Behavioral

Can you share an experience where you had to challenge your teammate's approach?

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Anonymous

5Exceptional
In my role as a Team Manager at a call center, we were implementing a new process to handle high call volumes during peak seasons. One of the senior managers proposed a strategy that involved extending work hours for all agents, including mandatory overtime, to ensure we met our service level agreements (SLAs).
While the proposed strategy aimed to address call volumes, I believed it would lead to burnout among the agents and negatively impact their morale and productivity. My task was to present an alternative solution that could achieve the same goals without overburdening the team.
I conducted a thorough analysis of our call volume patterns and agent performance metrics. I identified that not all hours during the extended period were equally busy and that a more targeted approach could be effective.
I developed an alternative proposal that involved optimizing our shift schedules. This included:
  • Implementing staggered shifts to ensure we had more agents available during peak hours without extending overall working hours.
  • Introducing a flexible part-time workforce that could be called upon during peak times.
  • Enhancing our self-service options on the website and IVR system to reduce call volume.
I scheduled a meeting with the senior manager and other stakeholders. I presented my findings and the alternative proposal, highlighting the potential benefits:
  • Reduced risk of agent burnout.
  • Improved morale and productivity.
  • Maintaining or even improving service levels through better resource allocation.
During the meeting, I respectfully disagreed with the initial proposal and explained the long-term negative impacts of mandatory overtime. I backed up my stance with data and examples from previous high-call-volume periods where burnout had led to increased absenteeism and turnover.

After a detailed discussion, the senior manager agreed to pilot the staggered shifts and part-time workforce approach. The implementation led to several positive outcomes:
  • Improved Agent Morale: Agents appreciated the more manageable work hours, leading to a 20% increase in job satisfaction scores.
  • Maintained Service Levels: We managed to meet our SLAs without overburdening the team. In fact, customer satisfaction scores improved by 15% due to better-managed call handling.
  • Cost Efficiency: The cost of hiring part-time agents was offset by the reduction in overtime pay and lower turnover rates.
This experience taught me the importance of having a backbone and respectfully disagreeing when necessary. It reinforced the value of using data to support my arguments and the need for collaborative problem-solving. By challenging the initial approach, I was able to implement a solution that benefited both the team and the organization.

Anonymous

4.6Exceptional
While working on a project to analyze genetic data for autism correlations, there was a disagreement on the approach for data analysis. One team member preferred using traditional statistical software, but I believed that using Python would provide more flexibility and efficiency for processing large datasets and performing custom analysis. I proposed trying both approaches on a small subset of the data to compare the results and assess which method offered better insights and processing time. After seeing the advantages of using Python, such as streamlined data manipulation and faster processing, the team agreed to adopt it as our primary tool, which enhanced the project’s overall efficiency. This experience highlighted the importance of proposing data-driven solutions and demonstrating their value.

Anonymous

4.6Exceptional
In a recent project involving a multi-service platform, we faced a situation where one of my peers suggested a new feature implementation that relied heavily on synchronous communication between services. While this approach would have met the immediate functional requirements, it posed significant risks for system performance and reliability due to potential bottlenecks and cascading failures.
Recognizing the broader implications, I proposed an asynchronous event-driven approach using a message queue system. To address this, I organized a series of cross-functional meetings with our architecture, operations, and QA teams. I prepared detailed impact analyses, including potential improvements in fault tolerance and scalability, and shared these insights through a series of workshops.
Through collaborative discussions, we mapped out the benefits and trade-offs of both approaches. This inclusive process allowed us to align on a solution that improved system resilience and performance while also accommodating feedback from all relevant stakeholders. The asynchronous design ultimately proved to be more adaptable to our growing needs, and the project was a success with enhanced system stability and performance.
This experience highlighted the importance of considering cross-functional impacts and involving diverse perspectives in decision-making, which is crucial for senior-level roles.

Anonymous

4.4Exceptional
When working at Flutter a member of the release engineering team wanted to automate the internal hotfix process with high priority. This would require creating several integrations and approval workflows with an estimated effort of 1 software engineer for two quarters.
I disagreed that automating the internal hotfix process was a high priority. I suggested the engineer run a cost-benefit analysis using information of how many hotfixes were processed per quarter and what was the effort of running the manual hotfix process. The engineer collected the information from the release engineering metrics. It turned out the hotfix process was executed approximately once per quarter and the manual process took only two hours. The cost then came to 1 software engineer for two quarters and the benefit was saving 2 software engineering hours per quarter.
After reviewing the cost-benefit I suggested the engineer select a project from the many available with higher priority and lower the priority of the automated hotfix process.

Anonymous

4.4Exceptional
At Auctane, the setup was such that Eng. Teams would delvelop code, and the deployment and operations was done by DevOps team. Even for Dev,Test environments. A key cloud ops eng, left the company during a critical phase of a project I was responsible for. This impacted our teams velocity, when I requested to prioritize our teams items, director of DevOps said that there was no other way around and we just have to be in the queue. I disagreed but started to look for alternatives in the background. I talked to other managers and found a common thread. I realized this a bottleneck for a the dev teams, hence I proposed the idea of having a process, where in our dev would generate the initial terraform scripts - collobrate with CloudOps eng to get an approval after which the devs has the autonomy to deploy in dev and test environments. While the Prod deploy will still be under Dev Ops. After convicing my peers, I held a meeting with DevOps director as well. I presented the pros and cons and Director brought into this process. By implementing this approach - it was a win-win scenario. The DevOps team got the time it wanted to hire the right eng. and we reduced the bottleneck for the lack of resource. We could improve our deploy cycle by 20%

Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
In my current role making semiconductors for different connected devices,  we have to work with different OEMs to integrate our chipsets into their product designs for operators such as T-Mobile or AT&T.  Based on the launched product KPIs, we identified some interference issues between cellular and wifi channels.  This has resulted in some intermittent performance issues and affect product quality.  I suggested that we should provide some design guidelines for the OEMs to assist them to develop a better RF filter design in order to maximize on our chipset capability, and to work with the key OEMs on the performance evaluation.  One of my peers has strong objection to this suggestion and recommended that it was not our job to provide any design suggestion to OEMs and instead just let OEMs work that out with their end customers.  I understand what is at stake for our business if the end customer associated the performance issues with our chipset.  I presented my case to the Product manager, to the test team, and then senior management on the risks of possibly losing market share by not investing in this design partnership with our OEMs.  The Product manager and test team agreed to support my suggestion and developed a collaboration plan with one of our key OEM.  I am glad that i pushed for this effort despite my peer's objection because now the carrier customer has asked for interference performance improvement in the product.  My effort gave the product and the team a nice position to meet the carrier customer's request.

Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
In one of the project, QA manager asked to utilize automation to speed up the testing cycle. However I had concerns about using automation. 
My task was to ensure that high standards for the delivery of the product and address my concerns.
For this, I consolidated all evidence and convened one to one meeting with the manager. 
Discussion started by sharing my concerns that- status of the project is still under development which leads to continuous changes in the scope. secondly, the project is all file based which leads to more time executing regression. Also, to test one functionality, it requires lot of explicit wait time to complete the test. I also prepared a small demo to explain my concerns.
After discussion, manager agreed on not utilizing this automation at the moment. There was a task created in backlog to automate in future. 
Thus, this incident helped to save critical time, addressing concerns helped to achieve better approach towards testing.

Anonymous

3.8Strong
At Auctane, I had a Sr. Engineer who was very harsh with Jr. Engineers in giving feedback. This led to Jr. Eng afraid of approaching with advice and team morale go down and productivity was down by 10%. I had to coach this teammate to not be hostile and instead approach people with Empathy and show ledership in asking the right questions and help them grown in their carrer as well - with this change in attitude, I saw that the team gel much better and the productivity increased overtime. 

Anonymous

3.6Strong
In a recent project while developing an interface there were multiple conditions and tasks that need to be implemented within a single interface so my colleage wanted to go ahead and develop one single batch for the entire interface as that would be easy to develop and that's how things have been working in this project ...but realiing the poetential imapct it might have in case of failure affecting all the subsequent work and also identifying the point of failure and again re-executing the batch would be difficult task I proposed that multiple batches for specific services should be implemented as this would save batch run time , identifying point of failure and re-executing the batches would also be easier and discussed these points with senior consultant, our manager as well as my fellow developer to which everyone was on the same page and we implemented the interface with 3 batches and ease out the life f the support team

Anonymous

it happens on one of our project where I disagree withe team members approach on the navigation system in the mobile app. team member will to show all menus under the humberger menu but I wanted to give main navigation at the footer because its easy to navigate the from there with the single hand asn the button are near to fingertips.
  • Can you tell me about a time when you disagreed with a team member's approach?
  • Have you ever had to disagree with a member of your team?
  • What was a time when you had to disagree with the approach taken by a team member?
  • Do you have an example of when you disagreed with another team member's approach?
  • What is one time you had to stand up and disagree with a team member's approach?
  • How have you disagreed with a team members approach when it was necessary?
  • Can you share a time when you had to disagree with someone's approach?
  • When were you forced to disagree with a team member's approach?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to step up and disagree with a team members approach?
  • Can you share an experience where you had to challenge your teammate's approach?
  • Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to voice your disagreement with a colleague's approach?
  • Could you describe a time when you had a different perspective from a team member and spoke up about it?
  • In your professional experience, can you recall a situation where you had to challenge a colleague's strategy or idea?
  • Have you ever had to object to a team member's approach? Can you walk me through it?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to be assertive with a team member's approach.
  • Have you ever encountered a situation where you had to voice your dissent to a team member's plan?
  • Could you give an example of a time when you had to step in and disagree with a colleague's approach?
  • Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had to push back on a teammate's idea?
  • Can you share a time when you had to challenge a team member's perspective or approach to a task or project?
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Interview question asked to ML Engineering Managers, Data Science Managers, UX Researchers and other roles interviewing at airtel, Goldman Sachs, Netflix and others: Can you share an experience where you had to challenge your teammate's approach?.