Have you ever had to assist a colleague in an area outside of your responsibilities? How did it go?

We had a critical release requiring an automated deployment process with parallel stacks—creating a new stack, deploying the software, running tests, and then cutting over traffic from the old stack. Our DevOps engineer, who was responsible for this process, had to take an unexpected leave due to a family emergency, leaving us without crucial support for this critical phase and putting our tight schedule and deployment strategy at risk.

Despite my primary role being focused on backend development, I wasn’t initially responsible for the deployment pipeline. I recognized that without effective management of the deployment pipeline, our release could be compromised. I took the initiative to step in and oversee the automated deployment process, even though it was outside my usual scope of responsibilities.

I quickly familiarized myself with our Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and Terraform infrastructure setup.

To automate the deployment, I enhanced the pipeline to create a new stack in parallel to the existing one, deploy our software, and run automated tests to validate the environment. For the traffic cutover, I implemented a gradual switch mechanism that allowed us to monitor performance and quickly revert if any issues arose. I collaborated with the development and QA teams to ensure alignment and documented the deployment process for future reference.

The deployment was completed successfully with no downtime, and the new stack performed well under real user traffic. My enhancements reduced deployment time by 40% and the controlled traffic cutover ensured a seamless transition with no user impact. The leadership team recognized my initiative and the effective solutions I implemented, which were adopted as standard practice for future releases.

Just one day before a major survey launch at NEPA, we discovered critical logic errors that threatened to derail the entire project. The operations team responsible for drafting these surveys had multiple projects running simultaneously and hence overwhelmed by this error, I stepped up to resolve the issue, even though it wasn't my direct responsibility and I had no prior experience with the specific scripting language of the survey tool called Confirmit.

The problem was with the branching logic of the survey, where the next question depends on the answer to the previous one. If any of these connections are wrong, respondents might see irrelevant questions or miss important ones.

'I recognized the urgency of the situation and took full responsibility for fixing the errors. First, I collaborated with the operations team to understand the tool's requirements and learned the basics of Confirmit.

To address the issues:

• I simplified the survey logic to make it easier to test and reuse

• Using my analytical skills, I meticulously checked each branch to make sure the right follow-up questions appeared based on previous answers.I then mapped out the correct logic flow using Excel, visualizing the desired outcomes before implementing them.

• I simulated different respondent scenarios to test and ensure everything worked correctly.

After implementing and testing the corrections, I conducted a soft launch the same day to validate the changes. The successful validation allowed us to proceed with the full launch on schedule, meeting our tight five-day data collection deadline and maintaining our commitment to client deliverables.

Post-project, I documented lessons learned and recommended having a dedicated testing day before committing timelines to clients. I also refined testing protocols to enhance efficiency and minimize future risks.

Further, I took the initiative to personally learn Confirmit scripting to better address future challenges. I successfully trained over 20 interns and employees, significantly enhancing their ability to independently maintain and enhance survey logic. This empowered the team to independently maintain and enhance survey logic, ensuring scalability and continuity across projects.

Situation: While working on the platform and reporting teams, an unexpected early maternity leave occurred on the team responsible for managing employee ethics disclosures. My manager needed to reassign tasks to ensure continuity.

Task: A critical feature for the system used to track and manage employee ethics disclosures needed to be completed within a tight three-week sprint. This was a new domain and team for me, presenting a significant challenge.

Action: I volunteered to take on this feature as I had the capacity and was eager to contribute. Despite my unfamiliarity with the area, I took the initiative to:

• Rapid Learning: I spent extra hours studying the project, consulted with senior team members, and took a short online course to understand the ethics disclosure management system better. I also had detailed discussions with the ethics disclosure team to grasp the system's intricacies and requirements.

• Collaborative Workshops: To fully understand user needs and project goals, I led focused meetings with stakeholders from both the ethics disclosure team and my existing teams. This approach fostered knowledge sharing and ensured alignment. We mapped out user journeys, identified key pain points, and defined clear objectives for the feature.

Result: Through dedication and a proactive approach, I delivered the high-priority feature on time. Additionally, through user research and collaboration, I suggested additional functionalities that significantly enhanced the system's overall value. For example, implementing a more intuitive user interface and automated compliance checks improved the user experience and reduced the time required for compliance reviews by 30%. This experience demonstrated my ability to adapt to new challenges and effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Relevance to the Role: This experience has equipped me with skills directly relevant to the target role. Working in cross-functional teams honed my ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders, a key requirement for this position. My ability to quickly learn new areas and take initiative is essential for roles that involve tackling new domains and leading projects under tight deadlines. Furthermore, my success in delivering a critical feature within a tight timeframe demonstrates my capability to manage and execute high-pressure projects, aligning with the demands of the target role.

We had a project which had a very tight deadline and the impact of not delivering timely was closely related to the revenue the company would generate. The engineers were already pushing hard to meet the deadlines. During this time, the engineering manager who was leading this project decided to leave the company and move on. Another Engineering Manager took over the team but he was already swamped with onboarding onto the new team. I could clearly see the impact of this in our project syncs where the engineers were working in silos, there was collaboration and communication gaps withing the engineers and the QA teams. The team moral was low overall. I decided to step in to help the new engineering manager as I had good knowledge about their domain and the overall project breadth. I went deep to understand the project dependencies and came up with a plan to distribute the work amongst the cross geophically located teams. I also worked on a working backwards document to align the timelines across the board and a RACI matrix to ensure that all stakeholders in the project understood their roles and responsibilities. This led to motivating the team, helped the engineering manager by providing him time to ramp up and empowered engineers and QA teams to lead and own their respective domains. We met the deadline in a timely manner with a smooth deployment of multiple systems and domains with no incidents.

I ensured that we did a retro after the project, and shared the success and learnings from the project to the wider engineering org.

Situation: While leading a team, one of my colleagues inadvertently overlooked the need to retain a copy of the raw data. Subsequently, we needed to enable new data elements  from the raw data but realized we didn’t have the required copy readily available. To address this, we had to reprocess the raw data. Fortunately, the API provided a 28-day   history, ensuring no data was lost. However, this oversight caused a slight delay in delivering insights to a key stakeholder.

Task: As the team lead, it was my responsibility to address the issue, resolve it promptly, and rebuild trust with the stakeholder.

Action: I took ownership of the situation and communicated the slight delay to the stakeholder and communicating a plan to address the issue. Internally, I worked with my   colleague to identify the root cause of the oversight, providing coaching and additional training to prevent recurrence. I also improved the team’s quality assurance process to add  an additional layer of review for future deployments.

Result: The issue was resolved quickly, the stakeholder appreciated the proactive communication, and the improved process ensured a higher standard of quality in subsequent  projects.

Yeah, there are times when we need to get into different roles, even if it is not a part of our job because communication and collaboration with colleagues help to foster a healthy work culture. In my recent organisation, we had  a new program manager joining, who was new to the project. He needed some help in knowing the verticals and the Engineering Team. I did my part getting him to understand the work culture and helping him collaborate with the team and got the Engineering team to sync up with him as well as getting him appropriate information on the product  by  providing him the appropriate channel access to the confluence docs to go through as well as helped him setting up 1: 1 calls with the product owners. This helped him in understanding his team that he/she would be syncing up with on a day to day basis . Also helped the engineering team and the product owners to have a open ended communication with him.

S - Situation. Once in the middle of the developing an important feature my team lost design coverage;
T - Task. We need a prototype to start building it
A - I rapidly learned Figma, assumed designer responsibilities, and delivered a crucial experience that enabled uninterrupted development—all while continuing to drive research as the UX Researcher
S - Feature was delivered on time and still in the product

I would like to talk about situation. When I was an engineering  manager at digital commerce platform org at Amazon, I was handling close to 11 services, and 

as part of the Rolling Stone initiative where Amazon was trying to move all its services away from Oracle, I had four services that I was trying to migrate from Oracle to the databases hosted on Azure. All my fellow colleagues who were owning services of DCP were doing similar exercise. One of the colleague who was owning digital redemption service had to go on maternity leave, and then couple of engineers earmarked to do this migration for digital redemption service wwere transition out of the organization. That is when I offered to help with the migration of the service. 

So I now had 5 services with competing  priorities where I 

had to manage very tight schedule of service migrations. Planning a very ruthless prioritization, figuring out an optimal execution path of a completely unknown service, interacting with the service upstream clients whom i had not worked with prior, working with an amalgam of My team members and the service owner team members were few of the ambiguous paths I navigated to help do on time migration completion of the   service owned by my collegues.

One of the QA faced challenges with keeping up with the developer in testing of CRM application. while my role was of QA, I had understanding of the scrum activities and also known the business. 

I reviewed the issue and conducted initial assessment of the problem. 

I collaborated with QA to understand their concern and came to know about the root cause that QA is not involved in all scrum activities which is resulting into QA lacking of testing, and some stories are missed to be tested.

I worked closely with the QA and scrum master to discuss about the issue and help to set up a process to involve QA in grooming, and planning meetings, involve QA in sizing the user story, and a user story can only be completed when all development, QA and UAT sign offs are given. 

Thus after discussion, a process was set up where in QA was involved in all the activities and issue was resolved. This helped to ensure high standards of the delivery of the product and proactive collaboration. 

Good question.

yes, There was a time that i had to participate another team project release. as something goes wrong with release related to the components that related to my team, i was there to help that team. This is not my direct responsibility.  i attended that because my team lead was not available there. within that release major problem arise related to cloud run instance issue and based on my priror experience i abled to help that team to slove that problem and   do the release succfully.

At CenterCard, we had a TPM who had joined the company recently. As a TPM she was expected to be part of the architecture discussion. This was a new area for her and she sought out my help to get upto speed on our Architecture. I decided to help her so that she can be more productive in her job, I saw an opprotunity for my Sr. Dev to help him improve his communication and help the TPM as well. With that in mind, I asked my Sr. Dev to set up meetings with my TPM and help her get up to speed. I could solve two things by doing this - I saw communication as area of improvement for my Dev and helping my TPM get more knowledegable, I could gain that working relationship with my TPM,

All the time, it is very common to work cross-team and to try to help when you can. So I often lend a hand when I see something coming across me that I can help with, which is simple feedback and directing them towards resources that will cut down on their work. It went really well, it has built a strong relationship between you and that person ,plus it is good exposure for the type of person you are in the organization