> If you ask your candidate to demonstrate how they've "delivered business value" in the past, you're basically asking them how lucky they were. Honestly I'd b

> If you ask your candidate to demonstrate how they've "delivered business value" in the past, you're basically asking them how lucky they were. Honestly I'd be ok with an answer along the lines of "I got moved onto a project that, for $reason, had no chance of ever seeing the light of day. It was obvious why it wouldn't survive, but the business needed to keep it alive because $other_reason. Even though we never shipped, we met objectives $x and $y, we struggled with $z, and we learned quite a bit about $w. After the project was finally killed, we were able to apply what we had learned to other projects." This at least demonstrates that the candidate understands how the project related to the business, how they can relate some of the technical aspects to business processes, how they acknowledge their failures, and how they extracted some success from a failure to apply to future efforts. It allows us to have a conversation about different aspects of the project -- technical, business, interpersonal / political, etc. I've been on projects across the spectrum from "never-shipped death march" to "mature cash cow", through various levels of team & management dysfunction, and I probably learned as much from the horrible failures as I have from the successes.