IntermediateLEADERSHIP
Custom Roles in General often require influencing without formal authority. Can you share an example from your experience where you had to drive a decision or change among stakeholders who did not report to you, and explain how you gained their buy-in?
Custom Role
General

Sample Answer

In my last role, I led a cross-functional effort to standardize how we defined and reported key metrics across product, sales, and ops. None of the stakeholders reported to me, and each team had its own dashboards and definitions. That mismatch was causing 10–15% discrepancies in our weekly numbers and a lot of finger-pointing. I started by running short 1:1s with the leads from each group to understand what they relied on and where they felt current reporting was failing them. Then I shared a simple before/after example showing how a unified model could cut reconciliation time from 2 days to a few hours and make QBR prep largely self-serve. I formed a working group of 6 people, drafted a strawman metric taxonomy, and explicitly incorporated their feedback. Because they helped shape it, adoption was quick: within a quarter, 90% of reporting used the new standards, and time spent arguing about numbers in exec reviews dropped noticeably.

Keywords

Used 1:1 conversations to understand incentives and pain pointsCreated a concrete before/after case with time and accuracy metricsFormed a cross-functional working group to co-create the solutionAchieved high adoption and reduced reporting discrepancies and overhead