Describe a time when you disagreed with your manager.

My manager and I disagreed on how to communicate a new feature to our customer. The most recent example was a feature that allows customers to compare themselves against other customers in our ecosystem. This gives them insights and recommendations on their performance as well as feedback on how to initiate next steps. My manager did not see much value to this tool, as not all the data on the backbone of this feature is crisp.

We disagreed on the data integrity standpoint, but I felt that there was enough value on some of the analytics to get customers excited as we continue to clean up the data effort. I went ahead and presented some of the value-add dashboards while hiding the dashboards with inaccurate data and got positive feedback. The customer really liked the information and has now continued to take initiative on a monthly basis to review these metrics with us.

In my last role I had to make a UX decision about the product that will balance functionality for the user without compromising performance. After testing a few options and validating it with internal stakeholders I released the updated UX, but then the CEO (who was a heavy user of the product) was against that change. I saw down with him and explained my reasoning and the process that I took to validate the solution, and gave him the option to try it himself on an early version. Once he saw the big picture he agreed that my solution was the right approach, but asked that next time I will consult with him before releasing changes like this. 

I worked towards describing all the data due to which I disagreed with the approach and put it on the table for discussion so that the manager could get a better picture. At times, they don't know the internals which is why they would come up with a particular way. I wanted to break it down so that my view point was well understood. This helped and the manager was convinced. He understood the stakeholder impact and we were given 2 weeks of push out for our project.