How to Answer: “How do you approach solving a problem you've never faced before?”
A complete guide to answering this common interview question — including what interviewers are really looking for, practical tips, and a worked example answer.
What interviewers are really asking
Show a structured, curious approach: how you define the problem before jumping to solutions, how you gather information, how you identify analogous situations, and how you test your thinking. Demonstrate comfort with uncertainty and a bias towards action.
Tips
- Show you define the problem carefully before solving it.
- Demonstrate structured thinking without rigid process.
- Show how you use analogies from other domains.
- Demonstrate a bias towards trying things quickly.
- Show how you validate your solution as you go.
Example answer
Sample response
“The first thing I do is resist the pull to solve it immediately. I spend time making sure I've defined the right problem — often what presents as the problem is a symptom. I then map what I know, what I'd need to know, and who might already have useful knowledge. When I had to build our first ML infrastructure from scratch with no ML background, I spent three days reading, found two people in my network who'd done it, and had them walk me through their mistakes before I made any decisions. I had a working prototype in three weeks. Front-loading the learning compressed the execution significantly.”
Adapt this to your own experience — never use any example answer verbatim.
Use the STAR method
Structure your answer as: Situation (brief context), Task (your specific responsibility), Action (what you personally did), Result (the quantified outcome). Most strong interview answers follow this pattern.
Full STAR method guide