Describe a time you had to make a difficult decision with limited information.

Situation: We had to choose between two cloud providers (GCP vs AWS) for a new data platform. Pricing was opaque, performance benchmarks were incomplete, and we had a 4-week window to decide. Task: Make a defensible choice with incomplete data. Action: I ran a time-boxed evaluation: (1) POC of core workloads (batch ETL, streaming, ad-hoc queries) on both platforms. (2) Benchmarked latency and cost for our typical queries. (3) Consulted with platform peers and reviewed roadmaps and vendor support. (4) Built a decision matrix (cost, performance, integration, vendor lock-in). I chose GCP (BigQuery + Dataflow) based on better integration with our existing stack, stronger developer experience, and more predictable pricing for our pattern. I documented the rationale and assumptions. Result: The platform launched on time and scaled to 10x initial load. We avoided a costly migration. The decision doc became a template for future vendor evaluations.