Behavioral

How did you handle a situation where you couldn't meet a deadline?

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Answers

Anonymous

9 months ago
4.4Exceptional
S - Sales got a new client and they promised to create a product for them in 12 weeks.
T -   As the program director, I was tasked to manage this end to end, when I reviewd the High level requirements, it was clear that we will not be able to deliver this entire application in just 12 weeks.
A - I immediately called a meeting with my team to brainstorm solutions and create a plan, and a roadmap to develop a MVP, that will have the essential features & enough UI for the client to start their work.  But since we were working on 2 high visibility products already, I could sense some resistance from the team.  I assured the team, that I will work with the client and will only get the most essential and minimal features out first, and can deliver much more when they actually have time.  so we developed a plan to deliver one small feature every 2 weeks, so by the end of 12th week, we will have delivered a MVP, but not a complete application.  
   Then I setup a meeting with the scientist (client), presented to his team, went over the features, UI and the main security & compliance safeguards that will be baked in. During the presentation I realized that the client is NOT familiar with Agile Iterative development, I explained how they will be at an advantage, with a iterative delivery, than waiting for the whole 12 weeks  to see anything.  After a quick walk through of the roadmap,  they realized that if they can iterate this product, they will be able to get more and more features and the capability can be upgraded at each iteration.  

R - They happily agreed to the MVP in 12 weeks, and then we worked with them for the next 12 week delivery features.  One of the best client we had, and had referred this product to be developed at other institutes too, and recommeded to CIOs at ohter institures
  


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Interview question asked to Software Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Full Stack Software Engineers and other roles interviewing at Wolt, Applied Materials, FleetSmith and others: How did you handle a situation where you couldn't meet a deadline?.