you stayed engaged when the first approach failed, even if you needed guidance along the way.
Good examples
🟢When my first fix only solved part of the issue, I reproduced the edge case, asked for a quick review on my findings, and updated the solution.
🟢A dependency delayed us, so I unblocked myself by writing tests and preparing the rollout steps while waiting for the final integration.
Bad examples
🔴I hit a blocker with an external dependency, so I waited for the other team to respond before continuing.
🔴When the first fix did not solve the issue, I switched to a different task until someone more experienced could take a look.
Strong answers show persistence with productive next steps, while weak ones equate being blocked with being done.
Example answers atlevel
Great answers
One project that felt especially impactful was a bug fix and small redesign I owned in our account signup flow during my first year. Support had been getting repeated tickets from users whose verification step failed in a confusing way, and my manager asked me to investigate. I traced the failures, realized most of them came from one validation path, and proposed a narrower fix we could ship quickly instead of rewriting the whole form logic. I implemented that change, added better error messages, and worked with QA on a safe rollout. After release, support told us those tickets dropped a lot and our team no longer had to manually help users through that path each week. It was impactful to me because it solved a real customer problem and taught me how to turn a fuzzy issue into a focused fix.
The most impactful project I worked on was a small developer-onboarding tool I built after watching multiple new hires struggle to get their local environments working. I interviewed three teammates to map the common pain points, then wrote a simple script that automated cloning the right repos, installing dependencies, applying local configuration, and running the first test suite. I paired with a senior engineer to add basic safety checks and wrote a short README so anyone could run it without hand-holding. After we introduced it, new engineers reported they could start contributing within a half day instead of a few days, and the team stopped getting the same “how do I set this up?” questions every week. It felt meaningful because it let me improve my team’s day-to-day productivity and taught me how small automation and clear docs can scale impact beyond one person.
Poor answers
My most impactful project was probably refactoring a test suite for one of our services. The tests were pretty old and hard to read, so I reorganized them and made the structure cleaner. The team appreciated it because it looked much better afterward and it was something that had been bothering people for a while. I did most of that work myself, so I think it had a strong impact.
Question Timeline
See when this question was last asked and where, including any notes left by other candidates.
Mid June, 2026
Rippling
Principal
Early June, 2026
Rippling
Mid-level
Early June, 2026
Robinhood
Staff
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