People Management

Can you describe a scenario where you had to balance competing priorities and how you approached it?

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Answers

Anonymous

4Strong
Competing priorities come up regularly. The best approach I find is to be open and communicative about such situations with your leadership as well as your stake holders. We recently had a lay-off at XYZ which impacted our team. At the same time, there were new strategic initiatives kicking off. This meant less people, more work. My team of 4 became a team of 3 and we were brought in to support new projects. My team was excited to be part of new strategies taking shape but also had the burden of maintaining old projects. I wanted to give my team the opportunity to work on the new projects which were exciting but also prevent burn-out. I firstly talked to my leadership highlighting the volume of tasks and the unrealistic expectation on each person. My leadership was in agreement that some work had to be de-prioritized and asked me to come up with a proposal. Next I talked to my stakeholders for old and new tasks. When explaining the high load on my team, some of the old tasks were voluntarily de-prioritized by my business teams as they were also considering going a new direction and didn't necessarily need  to maintain old solutions. Similarly some of the new projects could be time staggered to give my team time to close one and then take up another. What I learnt is honestly explaining the reasons why work might have to be delayed and still showing a genuine interest in collaborating helps get buy in and support from the otherwise demanding stakeholders. In this way, I was able to keep my stakeholders and my team happy and balanced.

Anonymous

3.8Strong
I had an attrition one day and  the team was not short on staff. We didn't have enough engineering resources to handle all the projects that were on the roadmap with the attrition so we had to re-prioritize projects. I first double checked on the impact/engineering weeks/and deadline of each project. I discovered one project that we were planning deliver by end of the quarter but the stakeholder originally told us they needed by end of the next quarter. I talked to the stakeholder to see whether they are okay with us delivering the project by the end of the next quarter. They said they are still fine with us delivering by the end of the next quarter and we were able to reprioritize projects without disrupting any of our stakeholders.

Anonymous

3.4Strong
There was a situation when I had to prepare two different payment systems ready for next month while I was working in company1. I divided the team in two section and run like a different teams. I designed the architecture for both and got reviewed with my manager and at every step I monitored and reviewed progress. I wanted to finish couple of days early just incase something comes up and done so. Everybody was happy and grateful to my effort to take multiple responsibilities at once. 
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Interview question asked to Data Science Managers, Data Engineering Managers, Engineering Managers and other roles interviewing at AMD, Apple, Summon and others: Can you describe a scenario where you had to balance competing priorities and how you approached it?.