Behavioral

Tell me about a time when you showed ownership

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Anonymous

4.3Exceptional
There was a situation last year when designing search functionality with in user messages was required, a staff engineer came up with an idea that pretty much requires writing from scratch using a trie + cache approach. I told him that we should rather use elastic search. I then explained to him that while his approach was innovative, it would require a significant amount of time and resources to implement. On the other hand, using elastic search, a proven technology, would allow us to achieve the same results more efficiently and with less risk. He was able to understand the bigger picture and eventually updated the design.
Expert Answer

Anonymous

5Exceptional
We were in the midst of integrating a payment gateway, escrow account, and split payout system for our new Marketplace for homeowners. This integration was crucial for facilitating seamless transactions between buyers and sellers on the platform.

**The Challenge:**
Just as we were nearing the completion of our integration with our chosen financial partner, we discovered a major compliance issue that made it impossible to continue with this partner. This was a critical setback as we had already committed release dates to our stakeholders and the launch was highly anticipated.

**Taking Ownership:**
Recognizing the urgency and critical nature of this issue, I took full ownership to resolve it swiftly and effectively. Here’s how I approached it:

1. **Initiating Discussions with Alternative Partners:**
   - I immediately initiated discussions with alternative financial partners to find a suitable replacement. My goal was to identify a partner who could meet our compliance requirements and integrate smoothly with our existing system.
   - I leveraged my network and industry contacts to expedite the evaluation process and set up meetings with potential partners.

2. **Looping in the Engineering Team:**
   - From the beginning, I involved our engineering team in discussions with the new potential partners. This ensured that the technical feasibility and integration requirements were clear and that we could maximize the reuse of existing work.
   - I facilitated technical deep-dive sessions to assess compatibility and identify areas where we could leverage previous integration efforts.

3. **Strategic Planning and Execution:**
   - I developed a detailed action plan that prioritized speed and efficiency. We set clear goals to reuse as much of the existing integration code and processes as possible to minimize rework.
   - I established a clear timeline and milestones, ensuring that all team members were aligned and understood the urgency.

4. **Maximizing Team Effort:**
   - I motivated the team by emphasizing the importance of meeting our committed launch dates. Everyone understood the critical nature of the project, and the entire team was prepared to give their 200%.
   - I facilitated daily stand-ups and regular progress reviews to keep the team focused and address any issues promptly.

5. **Ensuring Compliance and Quality:**
   - We worked closely with the new financial partner to ensure that all compliance requirements were met and that the integration was secure and reliable.
   - Extensive testing was conducted to validate the integration and ensure a smooth user experience upon launch.

**Outcome:**
Thanks to the team's dedication and the strategic approach, we successfully integrated with the new financial partner and launched the payment gateway, escrow account, and split payout system within two months. This was a significant achievement given the initial setback and tight timeline.

**Reflection:**
This experience reinforced the importance of taking ownership and being proactive in resolving critical issues. By demonstrating leadership, fostering collaboration, and maintaining clear communication, I was able to drive the project to successful completion despite the challenges. This project not only contributed significantly to the company’s revenue growth but also reinforced our commitment to delivering reliable and efficient services.

This example highlights my ability to take full ownership of a critical project, navigate through significant challenges, and lead a cross-functional team to achieve strategic business goals.

Anonymous

4.4Exceptional
Situation: At TinyEYE Therapy Services, I was leading the development of a new feature called Smart Note Generation. This feature was designed to take session transcriptions and use GPT technology to automatically summarize the session, making it easier for therapists to complete their session notes. However, there was significant resistance from the therapy team, who were concerned about the accuracy of AI-generated summaries and the potential for technology to replace their clinical judgment.
Task: My task was to decide whether to move forward with the implementation of this feature, knowing it could greatly reduce the time therapists spent on administrative tasks but also understanding the concerns about its reliability and impact on their workflow.
Action: After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to proceed with the Smart Note Generation feature. To address the team’s concerns, I initiated a pilot program where a small group of therapists would test the feature. I worked closely with them to gather feedback, iteratively improving the accuracy of the AI summaries based on their input. I also emphasized that the feature was designed to assist, not replace, their professional judgment, and they would always have the final say in the content of the notes.
Result: Initially, the decision to implement the Smart Note Generation feature was met with skepticism and reluctance. However, as the pilot program progressed, the therapists involved began to see the value in the feature. They reported that the AI summaries were saving them significant time, allowing them to focus more on direct patient care. Eventually, the feature was rolled out to the entire team, leading to a 40% reduction in time spent on session documentation and improving overall therapist satisfaction. What started as an unpopular decision became a widely appreciated tool that enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of the team’s work.

Anonymous

4.4Exceptional
When I joined Mobisy Technologies, I inherited a client account that was almost terminated due to unmet development commitments over the past three months. Before my involvement, 60% of their project was completed, but the remaining 40% had been neglected because there was no designated point of contact. The previous responsible person had left, and there had been no regular client meetings, only monthly follow-ups from my manager.
The client was frustrated by the lack of progress and communication, so they escalated their concerns to our senior stakeholders. To fix things, I started by listening carefully to what they were upset about. I made sure they knew I understood their frustrations and wanted to make things right.
I developed a clear action plan. I worked closely with our engineering team to assess the backlog, identify critical bottlenecks and prioritize tasks based on their impact. I used project tracking tool Jira to streamline workflow. This allowed us to maintain transparency and keep all stakeholders. I Implemented a live project tracker for the client to share regular progress and kept the client informed at every stage.
Simultaneously, I engaged directly with senior stakeholders on the client side. I provided detailed updates on our progress and demonstrated our commitment to addressing their concerns promptly. I also created a performance dashboard that highlighted our improvements, showing measurable increases in project completion rates.
These efforts not only retained the client but also expanded our engagement. The client appreciated our dedication to resolving issues and recognized our commitment to their success. After six months, they initiated project from another division, worth $110K.
This experience taught me the importance of proactive communication, problem-solving, and using tools like to streamline operations and ensure client satisfaction. 

Anonymous

4.4Exceptional
ADM had no user researcher in the past and I got pulled into a adoption email campaign and helped boosted the adoption. But in the study i found there's a perceived value gap so I initiated further collaboration after the adoption campaign to ensure the perceived value is delivered in ADM. I did survey and interviews to find main pain points inside ADM, and came up with the uber dashboard idea to resolve the messy alerting system by task driven widgets on the dashboard based on the feedback. Even though I wasn't the assigned researcher and no one support that product, I took it and own it and ADM had the best customer review after the big changes based on my research

Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
At my current job one of our biggest customer raised the  issue they were facing in our notification service. The issue was they were not receiving any notifications from our system on their new infrastructure. Their production infra was working fine.
I reviewed their configuration and everything was looking fine at the same time we hadn't done any changes to on our end which could cause this issue. Since their contract was up for renewal the issue, we needed quick resolution. I setup a live debugging session with customer to understand the issue in detail and their new infrastructure. After the first call it was clear that the issue was happening during https handshake or at network layer. To keep the momentum going I setup recurring call with with them and assured them that we are treating this as a high priority. On the next call I involved our security expert and SRE team for further debugging. However the issue not futher progress was made, at this point I insisted SRE team that we contact Azure support to understand if there is any issue at the tcp layer. Azure team looked at the turned on debug logs and found that our network was default MTU (maximum transmission unit) was higher than customers network MTU and customer network was dropping packets.
Finally I worked with SRE team to lower our MTU to match the customer configuration and ran tests. After the config change issue was resolved, our customer confirmed that they could see the notifications. This was really difficult issue I had ran across but I worked with various teams to get to the bottom of it and delivered results to customers satisfaction.

Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
I was working on a task with MIT University program team where they used to share CEU Document to the learner and this process was manual. PMs were manually creating the document for each learner and sharing it with them on their registered email id which was a a tedious process. On an average there were 50-60 learners in a batch and each document creation to sharing took at least 20 mins for one PM.
I took the ownership to automate this process where the learners would complete there program and automatically get the CEU Document just when their certificates were published. The timeline to do this task was 2 months.
I gathered all the information from the team where I got the assets like logo, signatures, details of the signatory, the copy of the document, the timeline of the program start and completion etc.
When the development started I did rigorous testing of the feature checking all the possible scenarios where this could break and launched the feature in exactly 2 months where the next document was going to be published in another month.
Through this feature I saved approx 100 hrs per PM

Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
At a previous job I was given the task of creating SQL queries based on user requests for data. Request needed to be formatted in a very specific way in order to work with our system, they had to be written in Python fitting a very specific structure for our system. What I did was I wrote a program in javascript which would take The user request you could just copy the user request wholesale, paste it into this program, and it would auto format their request as proper code for our system. You could then just run the code directly without having to do all of the formatting yourself. This made the task take much less time to do. I had not been asked to write this program. I saw an opportunity where the process could be improved and streamlined and decided to take it and wrote it myself over the course of a few weeks.

Anonymous

4Strong
In ISB Games 2023, I served as the Administrative Leader, responsible for overseeing all administrative tasks across pre-event, in-event, and post-event phases. My role included managing registrations, check-ins, student experience, and first-aid assistance, among other tasks. One key responsibility was risk management, where I developed strategies to address potential risks.
For example, I analyzed participation data from the previous year to determine drop rates for each sport, identifying those with the highest dropout rates. From these insights, I reviewed past feedback, examining factors like venue suitability, event timing, and participant experience, to hypothesize potential issues. I then assigned risk levels and proposed solutions to mitigate each identified risk. This groundwork was essential in guiding my team’s preparations for this year’s ISB Games.

Anonymous

4Strong
There was a situation last year when designing search functionality with in user messages was required, a staff engineer came up with an idea that pretty much requires writing from scratch using a trie + cache approach. I told him that we should rather use elastic search. I then explained to him that while his approach was innovative, it would require a significant amount of time and resources to implement. On the other hand, using elastic search, a proven technology, would allow us to achieve the same results more efficiently and with less risk. He was able to understand the bigger picture and eventually updated the design.

Anonymous

3.6Strong
In a recent project at my current company, PLM decided to go woth full fledge featurex, due to business requirements, in a single release which in a was overcommited given the capacity of the engineering team. But I took this as a challenge charted out the code completion, in-scrum testing, and PV testing forecast dates by working with different stakeholders involved. I also ensured that everyone involved has all the clarity for the requirements and scope, to avoid/minimize any reworks as the deadline was quite aggressive. Everone started working as per the sprint plan and i followed up about the progress in every checkpoint and standup meetings. 
 

Anonymous

3.4Strong
As I am lead I always take ownership of the tasks which are assigned by my higher managers. But I would like to highlight one incident which got me appreciation directly from the client. We had a project to integrate SSO with the client and the merchant applications and during that time my manager was on long leave and I took the responsibilities of the task and successfully launched it and we were the first team who achieve it first.

Anonymous

1.5Needs work
Ownership can be demonstrated in various settings, such as in a professional environment where one is responsible for specific tasks or projects'. 

Anonymous

  • Situation: In my role as a data engineer at [Healthcare Company], I was responsible for managing the data infrastructure for a critical healthcare analytics project. The project aimed to develop predictive models for identifying at-risk patients and improving care outcomes.
  • Task: During one phase of the project, we encountered a significant challenge with the data ingestion process. The data sources were diverse and often inconsistent, leading to delays and inaccuracies in our analytics. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, I took ownership of resolving this issue to ensure the project stayed on track and met its objectives.
  • Action: First, I conducted a thorough analysis of the data sources and identified discrepancies and inconsistencies that were causing the ingestion problems. I then collaborated closely with the data acquisition team and domain experts to develop data validation scripts and standardized data formats to address these issues at the source.
Next, I redesigned the data ingestion pipeline to incorporate robust error handling mechanisms and automated data quality checks. This involved writing custom scripts and configuring monitoring alerts to detect anomalies and ensure data integrity throughout the ingestion process.
Additionally, I took the initiative to document the entire data ingestion workflow, including troubleshooting procedures and escalation paths, to facilitate knowledge sharing and ensure continuity in case of future issues.
  • Result: As a result of my proactive approach and ownership mentality, we were able to resolve the data ingestion issues promptly and improve the overall reliability and efficiency of the analytics project. The redesigned pipeline reduced data processing errors and improved the accuracy of our predictive models, leading to more actionable insights for healthcare providers.
Furthermore, my documentation efforts ensured that team members had clear guidance on how to address similar issues in the future, enabling smoother operations and reducing downtime.
  • Impact: By taking ownership of the data ingestion challenge and driving the resolution process, I demonstrated my commitment to the success of the project and my ability to proactively identify and address issues to ensure project objectives are met. My actions helped maintain project momentum, instilled confidence among stakeholders, and ultimately contributed to the project's success in improving healthcare outcomes.
  • Tell me about a time when you showed ownership
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  • I want to hear about a time where you demonstrated ownership
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  • Give an example of a situation where you took responsibility for a task that was not assigned to you.
  • Describe a time when you went above and beyond your job duties to solve a problem.
  • Can you tell me about a time when you took charge of a project and saw it through to completion?
  • Have you ever taken ownership of a difficult situation? How did you handle it?
  • Tell me about a time when you took ownership of a mistake you made and what steps you took to rectify it.
  • Have you ever taken ownership of a project that was failing? How did you turn it around?
  • Describe a time when you took the initiative to improve a process or system at work.
  • Can you provide an example of a time when you took responsibility for a conflict and worked to resolve it?
  • Tell me about a time when you took ownership of your personal development and pursued learning opportunities.
  • Give an example of a time when you took ownership of a customer issue and went above and beyond to resolve it.
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Interview question asked to Backend Engineers, Program Managers, Software Engineers and other roles interviewing at Hired, Skyscanner, Corning and others: Tell me about a time when you showed ownership.