Use this bank to probe how candidates find a way forward when time, budget, or information is scarce. Each section includes prompts and cues for what strong answers demonstrate.

Mindset & Definition

• What does “resourcefulness” mean in your work?
  Good answers: Bias for action, creative use of constraints, ethical shortcuts avoided, measurable outcomes.
• Share a time you succeeded without the ideal tools or budget.
  Good answers: Clear goal, constraints, options considered, chosen path, outcome quantified.
• What’s your default move when you’re blocked?
  Good answers: Reframe, identify smallest next step, seek information/ally, propose trade‑offs.
• How do you know when to ask for help vs. keep hacking?
  Good answers: Cost of delay, risk, reversibility; defined escalation thresholds.
• What’s overrated/underrated about resourcefulness?
  Good answers: Overrated: lone‑wolf heroics; Underrated: systems, templates, and partnerships.

Scrappiness & Constraints

• Describe a solution you shipped with near‑zero budget.
  Good answers: Reuse, open‑source/no‑code tools, staged delivery, and safety checks.
• How do you triage must‑have vs. nice‑to‑have under pressure?
  Good answers: Clear “definition of done,” risks noted, stakeholder alignment.
• Tell me about turning a hard constraint into an advantage.
  Good answers: Constraint‑driven creativity leading to simpler, faster, cheaper outcomes.
• What’s your approach to building prototypes quickly?
  Good answers: Low‑fi first, success/fail criteria, user feedback within days.
• How do you avoid technical/operational debt while being scrappy?
  Good answers: Guardrails, documented TODOs, time‑boxed hacks, follow‑up plan.

Network, Partnerships & Influence

• How do you get help fast from busy people?
  Good answers: Terse context, clear ask/options, deadline, offer to do the heavy lift.
• Share a time a relationship unlocked a blocker.
  Good answers: Stakeholder map, win‑win framing, quick pilot to earn trust.
• How do you barter resources across teams?
  Good answers: Reciprocity (swap favors), shared goals, transparent commitments.
• What’s your approach to external vendors/communities?
  Good answers: Proof‑of‑value trials, reference checks, exit criteria, and IP awareness.
• When do you decide to go alone?
  Good answers: Coordination costs too high, small scope, reversible decision.

Tooling, Automation & Information Hunting

• What’s a manual task you automated?
  Good answers: Hours saved, tool choice (no‑code/scripts), reliability and ownership.
• How do you find information quickly in a new domain?
  Good answers: Query strategy, expert triangles, sanity checks, source quality.
• Which free/low‑cost tools do you reach for first?
  Good answers: Spreadsheets, APIs, scrapers, templates, community resources.
• Tell me about building a dashboard with scraps.
  Good answers: CSVs, lightweight ETL, simple visuals, and alerting.
• How do you prevent “tool sprawl” while being scrappy?
  Good answers: Single source of truth, naming conventions, deprecate redundant tools.

Learning Agility & Adaptability

• What’s the last skill you learned to unblock work?
  Good answers: Specific learning plan, quick application, documented notes/templates.
• How do you ramp quickly in a new domain?
  Good answers: 80/20 curriculum, mentors, deliberate practice, checkpoints.
• Describe a time your first plan failed.
  Good answers: Fast pivot, preserved learning, minimal sunk‑cost bias.
• What experiments do you run to learn cheaply?
  Good answers: Small tests, clear hypotheses, guardrails, and decision rules.
• How do you document and share what you learned?
  Good answers: Playbooks, wikis, short demos; reduces future toil.

Decision‑Making Under Scarcity

• How do you decide when speed beats precision?
  Good answers: Reversibility, blast radius, cost of delay; set a decision deadline.
• Tell me about gambling on an imperfect option.
  Good answers: Expected value framing, downside containment, quick feedback loop.
• What’s your rule for escalating risks?
  Good answers: Thresholds by impact/time; pre‑agreed channels and owners.
• How do you balance fairness/compliance with scrappiness?
  Good answers: Pre‑approved patterns, checklists, ethics guardrails.
• When is doing nothing the resourceful choice?
  Good answers: Option value, information arrival, avoid wasted effort.

Scaling Hacks into Systems

• After a hack works, how do you harden it?
  Good answers: Ownership, documentation, tests, reliability thresholds.
• How do you prevent hero culture?
  Good answers: Share templates, train others, automate, remove single‑points‑of‑failure.
• What’s your playbook for repeating a win in another team?
  Good answers: Minimal kit, onboarding doc, metrics to watch, support channel.
• Tell me about deprecating a scrappy solution.
  Good answers: Sunset plan, migration path, rollback, and comms.
• How do you quantify the ROI of resourcefulness?
  Good answers: Time/cost saved, cycle time reduced, risk avoided, revenue impact.

Cross‑Functional & Customer Focus

• How do you keep the customer front‑and‑center when cutting scope?
  Good answers: Protect core value, communicate trade‑offs, gather quick feedback.
• Describe co‑creating a workaround with a customer/partner.
  Good answers: Joint plan, interim relief, final fix, and testimonial/learning.
• What artifacts keep others moving while you solve a blocker?
  Good answers: Mocks, stubs, sample data, clear “need‑by.”
• How do you set and hit response/turnaround SLAs?
  Good answers: Triage windows, templates, batching, escalation ladder.
• Share a time you created leverage for the whole team.
  Good answers: Toolkit, document, or automation used across functions.

Ethics & Risk

• Where do you draw the line on “hacking”?
  Good answers: No violations of security, privacy, IP; seeks approvals; documents.
• A time a shortcut almost backfired—what changed?
  Good answers: Admits risk, adds guardrails, updates playbook.
• How do you avoid creating invisible toil for others?
  Good answers: Consider downstream impacts, consult early, clean handoffs.
• What do you do when resourcefulness conflicts with inclusion or accessibility?
  Good answers: Do not cut essential standards; find creative compliant alternatives.
• How do you ensure attribution when borrowing ideas/assets?
  Good answers: Credit sources, licenses respected, transform vs. copy.

Case Study Exercises

• Zero‑budget launch: Ship an MVP in 2 weeks with existing tools; outline scope, risks, and metrics.
• Vendor outage: Create a 48‑hour workaround plan with comms and rollback.
• Data scavenger: Produce a dashboard from CSVs and one public source; define quality checks.
• Process bottleneck: Reduce cycle time by 30% with automation or template changes.
• Stakeholder swap: Get a critical favor from another team—write the ask and the barter.

Tip: Look for calm, structured action, clear trade‑offs, ethical guardrails, and habits that turn one‑off hacks into repeatable leverage.