Earn Trust Questions Flashcards
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
Tell me about a critical piece of feedback you received
Situation
This goes to the time when I was Sr. Software Architect and was working on a new authoring application for my customer. This application was built from scratch over cloud. Customer has made a question save feature and they wanted to add delete, reorder features. I was working with leading the development. I observed that in our application after saving there was no notification for the end user if the save was successful or failed.
Task
I decided to add some spinner and toaster messages for every action user does.
Actions
I created new components for spinner and toaster and added them to our source code.
I hooked up all actions and set a spinner to show and toaster to display success and fail messages.
The QA testing team appreciated this effort. I also demonstrated one of my users and he was satisfied.
Result
When this new thing deployed in production my product owner was not happy.
They mostly gave me feedback saying we have many more features to work on and this was not our intention to work.
Also I did not put my product Owens in loop while I was implementing so they were surprised.
I learnt my lesson that focuses on key inputs of business and work on the area that makes them successful.
Later on I set up a one on one meeting with my product owner and let him know that I understood and will always look at the priority of business.
Tell me about a time when you saw your team member was struggling.
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was Development lead. One of my team members used to have a hard time speaking openly, taking ownership. My scrum master many times told me that they are unhappy with his working style and mostly directors were also not getting good feedback.
Task
I decided to work with him to improve his level
Actions
I invited him to a one on one meeting and spoke to him. I found he had 2 issues: first was lack of programming knowledge and 2nd was he was not sure what to do to become a good contributor on the team.
I had done many workshop with him on node.js and javascript., Also I explained him the 13 systems that we had and I trained him in one system very thoroughly to boost his confidence.
Next time onwards any issue used to come on that system he started owning and claiming the bugs on his name.
Results
That member became the single point of contact for that system. He also took other systems and became a good contributor.
My Scrum master appreciated me for this work. I used to then train a few more developers and help them to grow and raise their benchmark.
Building trust with teams can be difficult to achieve sometimes. Can you give me an example of how you effectively built trusting working relationships with others?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working as a software engineer in my current company. I was having 4 teams. 2 development and 1 backend , 1 QA team and 2 product owners team. I was part of one team.
Task
I decided to create trust relationship from each team
Actions
I started communicating with my QA team and helped him on various testing automation coding by spending my extra time.
QA personnel were connected to the other 2 team backend and dev and team. He introduced me to them and gave me feedback. They started trusting on me. Very often I used to see other dev team architecture and help them to solve their problems.
I used to show my work out to my product owner personally inviting them before pushing to QA that created good trus between him and me.
Result
This is how I have a strong relationship in my company with each team.
ANy time if I had to get any research and need help from any team I don’t have any obstacles and many people are ready to help me.
Anyone needs help they first think of me to talk in our team.
Can you describe a time you needed the cooperation of a resistant peer? What was the situation, and how did you handle that?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working as Development lead and our customer wanted to have a new project developed named Authlit. I had a modeling session and I proposed 3 new technologies & frameworks to use. One of my colleagues was not ready to implement them and he was opposed and the modeling session was not going well.
Task
I decided to help him understand the importance of those proposed frameworks and convince him.
Actions
I first collected some youtube videos and a pluralsight course related to those new frameworks. Organized lunch and learning sessions and invited him as well.
I pulled up all of the epics and stories for that product that we were building and explained to him the complex requirements that we were going to solve and how those new frameworks will help us.
I had many healthy debates with him to understand him and listen to him carefully and also explained to him the proposal.
Result
He convinced and appreciated my effort
Our project was developed with those new framework with full commitment
He became key contributor to the project
Your team goals were misaligned with another team. How were you able to match this up?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was senior software architect and we have 2 development teams working on the same product. We used to get stories to work on the same use case: our team work on client side and their teamwork on server side. We had issues that we never used to deliver the story on-time to business because of various mis-alignment going between both teams. This used to repeat many sprints. Both team product owners were not happy since their story was never done and end users were not getting product on time. Business had to spend 2ble money & time to get one story done.
Task
I decided to solve this mis-alignment issue between 2 teams.
Actions
I first created a JS framework to work with in-memory API such that our team used to not depend on server side code during the development phase.
I invited my VP of software development and directory of project delivery and explained to them the staggered story implementation fundamental where our team will keep working on a few client side stories which are not yet taken by both teams and we will let the other team keep building server side pieces of some story. Both teams will never step on each other.
I created scrum of scrum meetings for both teams where we started sharing each other’s area of pain and alert each other for any failure impacting each other.
Results
Both team is working independently
Product owners, business and end users are satisfied since they are getting stories delivered on time.
Both dev teams are especially thankful to me since I created a new framework on the client side where we can bypass the server and still keep the application running. This helped our design team as well as they didn’t have to set up a complicated server side environment and were still able to work on designing CSS for applications.
