IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Tell me about a time you had to manage conflicting expectations between product stakeholders and the engineering team for a backend feature—how did you negotiate scope, set priorities, and ensure successful execution?
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

At a previous company we needed a new billing API that product wanted shipped in one sprint for a marketing launch, while engineering flagged reliability and compliance risks that would normally take 8–12 weeks. I organized a two-hour stakeholders meeting with the PMs, QA lead, and two senior engineers to map out must-haves versus nice-to-haves. We agreed on a phased delivery: an MVP covering core endpoints in 6 weeks with feature flags and monitoring, and the full compliance work in the next 4 weeks. I owned the API design, paired with a senior engineer to accelerate implementation, and set clear rollback runbooks and SLOs (99.95% uptime). We launched the MVP on schedule, served 100k customers in month one with 30% lower latency than the old system, and completed full compliance in week 10.

Keywords

Facilitated cross-functional meeting to align on prioritiesNegotiated a phased MVP + full delivery plan with timelinesImplemented safeguards: feature flags, SLOs, rollback planMeasured outcomes: launch on schedule, 100k users, 30% latency improvement