Tell me about a time you've had to change the way you work.

Situation- I was assigned as the product manager for a trading app that would allow users to place trades in global markets. I was new to product management and had an authoritative way of dealing with other product managers and the development team.

Task- My features were getting affected due to this working style, there were delays in the feature completion, high number of defects and a low level of motivation amongst the team. I got this feedback from my manager to work on my relationship with rest of the team members

Action- I worked on the following items

a) Consider perspective of the development team on feature blue print, feature prioritization and timelines

b)  Become their voice with business team member

c) Develop trust through transparency and respect

d) Become sensitive to challenges faced by other stakeholders w.r.t resources, timelines etc.

Result- This change in working style had a huge impact on the working relationship between product and development team which in turn led to reduced schedule deviations, bug free code and reduced friction between teams

As a grew as a PM in my career, over the years one key trait which I embibed was a high degree of bias for action in whaever projects I worked for. I firmly believe that in this rapid world, things change quickly and hence we don't act fast enough while making an informed decision, then the decision will lose its relevance.

However, during one of my previous projects, I was collaborating with a PM from an upstream product team who had a different working style. She took time to respond, more often than not didn't have clarity on the data anlysis front and in a way it was impacting the momentum of the overall project. I was constantlt chasing for updates almost every single daya till we get complete clarity. However, I got feedback from my manager that I am being perceived as over aggressive while driving the project towards timely closure and that the PM was finding it difficult to keep pace. So, I paused for a moment here, understood the whole situation and decided to change my style here.

I had a 1:1 discussion with that person. Discussed about how can we collaborate more effectively to avoid any project dealys and at the same time not get over burdened by the work. We decided to have a weekly call and list down all action items along with PIC for each of them and the due date. Based on this list, we started reviewing the progress on a weekly basis. Though a weekly catch up felt like too much of a wait for me but we kept it so that we can adjusted to this process. We also decided to review the frequency of this catch up towards the final stages of the execution phase.

Through this collaborative approach we were able to work together effectively without any personal conflicts and were able to do a timely UAT for the e2e product feature followed by a closely monitored bug triage and a timely product launch.