Can you share with me a situation where a customer or colleague expressed dissatisfaction with your work and how you responded to the situation?

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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