Tell us about a time when you had to deal with conflict

In a recent project, I led a collaborative effort with a remote development team based in another country. We encountered a disagreement about the coding standards used by our respective teams. The other senior engineer on the project preferred their team's existing standards, while I believed aligning with our project's coding standards would improve consistency and ease collaboration across both teams. To resolve the disagreement, I scheduled a meeting with both teams to discuss the situation and understand the reasoning behind each team's preferred approach. During the meeting, I emphasized the importance of standards for maintaining code quality and readability throughout the project. We collaboratively reviewed both sets of standards and merged the best practices from each to create a unified set of coding guidelines for the project. This process involved actively listening to the other engineer's perspective and respectful dialogue between the teams. By reaching a consensus on the unified standards, we were able to enhance collaboration and improve code quality across the entire project. This experience highlighted the significance of effective communication while working with remote teams and managing cross-cultural differences

• Situation: The client had migrated from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365. My colleague and I were tasked to work on developing a Microsoft 365 training guide for the employees

  • We realized we have different visions and ideas

  • I want something interactive like adding video contents

  • She want to create like a powerpoint manual

• Task: We couldn’t come to a solution, i saw that tension is building up

  • I took a step back, and asked my coworker on why she doesn’t like my idea

  • She said that she can’t learn well through interactive videos

  • realized that our conflict stemmed from different learning styles

• To address the conflict, I proposed to combine our ideas to create a more comprehensive training resource

  • Set up meeting to discuss how we can add our parts  into the final product

• Result: We successfully publish the training guide for employees w diff learning styles

• Learned: I learned the importance of acknowledging and addressing these differences early in the process. Also accommodating diverse perspectives

In a recent project, I led a collaborative effort with a remote development team based in another country.

 We encountered a disagreement about the coding standards used by our respective teams. The other senior engineer on the project preferred their team's existing standards, while I believed aligning with our project's coding standards would improve consistency and ease collaboration across both teams. To resolve the disagreement, I scheduled a meeting with both teams to discuss the situation and understand the reasoning behind each team's preferred approach. During the meeting, I emphasized the importance of standards for maintaining code quality and readability throughout the project. We collaboratively reviewed both sets of standards and merged the best practices from each to create a unified set of coding guidelines for the project. This process involved actively listening to the other engineer's perspective and respectful dialogue between the teams. By reaching a consensus on the unified standards, we were able to enhance collaboration and improve code quality across the entire project. This experience highlighted the significance of effective communication while working with remote teams and managing cross-cultural differences

While working on a navigation redesign project, my team and I found that a colleague on another team (a GTM person) was very unhappy about the redesign project. There was a lot of chatter that she was unhappy and had spoken with leadership about her misgivings, but exactly what was bothering her was unclear.

The designer on my team and I decided to set up a 1:1 meeting with this colleague in order to understand exactly what the issues were. We learned that her team was in the middle of rebranding their product and she was worried that the launch of the redesign would undermine the rebrand effort.

We assured our colleague that the launch of the redesigned navigation would not happen for a few months, still, long after their rebrand and the buzz around it would have settled. With that assurance, she was no longer anxious about the redesign project, and we were able to move on with the work.

Simply having a conversation, understanding what the issues were, and coming up with a resolution was all it took.

In my current role, there was a time when operation and engineering team was not aligned which was causing lots of delays during deployment. as per operation team build should be deployed in same branch which was available on pre-prod but as we were running multiple projects/features parallelly. it was difficult to develop and test everything in one branch and made it ready for deployment in a short time.

I had to work with my team (engineering team) and operational team to come up with a solution where we both are aligned and can reduce delivery time as well.

Initially i had proposed a solution when we were developing and testing work on feature branch and once its fully tested by QA on feature branch we push all changes to staging branch where we can do final testing. for some time this approach worked but we start facing new issue which is related to code merge as after merge features were impacting each other and require additional time to fix those issues and make it ready within planned time.

We added one more process if features/fixes are small and won't impact much then we merge else we try to plan deployment sequentially to avoid any further delay. 

This approach helped team to deliver project/feature on time and operational team was happy as they don't need to keep track of multiple branches during deployment.

My philiosphy with conflicts are they are inevitable and it can be a good thing - because new ideas can come out of it. At XYZ, Dev Ops team is responsible for creating teraform scripts to deploy to AWS both on Test and Prod env. Few cloud eng left the company - and it started to impact our sprint cadence. Initially I approached the Director of Cloud Eng to see how we can unblock my team, in that meeting I proposed may be one of the resource can help their team come up with the TerraFarm script. After talking to other eng. teams I found that this was an issue with their cadance as well. I collobrated with my peers to come up with a proposal - i.e there will be a resource on each team - who will co-own the terra farm scripts. This would do things for us :

a) Reduce the backlog on cloud eng team and allow the teams move faster

b) GIve me time for cloud eng team to find the right fit.

Initially the manager was releuctant but aggreed to try out, after 2 sprints the backlog was reduced and we could more much faster. The lesson I learnt is - first find out all the solution we can have, then anticipate what kind of question they might have? Collobration is key in such instances. 

When I was working as a UX designer at Motorola in 2021, I dealt with conflict between design leadership and product. The conflict arised due to competing priorities. As a user Advocate, I took charge to collect data to help resolve the conflict one way or the other. so I conducted usability audit to prove that there were major usability issues and thus would lead to bad experience for customers if we don’t prioritise those in product roadmaplz after seeing the data the product stakoh were convinced and agreed to add those in roadmap.

As manager of a team I was confronted with a disagreement about how to implement a feature, one side wanted to make it in a certain way while another wanted differently. I had to step in to make the decision for them which then created disappointment with the ones who didn't get their way. I had to resolve by reminding them of my authority as well as the overall goal which has more importance than getting your way.

I audit the supplier in the workbook. 

The pic of the supplier link me to another personnel, and during the audit I just realised the factory is not belong to my direct supplier. It is the supplier own supplier and My company shall not audit my supplier own supplier. I have to continue the audit. When the audit finish, I wrote email to my superior and GCm regarding the finding, and need GCM help to confirm the factory that I audit is correct.  Through multiple email, the supplier was then admitted the factory I audit and the supplier company are 2 different entities and according to my company policy, we shall not audit the supplier's supplier. Then Supplier send us another company name, which is also different entities and let us decide whether need to audit. The GCm is emotional and made decision of requesting to perform the audit. I question GCm for his request and he is emotionally and unprofessional. I have to send email professional to reject the audit request with explanation and said audit will be conducted uf requested by management in future. 

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II

We were working in a project where stakeholder uses third party api for route optimization of the field service agents. We were trying to build a in house solution using open source tools while some stakeholders were supporting some are really spectacle that we should keep going to use third party api. To tackle the situation  in the first iteration we build a basic product that show the comparison of routes actually and using our product it shows how the coverage of work orders increased and generate value in this way we receive a better stakeholders support