Tell me about a project where you had a significant impact on the technical direction of the product.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

💬 Question: How did engineers respond when you influenced technical decisions
as a PM?

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⭐️ Answer: Engineers respected it when I came with a clear product problem, not
a technology preference. At CBRE, when we were deciding between different
retrieval and reranking approaches for Ellis AI, I didn't say "use this stack."
Instead, I defined the constraint: we needed sub-500ms latency for enterprise
users, 25% better accuracy on domain-specific queries, and cost efficiency at
scale across 100K+ documents. I brought data from user research showing that
slow answers hurt adoption more than feature count did.

The engineering team then owned the technical choices—they tested embedding
models, chunking strategies, and reranking algorithms. My role was to validate
that each decision moved the needle on the metrics we'd agreed on. When they
proposed a more complex architecture that would delay launch, I pushed back with
adoption data, not ego. We compromised on a phased approach: ship the MVP with
the simpler stack, measure real performance, then invest in optimization.

What made the difference was treating them as partners solving a customer
problem, not as people executing my vision. They had the technical judgment; I
had the user context and business constraints. When I showed up with both, they
leaned in.

Tell me about a project where you had a significant impact on the technical direction of the product.

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