Behavioral
Could you tell me about a time when you had to convince someone of an idea and how you did it?
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4 answers from the community
Expert Answer
Anonymous
This goes back to the time when I was a product manager at Company XYZ, which provides online therapy to students worldwide. At that time, the process of matching practitioners with students was being handled manually by a cross-functional internal team. I identified this as an opportunity for automation.
However, the Therapist Success team was concerned about the additional workload this automation might place on therapists. They were worried that therapists might not respond to requests or resolve conflicts, especially in cases where multiple therapists were working with the same school and might want to take on the same students simultaneously, potentially leaving other therapists with fewer students.
To address these concerns, I connected with the internal team and presented my proposal. The proposal involved giving each practitioner opportunities based on their current capacity, ensuring they would act by sending timely notifications, and improving the matching time, which previously took three weeks. This would help our schools start the service more efficiently and with fewer delays.
I conducted a survey and several interviews with groups of practitioners to assess the desirability of this feature. Collaborating with our designers and engineers, we developed an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to validate this idea quickly. I then ran an experiment with a small group of practitioners and tracked their behavior in a controlled environment. The results showed a quick response time of 2.7 business days and a reduced service start timeline, dropping from three weeks to just six days overall.
I presented this data to the leadership team and the Therapist Success team, who were initially concerned about retention rates. After reviewing the positive results, we received the green light to launch this feature for all our practitioners.
After the feature's launch, we observed a drastic reduction in the time required to match therapists and students, from three weeks to just three days on average. Customer satisfaction increased by 25%, as they could start their service faster with minimal involvement. Additionally, therapist retention increased by 50% year-over-year, as therapists were able to manage their caseloads independently.
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Robert
Was working at Careem as a Product Manager. I was responsible for improving the driver app.
I really wanted there to be a "money estimator" feature for drivers. My hypothesis was that this would improve retention meaningfully, if drivers could see how much they could earn in a day or week.
I got a lot of push back from our legal team about this idea. They had multiple concerns - first that it would set potetially false expectations and create a risk of claims if drivers didn't earn the amount, second that it could also create a situation where drivers behaved in unhealthy ways to hit what could come across as targets
I reassured them that I would monitor this sort of action once I implemented the change, and that I would launch it as an AB test so that we could be confident there were no negative effects.
They however didn't agree, and therefore I also created a business case to estimate how much revenue we could generate through better retention of our drivers. Although this was quite high level and based on a lot of assumptions, it helped me to convince my own leadership to support me. And with their help, I managed to also convince our legal team to allow this experiment.
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Anonymous
Situation:
I was leading the development of a unified Lakehouse architecture, leveraging Databricks and Delta Lake. However, some stakeholders were initially hesitant about the shift due to concerns about the complexity of the migration and the potential disruption to ongoing projects. The team had been relying on a traditional data warehouse, and some key members believed that migrating to a new system would be risky and resource-intensive.
Task:
My task was to convince stakeholders that adopting the Lakehouse architecture would significantly improve data consistency, scalability, and reduce long-term operational costs while making the transition as seamless as possible.
Action:
I organized a series of meetings with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, breaking down the benefits into digestible parts. I provided detailed comparisons between our current architecture and the proposed solution, highlighting how Databricks would enhance data accessibility and consistency by over 80%. I also addressed concerns about downtime and complexity by presenting a phased migration plan, ensuring minimal disruption to current operations. To further gain trust, I ran a proof-of-concept (POC) demonstrating real-time data ingestion and showcasing how the new architecture would improve data accuracy and speed.
Result:
After the POC and multiple discussions, the stakeholders were convinced of the benefits, and the migration to the Lakehouse was approved. Post-implementation, the team saw a 90% increase in data adoption and a substantial improvement in data quality. Additionally, the migration reduced storage and processing costs by $300,000 annually, further validating the decision.
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Anonymous
At hyperface we got requirement from product team to build a nudge engine, this will be a configuration driven engine and when a condition is met based on the configured communication pattern it is going to send the communication. Example : If user have done 5 transaction is flikart and an offer is going on to do 10 transactions to get a reward we will nudge user based on the communication channel and rules that nudge him on whatsapp this much time and send him the push notification.
When this product requirement came , product wanted to build each and everything as a single engine, but at that time I realized that having a separate notification service which will take care of all notification related stuff and we will be able to efficiently scale that system and prevent having a tight coupling will be very helpful , but when I proposed this product did not agreed as they thought right now there is no usecase for making nudge engine and notification engine a separate component.
At that time I dicsucces this with my fellow EM and came to know that they are scenarios where they need to send notification for example otps , push notification and everyone is handling this in a custom way in there own code based . With all this data I went back to product team ann pitched them that having this notification engine all this custom handling will be gone we will have better mechanism to control notification track metricies and and improve the experience by handling failure scenarios .
with this data I was able to convenience the product team to build to different systems.
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Behavioral
- Could you tell me about a time when you had to convince someone of an idea and how you did it?
- Clicked questionGive me an instance of how you convinced someone of an idea?
- Share an example of how you convinced someone of an idea?
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Interview question asked to Full Stack Software Engineers, Product Managers, Program Managers and other roles interviewing at Chime, Indeed.com, Ticketmaster and others: Could you tell me about a time when you had to convince someone of an idea and how you did it?.