Can you discuss a particularly challenging situation you faced as a manager and how you navigated it?

Recently after RTO policy I had a lot good employee attrition in my org across multiple team. Also lost a manager in the process. Which had a cascading impact on the team workload as we had to still deliver on our committments and also team morale was low as the operation load like oncall, etc went up. I worked with the managers reporting to me to evaluate all the projects in flight and worked in leadership and PM to prioritize the projects based on customer/business needs and tradeoffs. Decided to push stall few projects and opportunistically improve operational load till we hire and rampup new team members. Also decided to do re-org within the team to co-locate manager with employees between multiple locations. Setup a recruiting drive along with the recruiting team to create interview PODs and weekly reviewing number of resumes/PS/Onsite we were having per week to accelerate the hiring.

Couple of weeks in a new job, before establishing trust and relationships with my team, I noticed that the throughput of one of my reports is well below expectations for his level.  He was committed to the company and team and showed some really good thinking in the ideation stage. He was still in probation - basically hired at the wrong level.

I set some time up with HR partner to understand our PIP and options. We aligned on slightly different terms for this particular situation, extending PIP from 4 to 8 weeks and if the clear goals were not met, we wouldn't part ways, he would be offered to move to a more junior level.

Then, I clarified the details of his PIP, setting out clear goal and stepping stones between his current performance level up to the average at that level in the org, with weekly check-ins to ensure we're on track.

The challenge was in getting him to commit to the process, and understand that it is indeed a performance improvement process, a sort of a ramp-up process, where we try to replace a year of experience, rather than the last step before exit. I shared this with the report, pointing out what we're working towards and why, that the company and I believe in him enough to invest the significant time and effort into this process to get him onto that level. Then, I gave him space to process the news, and asked him to choose when we kick it off (within reason).

He has committed to the process and managed to hit the mark by the end of it. We needed some work to rebuild the relationship and trust after this, and make sure that he understand I am there to support him and help him grow and thrive, but I am happy to report that one year later we are talking about the gaps towards the next level up and he is seen as a top performer on his level.

Problem: the company had a massive reduction in force in early 2023. My team lost a few good engineers. I faced 2 challenges at the time: some projects need re-prioritization or timeline changes; I feared that the uncertainty from layoff would lead to attrition or morale issues. Actions: project re-prioritization with PMs, reviewed and reset some projects’ timelines; meetings with director and other EMs, HR to get a list of pre-approved narratives. I then set up 1-1s with the remaining engineers to get their feelings and address potential concerns. My strategy is to understand the problem, trying to resolve it using pre-approved narrative; escalate otherwise. I Explained the reason for layoff, strategy, and future plan. There was a common concern about the company’s future plan so I circled it back to director and suggested leadership / CEO to share the vision and plan directly with ICs. Results: the team got back on track in 2 weeks with re-aligned priorities. No attrition for the remainder of the year and with a clear understanding of the company’s goals the team moved faster.

At XYS, during the execution phase of one of the key project - a sr. eng from the team left the company. Since hiring external was out of question - I had to be more creative - we were the lead team for AWS migration - this presented an opportunity as other teams had their projects for migration in the pipeline. I knew a Sr. Dev on another team who had working knowledege - so I apporached the other manager and proposed a solution where in I could borrow this Sr. Dev for this project - this also gives the Sr. Dev  AWS knowledge they need any ways down the road. I proposed this as a win-win situation and after getting an approval from my manager, I could plug in this Sr. Eng with a 2 week transition period - as a result I managed to deliver the project still on time. The lesson I learn was resource planning is not just about allocation a person to the project but also have plan B options to plug in other devs when needed.

I had 2 managers and a technical program manager reporting to me. The challenge I faced is unclear definitions of roles and responsibilities across these individuals and general blame game of the other party not doing their job. We were trying to arrive at our milestone plan and deliverables through the next year which was launch.

I talked to each of them individually and understood there was expectation mismatch on who is accountable and responsible and hence general frustration all around. I asked the TPM to come up with a RACI matrix which we will then review with the group and talk about mechanisms to ensure these are being followed. I did serveral revisions of this with the TPM and then brought the whole group together.

At Auctane, while we were working an critical project, one my key Sr. Eng left the company. This put the project in jeoprady. External hire was not feasible as they needed system knowledege and the project would be understaffed. I had prior knowledege that another dev had worked on this system before and I came up with a approach of borrowing the resource for some time.

I convinced that manager that by borrowing this is a win-win for both of us as the Sr. Dev would learn new web skills as they had projects in the pipline to move their projects as well. After that I talked to my manager and borrowed this resource, I took two weeks time to do the KT and could deliver the project on time and within budget. the lesson i learnt was to have plan B an antiscipate any changes and plan for continegency.

Shortly after I joined the company, lead engineer approached me with the resignation. We call  the engineer F

My task was to understand the reasons for that and find a creative solution. 

It turned out that the engineer needed extended time for personal reasons and they did not think it was possible within the company. 

I wanted to learn more about the situation so I explored F's interest in projects, technology. I asked about F's friendship with colleagues, peer environment, stress level etc. After several (2?) conversations, I was able to conclude that there is no different agenda and F indeed needs time to be out of the office.

I reached out to my manager and HR outlining the situation. As F was a strong and committed engineer , I was confident that we can trust F's offer to work reduced hours in a different timezone.

I learned about extended leave that required complex approval. That was the solution that would keep engineer at the company while allowing F to take needed time.

Working with HR and management we were able to accellerate approval and balance PTO with approval cycle. 

As result the engineer stayed at the company. We were able to prevent loss of engineer and were able to offer comfort level to F of being employed.

There were certain type of clients called aggregators who were advertising on our platform. Business team came with a request that to remove them from ranking since they believe that they don't perform well in the long term. What we saw from the data was they have certain place in the market where they will advertise in the segments where nobody will advertise and when we remove them it hurts our revenue. So we decided to keep them on the platform. The conflict was I got two directions from my direct manager and manager's manager where the directions are tangent to each other. My manager says to keep them until there is measurable way to prove that they will hurt the platform. My manager's manager said it's up to business if they want to keep or remove them. 

 With the help of my team I came up with a plan that 

(1) if the predicted loss is less than 5% then we remove them from our listings 

(2) if they are abusing the platform by exploring the bottom then we limit them 

(3) we come up with a parameter called advertiser quality index which utilize in ranking 

The above helped to solve the conflict so that the presence of aggregators were limited and we selectively suppress them when there is minimal loss. We experimentally proved the theory. In the end the conflict was minimized was both parties got what they want to some extent. 

For full 10 years of my Nike career and for everyone else in Nike was a stressful time when Nike had big layoffs in few years back.

It was challenging to keep everyone in the team to keep them motivated and continue the work. During that time I had more frequent 1:1s to listen to people. That time even just lienting was also just sufficient for people.

During that time, even my peer EM got laid off, that means my team size got doubled. Managing other team and balancing the work, means I need to come up with startatgey on how I can support the team well.

Discuss with the team about the situation and understand the needs and concerns of the team. Ensure that needs and concerns are not conflicted. Motivate the team with all possible ways.

1) if there are conflicting priorities , then identify the priorities which are approved and funded in the organization AOP .

2) the One that is approved takes highest precedence, if there are multiple priorities then the one which has significant legal impact takes precedence.

3) if there are no legal concerns then the one which has biggest customer impact or the one which will realize lot of revenue for the org will take priority.