Tell me about a time you had to convince an engineering lead to adopt a technology they were initially against.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

💬 Question: How did you collaborate with engineers to ensure a smooth
transition?

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⭐️ Answer: At CBRE, when we transitioned Ellis AI from a prototype to a
production platform serving 100K+ enterprise documents, I knew the handoff would
break if engineering and product weren't aligned on what "done" meant.

I started by mapping the current workflow—how users searched, what frustrated
them, where they got stuck. Then I brought that to the engineering team and
asked them what they needed from product to build reliably. They said: clear
acceptance criteria, data quality guarantees, and a realistic latency target. I
didn't assume I knew the answer.

I wrote detailed requirements that separated what users saw from what had to
work behind the scenes—retrieval accuracy, hallucination detection, cost
tracking, fallback behavior. For each piece, I defined the success metric and
the guardrail. When they said "we need a golden dataset to validate retrieval
quality," I owned building it with them, not handing it off.

During development, I attended their technical reviews, not to approve code but
to catch misalignment early. When they discovered that our initial chunking
strategy would miss domain-specific context, we didn't blame the design—we
tested alternatives together and picked the one that balanced accuracy and
latency.

The key was treating them as partners solving a customer problem, not as
executors of my vision. I clarified what mattered to users and business, they
clarified what was technically feasible, and we decided together. That made the
transition smooth because we both owned the outcome.

Tell me about a time you had to convince an engineering lead to adopt a technology they were initially against.

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