IntermediateLEADERSHIP
Interns at IBM are expected to take ownership of their tasks within an Agile squad. Describe a situation where you had to take the lead on a piece of work, coordinate with others, and drive it to completion despite obstacles such as changing requirements, technical debt, or integration issues.
Custom Role
General

Sample Answer

On a recent project, I led a small squad of 4 to build a new internal dashboard that pulled data from three legacy services. Halfway through the sprint, product changed the reporting requirements and we also discovered that one of the legacy APIs was undocumented and rate-limited, which kept breaking our integration tests. I took ownership of unblocking the team. I set up a quick working session with the backend owner to reverse‑engineer the API behavior and documented it in Confluence. Then I split the work: one teammate focused on a lightweight caching layer to handle rate limits, another refactored some brittle parsing code, and I handled the new reporting logic plus test coverage. We re-scoped the sprint, communicated the trade‑offs to the PO, and still delivered a usable MVP on time. The dashboard cut manual reporting effort by about 60% for our ops team and became the basis for the next quarter’s enhancements.

Keywords

Took clear ownership of a cross-team integration featureCoordinated with legacy system owners and clarified undocumented behaviorRe-scoped work and delegated tasks effectively within the squadDelivered an MVP on time that reduced manual work by ~60%