Can you describe a time when a project faced a significant delay and how you approached the situation?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

For any project to succeed the team needs to have the clear understanding of the
goals and expectations. I make sure the team understand the business
requirements, customer scenarios as well as roadmap and milestones. I involve
the team in the planning process to define the intermediate milestones and
roadmap to completion. I use Agile sprint to track the process and use weekly
meetings to track process. The daily standup is setup to highlight the process
as well as any blockers or potential risks faced by the team. We also use the
teams and other communication channels for cross team collaboration and high
light dependencies. For any milestone the team achieve I make sure celebrate by
acknowledging the effort, so that they feel appreciated and motivated.

Anonymous · Answer

To keep the project on track, I believe having clear deliverables and holding
people and teams accountable is important.
In a recent project, we worked with one of the product teams to develop a
voicemail feature for their product. My team had to integrate with a 3rd party
solution, integrate with the product team's backend, and set up monitoring and
alerting. Our product team also had to implement new UIs and make backend
changes to communicate with our backend.
I worked with my team to break down the project into multiple deliverable
milestones with a set expected delivery date. I focused on different phases of
work where the team can work independently from our stakeholders or when the
team has to work with them. We’ve set our milestones to 1) Integrate with the
3rd party APIs 2) Integrate with the product team's backend 3) Test & Setup
monitoring and alerting. Since the product team depends on our progress, I
shared our deliverable milestones with our stakeholders and made suggestions on
how they can line up their development timing respected to our milestones so we
can efficiently work together. We also made sure to reserve some time to handle
any unexpected problems which became handy later when we discovered an
undocumented limitation on the 3rd party API. To make sure both teams are making
progress and there are no unexpected issues/delays, we utilized Jira tickets to
keep track of the progress, and set up a weekly sync for continuous check-in to
discuss any challenges or blockers.
After we delivered the project, we reviewed the success metrics together and
confirmed we increased the retention rate by 5%. After the project was
completed, we did a project retro and discussed things that went well, didn't go
well, and what could have been done better.

Anonymous · Answer

I keep my team focused on five main areas: design reviews, tracking development
progress, ensuring release efficiency, managing risks and dependencies, and
overseeing timelines.
For example, in our RAG system for conversational AI, I led design updates that
introduced components to decide when retrieval was necessary and refine queries
with context to improve relevance. This required additional expertise, so I
added two more applied scientists to the project. I also participate in code
reviews with my team, ensuring code quality and maintainability and aiming to
keep code inventory age minimal before production. By doing so, I maintain high
release efficiency and reduce technical debt.
I play a bridging role between scientists and engineers to ensure smooth
collaboration and production deployment, especially on complex projects like the
RAG system. Through weekly reviews with stakeholders, senior team members, and
our TPM, I proactively identify and address risks and dependencies.
For instance, in our smart voice CX project, the original design included two
main components to orchestrate multi-turn voice interactions. One was an
end-to-end, paralinguistic-aware speech-to-speech system for simple chit-chat,
while the other was an LLM-based reasoning engine for handling more complex
conversations. We initially introduced an arbitration component—a smaller,
fine-tuned LLM—to direct each interaction to the appropriate component. However,
I identified a critical risk: due to the stochastic nature of this arbitration,
it could result in inconsistent customer experiences for similar scenarios.
Additionally, this setup increased system complexity and impacted latency
management.
To address these risks, I proposed a streamlined approach, suggesting that the
LLM-based reasoning engine should handle 100% of the reasoning tasks. This
eliminated the need for complex arbitration, reduced integration complexity, and
improved response times. I presented this proposal to stakeholders, including
principal engineers and product managers, and successfully influenced them to
adopt this approach, which resulted in a more consistent and efficient
conversational experience.
Overall, I focus on guiding the team through structured processes, proactively
identifying potential issues, and simplifying complex technical challenges to
deliver consistent, high-quality results across our projects.

Anonymous · Answer

At Octane, I had the following three steps. One is, I had a Confluent page
wherein I would have the project up-to-date status on the stories, the features
we are working and the state of each of the stories along with detailed
explanation of where we are at, the risks the project carries, and also any test
cases which have been passed. The second point of communication was via weekly
status report wherein I would have a detailed status of where the project is
trending, what are the risks associated, and identify the stories which was done
in the previous week. The third part was, we had a bi-weekly communication
wherein I would present the project status to all the stakeholders, including
the leadership, to help them understand where the product is at, and are there
any risks associated, and if so, how I'm trying to address it, and with whom I'm
collaborating to get the risks addressed. By following these three steps and
also being open to communicate on Slack, I had all the different channels open
for communication with my stakeholders and leadership.

Anonymous · Answer

It is very important for an engineering manager to keep track of the project and
ensuring the team is moving forward.
First, it is very important to setup a clear and reachable goal. Sometimes, it
would be wise to have a stretch goal as well. Once a goal is set, it is
important to do some rough estimations on the overall timeline. If the project
is a big project (like more than a quarter), then it would be great to actually
break down the project in to multiple deliverable milestones. With a clear goal
and projects broken down in to milestones, it would make it easy for every one
to track the progress of a project. Manager can track the progress towards each
milestone to see if the team is moving forward at the right phase. If needed, I
would setup a recurring short meeting (like once a week) to review the progress
with the people working on a project to track the progress.

Anonymous · Answer

Every Sprint I update the status of the project to express a clear summary
whether project is moving forward as expected, delayed or blocked /in dire state
Additionally monthly I send out an executive summary of most important projects,
including a mapping from the known milestones to where we are currently in
execution

Anonymous · Answer

To keep a project team on track and moving fo ownership of tasks—let members
demo their work.

Use metrics (velocity, burndown, quality keep the team on track by setting clear
goals, aligning everyone on priorities, maintaining open communication, and
using project management tools to track progress. I focus on removing blockers,
managing risks, and keeping motivation high. This way, the team stays
accountable and continuously moves forward toward milestone

Anonymous · Answer

I would ask team to come up with design and task breakdown. I’lll use that to
create working backwards plan. Divide it into milestones and the. come up with
delivery execution plan.

Can you describe a time when a project faced a significant delay and how you approached the situation?

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