You encounter an unfamiliar technical problem at a client site. What steps would you take to identify the cause quickly and provide a safe temporary solution?

Problem diagnosis under ambiguity — structured triage, hypothesis formation, and risk-managed mitigation.

Use a 3-step framework: (1) Classify the failure domain (data, network, application, infra). (2) Form 2–3 hypotheses ranked by likelihood and blast radius. (3) Apply the least-destructive diagnostic action first. Always communicate the temporary fix and its trade-off to the customer.

• ✗Jumping straight to code changes without reproducing the issue
• ✗Not establishing a rollback plan before experimenting
• ✗Treating all failure domains equally instead of ruling out the most likely first