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As a QA leader I had to choose between run a full check of a new functionality that wasnt very popular or use or let the change pass over with the aprove of the PM for some time saving. I choose run the full check, take a few days more, but when the functionality goes to production it works well, without any bugs.

Question: Tell me about a time when you assisted a colleague in his work. What was the result?

Answer:

Sure. I really enjoy helping others on the team, especially when they’re stuck and not sure how to move forward.

S – Situation:
Once, someone on a neighboring team was struggling with a production issue for a few days. I noticed that he seemed frustrated and wanted help, but didn’t quite know how to ask.

T – Task:
After finishing my work early one day, I proactively messaged him on Teams and offered support. He was happy, but mentioned he wasn’t even sure how to describe the problem clearly.

A – Action:
So I sat down with him and tried to understand the issue. He told me that after one of his code changes went live, a dropdown component in our shared UI broke — its layout was completely messed up, even though his change didn’t touch that component directly.
I helped him debug the issue step by step. After ruling out rendering or layout bugs, I noticed the problem was actually due to a CSS variable conflict — the styles weren’t properly isolated, which caused unexpected overrides.
Together, we fixed the CSS scoping issue and verified the dropdown worked as expected.

R – Result:
The bug was resolved and the fix was shared with the wider team via email, to prevent similar issues in the future. My teammate was really grateful, and after that, our collaboration improved significantly.

I’m my current role, during a core-team meeting I noticed conflicts between 2 team members, the MM and the EE. They were debating about why to include one component in the official BOM and discarding another one.

To understand their perspectives, I spoke with them separately in a friendly environment. The MM was frustrated because the EE didn’t provide any data or argument to discard the component that the MM suggested. This component had the same performance, was pin to pin compatible, and cheaper. On the other hand the EE explained he had bad experiences in the past with the component suggested by the MM and he refused to validate and qualify it to do not waste his time.

So… After being clear about the situation, I brought them together for a discussion and I emphasize to focus on the issue, not in personal discrepancies. Do, during the meeting, I encouraged both to consider the Project requirements, customers need and I worked with them brainstorming session.

Then, they agreed to meet with other stakeholders to get their inputs about these 2 components, they commit on a validation plan including both components. The one suggested by the EE as POR and the one suggested by the MM as alternate. They also agree to allocate 60% of the mass production volume to the EE component and 40% to the component suggested by the MM.

From my side, to ensure progress, I scheduled follow-up meetings with them to monitor their collaboration and for sure, I offered my support. Finally, both components are currently part of the product official BOM and these 2 guys improved their working relationship and communication.

I believe my biggest achievement is building a high performing team amongst a lot of chaos. I started as an engineering manager for replenishment team, soon due to restructuring I was asked to lead a different BU called Parcel and I was given the team from scratch, 8 months into this I heard the leadership is deciding to put Parcel on KTLO and give me a new tier 1 service called channels. This service was highly unstable with a lot of issues and tech debt. This service was transitioned among 4 engg manager in past three years (4th me). 

TASK

My job was to do a successful transition of this service and keep the team motivated

Actions

- When I got to. know about Parcel KTLO and having a new product under me, I wanted to ensure this is communicated to the team clearly with empathy and I wanted to ensure the team that this will only benefit their growth

- I started with a team meeting, shared a couple of wins that we did in parcel, shared even though we did so much, Parcel is being put on KTLO for various xyz reasons.

- I told them every crisis situation is an opportunity and by channels coming under us, we can showcase that even the toughest of the services can be maintained if the tech debt is continuously addressed

- Post team meeting I kept 1:1 with every member and listened them, helped answer their questions

- A couple of team members did share that they felt proud about what they developed in Parcel and were feeling sad that it was going in KTLO.

- I shared that products coming in KTLO happens sometime and this in no way reflects the teams performance, infact our teams reputation is very good amongst the leaders thats why they have given us the most important service (which is also in the worst shape)

- Under previous engg managers there was minimal to no improvement in the service on tech and product side because they were busy fixing on call issues

- I worked with the team to fix this by assigning ywo people to on call and rest two on fixing the issues from root cause. 

- In a couple of months this gave us brwating space since the oncall issues reduced directly impacting reduction in customer queries

- We got appreciated by leadership for this

Result

- Team members were highly motivated

- Learnt a lot

- Got appreciated by leadership for this hard works

I was working on a high stake project with very high visibility from my senior management.

Me and my manager were thinking of can we leverage the quality of the development using help from QA team. He wanted to keep the QA team separate. His point of view was that a separate team would keep clear focus for the team and they would focus on finding more customer facing bugs. I thought that we should have QA embedded in the scrum team as that would help in easier collaboration and quicker bug fixes plus this is a more efficient way. Though I understood his point of view I always believed that in QA embedded inside the scrum team. I went back had a thought to measure the merits and demerits of the proposals. I put down in a slide the merits and demerits of each. Merit from having a separate team, clear focus and better filtering of quality, demerits less collaboration with development team. I then proposed that the QA engineers attend the calls of dev teams but keep a separate QA board for their tasks. This will give clarity of what bugs they find, what test scenarios they create and finally the metrics to measure the bugs reported per development. My boss and I both agreed as it solved the problems of each proposals

I led a project to implement a new feature in our loan processing system aimed at reducing API latency for faster loan approvals. Midway, I encountered data inconsistencies and latency issues caused by schema mismatches between the new API and our backend services. To resolve this, I optimized the data schema mapping, streamlined query performance, and introduced Redis caching for frequently accessed data, which significantly reduced the API call frequency and improved response times.

I also collaborated with QA to parallelize testing, allowing us to catch issues early. By continuously optimizing our microservices with adjustments to load balancing and asynchronous data processing, we increased processing speeds by 20%. While the deadline was slightly extended, our enhancements directly improved loan approval times and were a solid technical win for both the team and the user experience.

I was having a team member, who was technically strong, but when it came to gelling with the team members, he was having problems. His comments/feedback for the technical artefacts, or for ones understanding of a problem, was showing people in a bad light. Team members were apprehensive, working with him. People started to unplug themselves while that person was around. I could sense that, the team’s engagement had started to wane. If that had continued, we were at risk of losing that person from the team.

I initially un-plugged him from the team discussions and meetings and started to have a daily sync-ups with him. Sensitised him about working as a team and how successful teams thrive in the organisation. Made him enrol for some trainings like - Seven habits of highly effective people. Recommended that training mainly because of the focus it lays on - personal change, collaborations with the team etc.

Then he started to show empathy towards the team members, started to mingle with team, started to give constructive feedbacks for the technical contributions and started to show respect to the fellow team members. The bridge that was created, started to disappear. And we finally made him part of all the discussions and meetings and today, he is one of the go-to person in the team.

At Auctane, I had a senior dev working on tech debt, this was critical for some small segment of customers and my PM was looking forward to it being devliered. A churn happend on other team and they had a higher priority project. That EM approaced me to help him deliver the project. I had to reshffle the resource and had to push back on the timing for this tech debt project . The compramise I made was to put hold the project we had been working and convince my PM that this was most optimal approach for the company.