Persuading partner teams on a product call when you have no data to back it

In a behavioral round for a product manager role, the interviewer sets up this situation: you are convinced that one or more partner teams, whose work you depend on but who do not report to you, should make a particular decision, yet you have no data that proves you are right. How would you bring them to the right decision? Ground your answer in a real situation from your own experience if you have one, and make the approach you followed clear. ```hint Start from their side of the table Before deciding how to argue, work out what the partner team is measured on and what saying yes would cost them. Your plan has to make sense from where they sit, not only from where you sit. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Do you want a specific past situation told in STAR form, or the general approach I would take the next time this happens? - Is the data missing because the product or market is new, or because collecting it would take longer or cost more than this decision allows? - How reversible is the decision, and what does the partner team lose if it turns out to be wrong? - Is there a shared leader above both teams who could make the call, and at what point would involving them be appropriate? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A concrete situation where the candidate had neither authority over the partner team nor data to settle the question, with clear stakes. - Understanding the partner team's goals, constraints and objections before pushing, and framing the decision around an outcome both teams share. - Substitutes for missing data (qualitative evidence, reasoning about the mechanism, comparable cases, explicit assumptions) and a cheap way to create data or limit the cost of being wrong. - How agreement was reached, or how the disagreement was escalated or settled cleanly, with the result and what the candidate learned, including openness to being the one who was wrong. ### Follow-up Questions - What would you do if the partner team still said no after you had done all of this? - Tell me about a time you pushed for a decision without data and turned out to be wrong. What did you change afterwards? - How do you tell a decision that needs data first from one where waiting for data is the bigger risk?