Tell me about a time when a key stakeholder (such as product management or a business owner) requested a change that conflicted with technical constraints or long-term maintainability. How did you communicate trade-offs, influence the decision, and what was the outcome?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

On a previous team, our PM wanted to ship a custom pricing rules engine in six weeks to hit a big partner launch. The proposal was to hard‑code the rules directly into our monolith, which would have met the date but created a long‑term maintenance nightmare. I pulled the PM and tech lead into a working session with data: we were already spending ~25% of our sprint capacity on pricing-related bugs and one-off changes. I sketched two options on a doc: (A) hard‑code and ship in 6 weeks, likely adding 10–15% ongoing maintenance, or (B) build a lightweight rules service in 8 weeks with config‑driven rules and a simple UI. I highlighted the impact in dollars and velocity. We aligned on a compromise: MVP rules service in 7 weeks, with a very narrow scope. We hit the partner date, cut future pricing change lead time from 3–4 days to under 4 hours, and bug tickets dropped by about 60% over the next quarter.

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