Can you tell me about a recent instance when a customer or co-worker was unhappy with your work and how you addressed the situation?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Situation: The team I was leading did not have an established consistent
mechanism to handle requests from the product managers, issues from the field
operations.
Obstacle: Due to the lack of a framework the teams (internal customers) would
reach out to the team members over Slack including the leads to get their work
done. This led to missed deadlines, expectations not being met, burnout and
randomization within the team

Action: I dove into the nature of requests, the common challenges the team faced
in completing the requests. For example, some requests were not small scope that
can be taken up by an on-call. I also talked to the stakeholders on the issues,
challenges they faced and the cause of dissatisfaction. Next, we use JIRA tool
for tracking issues. I decided to take IT help get a project setup that would
act as an intake mechanism for these items instead of using the Slack. I also
created an automated template within the tool to help fill out relevant details
by the stakeholders to be as specific as possible but to the point. The next
step was to create a severity level matrix for each of these incoming
requests/issues and have a collective agreement on what these severity levels
map to the service level agreement in terms of triage and resolution. This
helped in setting expectations. This also included creating a runbook for
triage, labeling and creating dashboards for monitoring the performance. This
was then included into the team on-call runbook. I set up a 2 times a week
triage meeting with the stakeholders to discuss any hot topics or items that
needed clarification , retriaging etc.

Impact: The number complaints from the stakeholders decreased by 50% in the
first 3 months of this going live. This was smoothly integrated into the
process. The operations team also stopped messaging on slack with 100% move over
in 10 months.

Anonymous · Answer

Customer complains about a performance issue they identified in our scheduling
system, this has been the existing behavior for years.
I want to  win trust of customers by acknowledging and resolving the problem
quickly.
 * I acknowledged the issues that customers raised, and committed that the team
   will look into this and provide an update on the fix.
 * I deep dived the workflow where customers having complaints, and performance
   profiling on the pipeline, and identified the bottleneck.
 * I quickly realized that it could be resolved by implementing parallelism on
   the bottleneck component to speed up the system.
 * I met with the domain experts and presented my findings, and we agreed on the
   solution. Together, I planned workstreams in parallel to ensure quick
   resolution.
 * I updated the customer with an ETA based on the plan and left some buffer
   time for unexpected things.
 * With great teamwork, the team delivered the fix in 1 week ahead of our ETA,
   and reduced the latency by 5 times.

customers were impressed with perf improvement in such short time
we did retro on this, and made a long term plan to further improve customer
experience on this overlooked aspect, including adding metrics from customer
perspective not just internal system metrics, and also redesign the system
aiming to further reduce the latency.

Anonymous · Answer

Situation:
We had a customer who was complaining a lot about inventory sync and order sync
issues. Every other day they would raise issues and tag my manager, skip level
manager and a bunch of other folks
Task:
I was scheduled for a customer call by my skip level manager and the agenda was
to discuss their overall satisfaction with the product, discuss their questions,
suggest action items and give them a sneak peek about new features
Action
- Before going into the meeting I dug deeper into past issues the merchant is
facing
- I analysed his replies to see the ton of the merchant
- I wrote an action plan on how these can be resolved including Short, medium
and long term items eg in few cases the merchant reached out to us regarding an
issue whereas those should have been internally identified via different
monitors which were missing
- I laid out the plan with specific ETA's
- I prepared a small ppt of 5-6 slides which had these details
- I also added new and upcoming feature releases
- I went in the meeting and patiently listened to the customer
- I acknowledged all the issues that happened and shared short, medium and long
term fixes with ETA's
- The seller was very happy with the acknowledgement and the action items
- I ensured to keep them updated via our shared slack channel
Result
- Fewer queries from customer
- Minimal to no tagging to senior leadership
- If anything needed to be escalated they used to tag me first

Anonymous · Answer

At Octane, we were in the process of migrating from a monolithic architecture to
microservices, which included transitioning to a NoSQL database—specifically
DynamoDB. During this shift, our DBA manager expressed concern that his team was
no longer part of the code review process, as they had been under the previous
monolithic setup.
Recognizing the dissatisfaction and potential misalignment, I organized a
meeting with our principal developer, the DBA manager, and members of the DBA
team. In that meeting, I clarified that while the process had evolved, the scope
of the DBA team’s responsibilities remained critical. Their role now centered
more on managing and monitoring the performance and health of DynamoDB in a
production environment.
By aligning expectations and emphasizing the continued importance of their
contributions, we were able to resolve the concerns. This helped foster better
collaboration and led to more productive and smooth sprints moving forward.

Anonymous · Answer

As a Manager of managers, I was leading the development of multiple scheduled
projects at the same time. I received an urgent request from the business owner
about a new feature we needed to develop quickly. This required one of my teams
to stop the work they were doing and pivot to this new project which made one of
the managers reporting to me dissatisfied about the churn.
In my discussion with the manager, I explained to him about the urgency of the
request and why it was more important and time sensitive than the other project
we were working on. We together evaluated the customer impact and reached out to
the Product manager to collect further details. He and I then spoke to the team
in a team meeting explaining the details of the new project and the impact it
would have for our customers. We also explained that the original project was
only paused and we would get back to it in a month. The team and the manager
appreciated the clarity and committed to working on the new project which was
delivered on time. We were then able to switch back to the original project.
Subsequently we also had a discussion with the Product and Marketing team about
how we could get more notice on new projects and setting up a monthly sync up so
they knew what projects we were working on.

Anonymous · Answer

At XYX, we were in the process of migrating to new microservices, which involved
NoSQL DB. Now, our DBA manager was concerned that his DBA team was not involved
in the code review process as they were following in the previous processes,
previous in the monolith system. Now, I realized that the DBAs were not happy,
so in order to make sure that we are all on the same page, I had a meeting with
my principal developer, DBA manager in the DBA, and explained to the DBA that
the process has little change, yes, but his scope of work has not changed in the
sense that now he has to take care of managing the DynamoDB itself and
monitoring that in production. So by ensuring that we are all on the same page,
I could address the conflict, and we had a productive spring from then on.

Anonymous · Answer

Ideally all delivered works should make our stakeholders happy but in reality
sometimes stakeholders will not be satisfied with our delivered work. When this
happens, it is very important to have a conversation with the stakeholder and
address the issue.

We delivered a batch api endpoint to send emails in batch after receiving
multiple requests from stakeholders. While it worked great for most teams, there
was a team that actually expected more. Our solution was to provide an api
endpoint to simply loop through and send emails and to avoid to much of a
latency hit, we set a size limit on how big a batch can be. However, the batch
size was basically a bit too small. We discussed with the stakedholer and
negotiated a batch size they will be happy with and had an internal discussion
within the team whether the request is feasible. we were able to come up with a
slightly modified design and address the issue the customer was having,

Anonymous · Answer

I recall an incident where all members showed their dissatisfaction when they
need to work extra hours to promote a critical change to live. It was a critical
change provided by the client last moment a few hours before the launch and it
was really tough to team members to incorporate it.  I need to address it from
my side for the client. I called a meeting with my team members. I discussed
with them about the requirement and its criticality, and asked suggestions how
we can address this situation and I met the client and understand them the
consequence of last moment changes and the way how we can address the issue. I
summed with a satisfied way to both team and the client. After this incident
team was more confident about their work.

Anonymous · Answer

In one of the projects that I was managing as a TPM, I had multiple key projects
which I was already working upon with more than 20 SDE's. I had no bandwidth for
this one but I was guided to work upon this mainly from project tracking
standpoint. During the end of the year I could see that the stakeholder had more
expectations from me. I clarified the situation and also iterated the alignment
we had initially. But post that I have made a point to take up things only where
you can take 100% ownership

Can you tell me about a recent instance when a customer or co-worker was unhappy with your work and how you addressed the situation?

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