Case context: Your team has built an early churn-prediction model for a subscription app. It performs poorly, and the product manager wants to abandon it and spend many months designing a much more complex system from the ground up.

Question: What should you do with the current baseline model, and what is the main benefit of doing so?

Sample answer: Keep the baseline model and study its behavior instead of discarding it. Looking closely at its mistakes and patterns can reveal where the real problems are, which helps the team choose the most promising improvements much faster than starting over blindly.

Key points:

• Keep the baseline model.
• Analyze its predictions and errors.
• Use that analysis to identify promising improvement directions.
• This avoids wasting time on less useful work.

Rubric: The response should recommend analyzing the baseline model rather than discarding it, and explain that this analysis will expose useful clues for deciding what to improve next.