How would you lead a team through delivery issues?

Interview prompt (Behavioral & Leadership)

You are interviewing for a software engineering role. The interviewer asks a mix of experience-based and hypothetical leadership questions.

Part A — Project discussion

• Walk through one project you worked on.
• Explain your role, the technical challenges, and the impact.

Part B — Hypothetical team leadership scenarios

Answer as if you are acting as a team lead (formal manager experience is not required).

1. Missed deadline (overdue task):
   • A team member repeatedly misses deadlines. How do you respond in the short term to protect delivery?
   • How do you prevent this from happening again?
2. Role assignment:
   • You need to split work among several engineers with different strengths. How do you assign roles and responsibilities?
3. Unfamiliar new problem:
   • The team encounters a new problem that nobody has prior experience with. How do you lead the team to make progress?

Part C — Conflict and feedback

• Describe how you handle conflict on a team.
• Describe how you give and receive feedback (especially when the feedback is difficult).