We need an online store. Where do you start?
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you asked who uses it before naming what you would build it with.
A founder in a kickoff call: "We need an online store for our products — nothing fancy, we just need to sell online by the end of the quarter. Can you build it?" There is no document. The founder has a spreadsheet of about forty products (illustrative) and a Stripe account somebody opened last year. You have forty-five minutes with them.
React to this
Say what you would question, what you would keep, and what you would need to know first.
Founder's email, the morning after the call (illustrative):
"Quick list of what the store needs:
- product pages with photos
- cart + checkout with Stripe
- discount codes
- customer accounts and order history
- recommendations ("you might also like")
- admin dashboard with sales charts
- multi-currency (we get EU orders sometimes)
- has to handle a big spike when we get press
End of quarter is fine, right?"What it is really testing
Whether the candidate treats the sentence as a problem to be understood or as a task to be tooled. The strongest signal is that the first ten minutes contain no technology at all: actors, actions, the one workflow that means the store works, what data must persist, what is outside the system, and a list of unknowns already rewritten as questions.