Tell me about a time you had to manage conflicting priorities between an end user, your team lead, and another support team (e.g., network or application team). How did you communicate with each stakeholder, what trade-offs did you make, and what was the final outcome?

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VirtualInterview.AI · Accepted Answer

In my last role, we had a regional sales manager whose CRM kept timing out right before quarter close. He wanted an immediate fix, my team lead wanted me to stick to the ticket queue, and the network team was already in a change window. I first got clear impact from the user: about 40 reps blocked, roughly $300K pipeline. I relayed that to my lead and got approval to treat it as a P2. With the network team, I avoided blaming and just shared concrete data: timeouts every 5–7 minutes, traceroute showing high latency at a specific hop, plus screenshots and timestamps. We agreed they’d pause non-critical changes and prioritize our issue for 1 hour. I managed expectations with the user by giving 30-minute updates instead of “we’re working on it.” Within 45 minutes, they rerouted traffic and timeouts dropped to near zero. The sales team hit their deadline and my lead later used it as an example of good prioritization.

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