PM Behavioral: A Conflict With Your Engineering Partners and How It Ended

Describe a time when you and the engineering team disagreed about something on a product you were responsible for. Explain what you disagreed about, how you handled it and what the outcome was. ```hint Find what the engineers were protecting Before you describe your own argument, work out the concern behind engineering's position, such as load on a system, existing tech debt or a team already at capacity, and show how the resolution respected it. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should the disagreement be with a single engineer or architect, or with the engineering team or its leadership as a group? - Does it matter whether we disagreed about how to build something or about what to build and when? - Is a story where engineering's view prevailed, and I changed my mind, an acceptable answer? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A disagreement with substance on both sides, with the engineers' reasoning stated fairly rather than as an obstacle. - How the candidate uncovered the underlying concern, for example through one-on-one conversations or the history behind a past decision, before escalating. - The use of user impact, data and explicit scope (including what the team would not do) to reach a resolution, and the trade-off that resolution made. - A clear outcome for users and the product, plus the state of the working relationship with engineering afterward. - Evidence that the candidate neither avoids conflict nor overrides engineers, and was open to being wrong. ### Follow-up Questions - Suppose you still had not agreed after all that. Would you have escalated, to whom, and how? - How did the engineers feel about the outcome, and how do you know? - Tell me about a disagreement with engineering where you turned out to be wrong.