Tell me a time when you influenced engineering to build a particular feature.

Question

Tell me a time when you influenced engineering to build a particular feature.

Asked at Amazon over a year ago

5.5k views

& 5 other companies

Asked at

& 5 other companies

5.5k views

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Nimasha Jain · Answer 1 · 2020-12-05T01:16:38+0000

My approach to this behavioral interview question.

My Role: I was working as a Product Manager in Strategic integration platform for our product with various partners in cybersecurity domain.

Situation: I was informed by engineering team that platform on which the integration was taking place would require to remove some fields as its adding overhead for another team.’

Obviously I was not the happiest person on this as it would decrease the usage for integration platform as customers using integration need to fetch more details which they initially found auto populated.

Indicative Alternatives

I thought to take a deep dive why Engineering team want to reduce the fields. To discuss it, I sat with the platform team and understood the files from where the field are being read and auto populated. Then went to architect what activates they need to perform on the configuration setting to get the files, during the discussion I got to know, its all manual effort by the operations team to make the configuration files and release it in weekly knowledge base. Engineering team want to reduce it as maintaining all the environmental configuration files delay’s the process and recently lost few customers.

Action

I asked is there a way we can making the execution on multiple environments as the part of automation which was one of the backlog item for long. The hurdle to this situation was ownership as this particular feature was touching 5-6 modules of the product so there was not clear ownership. I talked to my Manager to pick the item in our backlog as it is directly impacting us to which my manager was supportive in discussing it with Director of product management group.

We had our next meeting with Product management director, Engineering VP and architects to blue print the activities that would make configuration file update as part of devOps team and Getting added it to knowledge base.

Result

I got to learn deep concept of architecture of our platform. We got resolution of long pending item and decrease workload of operation team.

We preserved the functionality of our integration platform without impacting the user base.

Surbhis · Answer 2 · 2022-06-10T12:13:14+0000

Tell me a time when you influenced engineering to build a particular feature.

This is a regular job of a product manager. However, sometimes when PM deviates from the roadmap to address the quick market change/customer feedback, applying a few tactical ways helps a lot to influence the engineering team. They are-

Facts and data to influence the team.
Listen, understand, empathise with Engginering POV( Point of view) and break myths
Exhibit confidence.

My scenario:

There is a unique instance in my career where I applied the above three skills. In past, I worked as Tech PM with one of the biggest healthcare device manufacturing firms that build IoT-based digital healthcare products. Our quarterly roadmaps and strategy used to be reviewed and planned before the beginning of the year. Our vision was to build and high-end big IOT-based MR machine which has more smart capabilities than existing machines in the market. The R&D section of engineering has started working on prototypes, high-level system design, and architectural feasibility to validate the different IoT use cases. Suddenly business and marketing team came up with a new change that was a better and bigger opportunity for the company in terms of bottom line and growth. It was a different and smaller product to build. As a PM of the IoT team, I had to take a decision to convenience and influence my team so that team don't acquire dissatisfaction, push back, and questions to support and address these market changes wholeheartedly. The dev team had also invested good time and effort in R&D and initial prep for building what we decided earlier.

To influence them I have collected all data insights and facts, and analyzed the underlying market opportunities to convenience them why working on a new product(Small SMART lullaby) is a bigger and better opportunity for the company. Instead of imposing decisions on the team through leadership or from my end, I bought into the engineering team by putting facts and data and listening and addressing their concern and POV too. The idea was to have team agreement too on the execution level and it worked for me by exhibiting lead with influence. There are no sure sort skills to handle such situations, but a few skills work well.