Practice: Resolving Conflicts Between Engineer and Cross-functional Partner

What the interviewer is looking for:

• Strong communication skills, especially in tense situations.
• A proactive approach to conflict resolution, rather than avoiding issues or escalating unnecessarily.
• Humility and the ability to learn from mistakes.

Here's what a good answer looks like:

"Some amount of disagreement on a team can be healthy and productive. The important thing is developing the right attitude and culture where people feel they can disagree without hurting each other's feelings.

This happened recently in a project where an engineer on my team and one of the product designers disagreed on how to implement a feature in one our projects: the designer felt that it was important to implement a particular UI, while the engineer felt we should spend more time on other parts of the project. The engineer brought this up to me during our regular 1-1 when I asked if they were facing any issues with the project. Instead of waiting for the issue to build into something larger, I encouraged the engineer to bring up their concerns in our weekly project sync and propose an alternate solution that could solve the problem in less time. In the end, the designer still felt strongly that their solution was important for the final product, but since their changes weren't launch-blocking, they were able to come to an agreement where engineering could work on higher priority tasks first and then re-visit the final design in a future sprint after the initial version of the project had shipped to customers.

Of course, not every conflict has a clear win-win outcome. If people can't come to an agreement or there isn't a clear answer, it's helpful to adopt a mentality where team members can "disagree and commit." It's important to learn from these disagreements, so I make sure to run regular retrospectives with the team where everyone gets the opportunity to voice their opinion and follow up with each person individually as well."

Explanation

This example illustrates how a skilled manager can turn a potential problem into a learning opportunity. The candidate explains how they proactively identified and de-escalated a potential conflict among team members. Rather than getting directly involved, they coached the employee on how to resolve the problem on their own. Finally, they go beyond this particular example by weaving in details about the team process they've developed for handling disagreements, such as regular 1:1's, weekly syncs, and retrospectives.

Try it yourself

Record yourself answering this question. When you're finished, score your answer on the criteria below.

Great answers:

• Demonstrate a clear yet tactful communication style that won't escalate conflict.
• Demonstrate a management style that acknowledges that win-wins aren't always possible and refers to business objectives to choose a course of action.
• Demonstrates a "disagree and commit" approach in which all stakeholders are free to disagree while a decision is being made, but once a decision has been made, all must commit.
• Demonstrates personal reflection during and after the conflict. If mistakes were made, you should mention this and what you learned.

Grading rubric

Communicates clearly yet tactfully.

☐ Your answer includes details around the motivations and interests of the parties in disagreement. You want to show that you're able to understand where others are coming from, and make a decision that's best for all involved.

Has realistic expectations.

☐ Your answer acknowledges the reality of conflict at work. Disagreement can be healthy, and you're not always going to win others over to your side.

Can implement "disagree and commit".

☐ Your answer includes mention of a disagree-and-commit style or explicit policy, allowing everyone to disagree freely while decisions are being made, and agreeing to commit once the group decides.

☐ When discussing results, your answer includes detail around how both parties felt once the decision was made. Ideally, everyone should feel good about the decision taken, but as this isn't always possible, getting both parties to commit to an action is enough.

Shows humility and teachability.

☐ Your answer includes personal reflection on what could have gone differently and what you learned.