Please share a time when you disagreed with a member of your team.

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Situation

While working as a Product Manager on the Documents module, we were rolling out
improvements to document versioning and collaboration. During this project, I
had a conflict with a senior engineer who strongly disagreed with my proposed
approach to limit real-time editing in favor of stronger audit trails for
compliance and legal defensibility.

Task

My responsibility was to ensure the solution met customer needs (law firms
needing clear version history and compliance) while maintaining a collaborative
relationship with engineering and keeping the release on schedule.

Action

I addressed the conflict by first setting up a 1:1 conversation with the
engineer rather than debating in sprint meetings. I actively listened to
understand their concerns—mainly performance impact and technical complexity.

To move the discussion from opinions to data, I:

* Shared customer research and support tickets showing confusion and risk
   around document overwrites.

* Walked through personas of small law firms that rely heavily on defensible
   audit trails.

* Invited the engineer to co-design alternatives, which led us to prototype a
   hybrid approach: limited real-time collaboration combined with clear version
   checkpoints and immutable audit logs.

Anonymous · Answer

At one of my projects at my previous employment, there was a scenario where the
user would upload a file to process it, and it showed different stages of
statuses while it was processed. The user would refresh multiple times to see
the changed status. That's why I was assigned to implement auto-fetching the
statuses periodically. One of the senior engineers advised me to poll data at
regular intervals. His idea was this would be easier and quicker, and we could
focus on the next issue quicker. But I respectfully argued with his decision,
suggested that it would increase server stress, and as a result, the cost of the
client might increase. Instead, I was insisted on implementing websocket, as it
is better for this kinds of use cases. He also understood the situation, but he
insisted on polling data because it is easier to implement. We talked to the PM
about this issue, and the PM agreed on implementing websocket API for this
scenario. I then implemented the API, took some time to learn and understand
more on how to implement websocket API, and work with them.

Anonymous · Answer

I try to understand their point of view and be open to new ideas. If I listen
without being defensive I know  the other party will also listen. That way we
can take the best idea from both and come up with great solution.

Anonymous · Answer

A colleague and I disagreed about which task should be completed first. I
listened to his points and shared mine. He made valid arguments that proved we
should follow his suggestion. I agreed with him, and we prioritized his task.

Please share a time when you disagreed with a member of your team.

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