Resolve conflict across teams
Company: Harvey
Role: Backend Engineer
Category: Behavioral & Leadership
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Describe a time when you had to coordinate between two teams that were in conflict or seriously misaligned. What caused the disagreement, how did you align stakeholders, what actions did you personally take, and what was the outcome?
Quick Answer: This question evaluates conflict resolution, stakeholder alignment, cross-team communication, and leadership competencies in the context of engineering coordination, classified under Behavioral & Leadership for a backend engineer role.
Solution
Use a **STAR** structure and focus on collaboration, ownership, and outcome.
**1. Situation**
Briefly explain:
- the two teams involved,
- the source of conflict,
- why it mattered to the business or project.
Good examples include disagreements over priorities, ownership boundaries, timelines, interface contracts, or reliability expectations.
**2. Task**
State your responsibility clearly:
- Were you the technical lead?
- Were you responsible for delivery?
- Did you need to unblock communication and drive a decision?
**3. Action**
This is the most important part. Emphasize what *you* did:
- gathered facts from both sides,
- identified the real root cause rather than the emotional framing,
- created a shared goal,
- made trade-offs explicit,
- proposed options with pros and cons,
- facilitated a decision meeting,
- documented ownership and next steps,
- followed up to ensure execution.
Strong signals include empathy, neutrality, and turning disagreement into a concrete decision process.
**4. Result**
Explain the outcome with specifics:
- Was the project delivered?
- Did latency improve, incidents drop, or timelines recover?
- Did the teams establish a better interface or operating model afterward?
**5. Reflection**
Close with what you learned:
- handle misalignment earlier,
- document decisions sooner,
- define ownership more clearly,
- involve stakeholders before conflict hardens.
**What makes a strong answer**
- You do not blame the other team.
- You show listening and conflict resolution skills.
- You balance technical judgment with relationship management.
- You produce a concrete business or engineering result.
A good one-sentence framing is: "I helped two teams move from positional disagreement to a shared decision by clarifying goals, surfacing trade-offs, and creating a concrete execution plan."