How do you manage performance and disagreements?
Company: Uber
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Behavioral & Leadership
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## Manager behavioral prompts
Answer the following as a people manager (or manager-level tech lead). Use real examples where possible.
1. **Scope and ownership**: What is your team’s scope? How do you align it with org goals, and what metrics do you own?
2. **Managing a poor performer**: How do you identify performance issues, deliver feedback, and execute an improvement plan while protecting the team?
3. **Disagreement with your manager**: Describe a time you disagreed with your manager. How did you handle it and what was the outcome?
4. **Disagreement with cross-functional partners (PM/DS/Eng)**: Describe a conflict with XFN partners and how you resolved it (tradeoffs, decision process, and communication).
Quick Answer: This question evaluates leadership and people-management competencies such as defining team scope and ownership, aligning metrics with organizational goals, identifying and addressing poor performance, and resolving disagreements with managers and cross-functional partners.
Solution
## How to structure manager behavioral answers
Use a consistent structure so you’re concise and credible.
### Recommended template (STAR + leadership layer)
- **S**ituation: context, stakes, who was involved.
- **T**ask: your responsibility and what success meant.
- **A**ctions: what you did (sequence, decision points, communication).
- **R**esult: measurable outcomes + what you learned.
Add a manager-specific layer:
- How you **set expectations**, **measured progress**, **coached**, and **handled alignment**.
---
## 1) Team scope / org goals / metrics ownership
### What interviewers want
- You can translate strategy into execution.
- You own outcomes via measurable metrics.
### Good answer elements
1. **Define scope in 1–2 sentences**
- Product area, customers, and boundaries (what you do and don’t do).
2. **Connect to org goals**
- E.g., growth, retention, cost, reliability, compliance.
3. **Metrics you own (leading + lagging)**
- Lagging: revenue, conversion, retention, SLA.
- Leading: latency, error rate, funnel step drop-offs, experiment win rate.
4. **Operating cadence**
- Weekly metric reviews, roadmap reviews, incident reviews.
### Example metrics framing
- North Star: checkout conversion rate.
- Supporting: cart load latency p95, checkout failure rate, pricing mismatch rate, SEV incidents, on-call load.
---
## 2) Managing a poor performer
### What interviewers want
- You diagnose root causes (skill vs will vs context).
- You’re direct, fair, and documented.
- You can protect team delivery while supporting the individual.
### Step-by-step approach
1. **Detect early with specific signals**
- Missed deadlines, low-quality reviews, repeated incidents, poor collaboration.
2. **Clarify expectations**
- What “good” looks like (quality bar, autonomy, communication).
3. **Give timely, specific feedback**
- Use SBI (Situation–Behavior–Impact).
4. **Diagnose root cause**
- Skills gap (training), scope mismatch (reassignment), personal issues (support), unclear requirements (process).
5. **Create an improvement plan**
- 30/60/90 day plan with concrete milestones.
- Weekly check-ins and written recap.
6. **Provide support**
- Mentorship, pairing, smaller scoped work, clear success criteria.
7. **Protect the team**
- Risk management: re-balance critical path work; ensure coverage.
8. **Escalate if needed (PIP / performance process)**
- Involve HR early, document objectively.
### Pitfalls to avoid
- Waiting too long.
- Vague feedback (“be more proactive”).
- Letting performance issues become a surprise at review time.
---
## 3) Disagreement with your manager
### What interviewers want
- You can disagree and commit.
- You can influence upward with data and empathy.
### Effective playbook
1. **Align on goals**: confirm you’re optimizing the same objective.
2. **Bring data and options**:
- Present 2–3 alternatives with tradeoffs (time, risk, cost).
3. **Surface risks explicitly**:
- “If we choose A, the risk is X; mitigation is Y.”
4. **Decide and commit**:
- If manager decides differently, commit publicly and execute.
5. **Retrospect**:
- After results, review what happened without blame.
### Strong results signals
- Decision made faster.
- Better alignment.
- Improved plan due to surfaced risks.
---
## 4) Disagreement with XFN (PM/DS/Eng)
### What interviewers want
- You handle ambiguity and competing incentives.
- You prevent thrash by defining decision mechanisms.
### Framework
1. **Make incentives explicit**
- PM: user value and roadmap.
- DS: measurement validity, experimentation.
- Eng: feasibility, reliability, cost.
2. **Define decision owner and DACI/RACI**
- Who decides vs who advises.
3. **Agree on success metrics and guardrails**
- E.g., ship growth experiment with reliability SLO guardrails.
4. **Run structured tradeoff discussion**
- Options, impact sizing, risks, reversibility.
5. **Document and communicate**
- One-pager + decision log.
### Common edge cases to mention
- Conflicting metrics (short-term conversion vs long-term retention).
- Data quality disputes (instrumentation gaps).
- Launch vs reliability (need phased rollout, feature flags, canarying).
---
## How to prepare quickly
- Prepare 2–3 stories that can be reused across prompts:
1. Performance/coaching story
2. Strategic alignment story
3. XFN conflict story
- For each story, pre-write:
- Stakes, your role, the hardest moment, the decision, measurable outcomes.
- Keep answers to ~2–3 minutes, then go deeper when prompted.