IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Describe a situation where a key stakeholder (e.g., product manager, customer, or another team) requested a change that conflicted with technical constraints or your engineering judgment. How did you communicate trade-offs, negotiate scope, and reach a decision?
Software Engineer
General

Sample Answer

On a previous growth team, our PM wanted to launch a “smart recommendations” widget in two weeks to hit a marketing date. The ask included real-time personalization and cross-device history, but our data platform only supported nightly batch jobs and we had a single ML engineer shared across three teams. Instead of just saying no, I put together a one-page proposal with three options: the full vision (estimate: 3–4 sprints), a phased MVP using our existing batch data (1 sprint), and doing nothing. I spelled out impact and risk for each, including expected latency, infra cost, and what could break under peak load. In a working session with PM, design, and data, we aligned on the MVP: daily-updated recommendations for web only. That hit the date, lifted click-through by 11%, and we later iterated to near real-time once we’d upgraded the event pipeline.

Keywords

Acknowledged business goal but clarified hard constraints with dataPresented multiple scoped options with timelines and risksUsed a short written doc to drive an objective trade-off conversationArrived at an MVP that met the deadline and delivered measurable impact