People Management

Can you share a time when you faced failure in a project and what lessons did you learn from the experience?

Engineering ManagerML Engineering ManagerData Science ManagerData Engineering Manager

Microsoft

Apple

Paycom

Blue Origin

Merck

Blackberry

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Answers

Anonymous

3.6Strong
We worked on a project and got stuck on a problem where the common solution does not satisfy our goals of minimizing the risk of customer impact and minimizing the workloads on over 30 partner teams.My task is to get the team unblocked and find the best solution
  • I drafted our detailed requirements and constraints with diagrams, and shared with the partner team owing to the key component we don’t have enough knowledge on, and explained our situation and why the common solutions would not be the best for us.
  • I facilitated our team brainstorm sessions to explore all possible directions we could explore with the limited knowledge we have, and we got a few ideas.
  • I followed up with the core team on the requirements and our probing questions and the feasibility of the ideas from team brainstorm
  • After a few interactions of exchanging information and ideas, both side were able to find a couple of solutions to the problem, and with tradeoff discussion, we narrowed it down to one solution which minimizes operation and coordination cost with manageable risk.
  • With core team’s support, we were able to implement and verify the solution successfully and get unblocked on the project
  •  the project is rolling out to production with peace in mind that the risk of customer impact is very low
  • Learning: detailed description on the requirements.  Identify dependencies in detail and ahead of time, have 1:1 discussion with pertner team
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  • Can you give an example of a project that failed and what you learned from the failure?
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Interview question asked to Data Engineering Managers, ML Engineering Managers, Engineering Managers and other roles interviewing at Apple, Quora, Intel and others: Can you share a time when you faced failure in a project and what lessons did you learn from the experience?.