Anonymous
I tend to deal with persuasive conversation in a way that tends to benefit all parties involved. And one effective strategy I have found useful is to rather than straight up say no and get into a confrontation, I tend to understand where the party is coming from and what are the goals the party is trying to achieve and what can be done to get into a win-win situation for both parties. Especially in Amazon this comes into play almost every with the amount of dependencies each team has and so much away team work being done.
One example I can think about was my sister team who manager License Manager was working on a S Team level project where they unearthed a dependency on my team pretty late into the cycle and there was very little time the team could do to do an away team effort and came to me for the work to be done. I first understood the business impct of their project and ceded control in this situation by explaining that I have my core projects coming up but one invent and simplify thing we could is to push back the component’s work to later in the dev cycle and provide my support for their project which they can later come back and finish off for my project. In this bargain I was also able to convince my counterpart to provide me their Sr Engineer to do that work as we were taking a risk to my project by pushing that component out. The outcome of this arrangement was that we were able to deliver their project in time as well as get their best engineer to work on my project which led to a timely and high quality deliverable for my project as well.
