Leadership principal questions Flashcards
Tell me about a time when you worked on a project with a tight deadline.
Deliver Results
- MyPerks Challenges Project
Situation:
- High visibility marketing campaign
- Tight deadline, hard dates, marketing campaign commitments
- lots of stress and anxiety across the team
Task:
- Vet design, collaborate with all areas in stack, design API, learn new tech (mparticle, Formation, Dynamo), build, create and execute test plan, resolve any bugs, launch within tight deadline.
Action:
- First phase: Thoroughly Vet the design and plan out work.
- Early feedback and collaboration to weed out anything that could cost us more time later
- Second phase: execute, clear and constant communication, API contracts, stay ahead of bottlenecks and roadblocks
- Third phase: Testing and deployment.
- Lowering our standards for the sake of speed is never a good strategy, so we needed to be deliberate and precise about how we execute. That included the test plan which I organized.
- Wrote up a plan and tracker document to allow multiple members to perform additional QA on all the various features as they became available on staging and production environments asynchronously
Describe a challenging project you worked on and why it was challenging.
Deliver Results
- MyPerks Challenges
- Promo Codes Edit order flow
How do you prioritize?
Deliver Results
- Splitting time between two teams
- MyPerks Challenges
Describe a situation where you negotiated a win-win situation.
Deliver Results
- New team headaches joining Giant Eagle merger
Situation: Team was shifting and growing, sprint planning and discover meetings were very long and never enough time. Clashes between PM’s schedules and large number of team members schedules made it impossible to meet for longer or more meetings
Task: Find a way to satisfy our sprint planning and discovery needs without adding more meetings or extending the meeting time. Decrease wasted developer time
Action: I proposed and organized a system where we could split up members by project, write up agendas for meetings beforehand, and create time boxes within the meeting. If some projects needed less discovery time, members could attend optionally and provide feedback on slack or in the project tickets.
Result: PM’s and Engineers got to attend less meetings on average, discovery and planning time was used where it was needed most, wasted time now spent on development rather than sitting in an hour long meeting just to be told there’s not enough time to discuss your projects anyway.
Tell me about a time you used a specific metric to drive change in your department.
Deliver Results
- Documentation Standards (metric: upto 5 different locations of documention for same project)
- Graphql_caching project
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains.
Ownership
- Splitting teams (short term extra time worked; long-term better/faster productivity)
Tell me about a time you made a bold and difficult decision.
Ownership
- speaking up to management about developers’ concerns
Describe a challenging situation in which you had to step into a leadership role.
Ownership
- MyPerks Challenges
- Splitting time between teams
Tell me about a time when you were dissatisfied with the status quo.
Ownership
- Documentation standards
- Team Transition Headaches: Meetings issues
Tell me about a time when your project failed.
Ownership
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How do you build credibility with new reports on a team you haven’t built yourself?
Earn Trust
- Splitting Time between teams
Can you give me an example of how you manage conflict?
Earn Trust
- MyPerks Challenges: Conflict resolution
How do you earn the trust of your team members?
Earn Trust
- Splitting time between teams
Tell me about a time when you had to convince team members of something you proposed.
Earn Trust
- Virtual store
- Using Prerender
How have you convinced others to take action?
Earn Trust
- Splitting teams: Mentoring jr devs, encouraging them to take on new challenges and get out of their comfort zones
