A key team member gives their two-week notice during a critical project phase. What do you do?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to see how you handle disruption and maintain continuity when losing critical talent. They're assessing your ability to stay calm, prioritize knowledge transfer, support the departing employee, and keep the team and project on track without burning out remaining staff.
Key Points to Cover
- Immediate response: acknowledge the departure professionally, avoid guilt or pressure
- Knowledge transfer: documenting, pairing, and handoff planning within the two-week window
- Project impact: reassessing timeline, scope, or resources; communicating with stakeholders
- Team morale: supporting remaining team members and preventing further attrition
STAR Method Answer Template
Describe the context - what was happening, what team/company, what was at stake
What was your specific responsibility or challenge?
What specific steps did you take? Be detailed about YOUR actions
What was the outcome? Use metrics where possible. What did you learn?
đź’ˇ Tips
- Emphasize treating the departing employee with respect—no guilt-tripping or burning bridges
- Show you prioritize knowledge capture over trying to convince them to stay
- Mention succession planning or cross-training as a preventive measure for the future
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: Our lead backend engineer—the primary owner of our payment integration and the only person who knew the full architecture—gave two weeks' notice during the final phase of a major migration. We were three weeks from a hard deadline with a key enterprise customer. Losing him without a plan would have been catastrophic.
Task: I had to ensure knowledge transfer, maintain project continuity, and support both the departing employee and the rest of the team.
Action: I met with him the same day. I thanked him for his contributions and asked what he needed from me during the transition—no guilt, no pressure to stay. I then created a knowledge transfer plan: we identified the critical domains (payment flows, migration scripts, runbooks) and scheduled daily pairing sessions with two engineers who would take ownership. I had him document the architecture in a living doc and record a walkthrough. I reassessed the project timeline with the tech lead: we determined we could still hit the deadline if we focused the remaining team on the migration and deferred one non-critical feature. I communicated the departure and revised plan to stakeholders—transparent about the risk and our mitigation. I also checked in with the team to ensure no one was overloaded.
Result: We completed the migration on time. The two engineers who paired with him became confident owners. The departing employee left on good terms and later referred a candidate. I learned that treating departures professionally and prioritizing knowledge capture pays off—and that succession planning should start before someone leaves.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Ownership, Have Backbone — "A key person gives notice during a critical project. What do you do?" |
| Meta | Cross-functional alignment, making hard calls |
| Collaboration | |
| Microsoft | Collaboration |
| Netflix | High performance, freedom & responsibility |
| Uber | Ownership |