Questions for Leadership principles

Question 1

tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer

Answer 1

payment method entity because it wasn’t broken but value add was broken

Question 2

If you cant deliver everything in an MVP, how do you still provide customer delight? Or how do you ‘wow’ your customer?

Answer 2

• [x] Couldn’t deliver all currencies and countries in MVP. 3 outcomes I considers:
  
  • [ ] Cut scope to include this feature
  • [ ] Delay launch
  • [x] Launch and mitigate risk - create draft expenses. THis was successful becuase customer adopted and in the four weeks from launch, we only sawless than 10% of expenses being created in different currencies.
    
    • [x] Conveyed the data about <10% expenses coming from currencfies/coiuntries that we didn’t support. Conveyed the mitigation strategy, and prioritized efforts post launch

Question 3

Give me an example of when you did not meet a customer’s expectations. What
happened, and how did you attempt to rectify the situation?

Answer 3

initial launch did not meet the standard of a truly ‘global’ product

Question 4

Tell me about a time you used customer feedback to drive improvement or innovation.
What was the situation and what action did you take?

Answer 4

payment method; multiple receipt, currency country scope expansion to include cities

Question 5

When did you have to work backward from a customer requirement? How did you
approach the situation? What were your actions? What was the end result?

Answer 5

payment method, multiple receipts, currency country,

Question 6

Tell me about a time you handled a difficult customer. What did you do? How did you
manage the customer? What was her/his reaction?** What was the outcome

Answer 6

E-receipt job failure

Question 7

Tell me about a time you had a Difficult interaction with customer. How did you react to it. what was customer’s reaction and the outcome? What would you do differently

Answer 7

E-receipt job failure or MVP launch didn’t include all currency country pairs

Question 8

Tell me about a time you put the customer first, regardless of what peers or higher
management directed. What was the outcome? How did this impact day-to-day
interaction with your peers and/or management?

Answer 8

Strategy to be more cross functional than depth first AND change the revenue strategy from acquisition to promote higher levels of engagement and growth of existing products. Sacrificing short term gains for long term results

Question 9

Tell me about a time you increased the scope of a product

Answer 9

1. Matching with corporate cars because potential matches were not being resolved in time => solving the problem of increased submission time for potential matches
2. Multiple receipts - capability to review the queue, AND later after release, I improved it by resurfacing the queue proactively to reduce avg submission time
3. City entity - delayed launch of all currencies and countries, nd then launched it and also included city entity for 4 cities in India

Question 10

Give me an example of when you anticipated a need with a product the customer didn’t know they wanted. How did you know they know they needed this. How did they respond

Answer 10

1. Matching with corporate cards -> Proving the ability to resolve matching issues within the assistant
2. Multiple receipts - > proactively show the draft queue to speed up submission and reduce avg submission time
3. feedback skill

Question 11

Give me an example of a time when you didn’t think you were going to meet the
commitments you promised. How did you identify the risk and communicate it to
stakeholders? What was the outcome?

Answer 11

MVP launch didn’t include all currencies country pairs. Mitigated the risk involved

Question 12

Tell me about a time you had to make a short-term sacrifice in order to achieve a longterm goal. What was the outcome?

Answer 12

1. change the approach from being depth focused to more cross functional. Which meant that sure we would annoy a few customers but in the long term they would find it more valuable. 2) Sacrificed short term revenue and profits by influencing the change in pricing model. -> Result, we have started to see greater roll out from the customer, increased usage, and willingness to extend pilot roll out
2. Shipped multiple receipt design even though the design was far from ideal but it solved the problem in the current release cycle

Question 13

Provide an example of when you personally demonstrated ownership?

Answer 13

Anything where the platform team could have solved it but you decided to instead of waiting
Multiple receipts because I didn’t say that not my job.

Session history because it impacted other teams as well and no one really had ownership of it, and platform team hadn’t solved this yet.

Question 14

Describe a project or idea (not necessarily your own) that was implemented primarily
because of your efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?

Answer 14

Multiple receipts

Question 15

Tell me about a time you missed a deadline. What happened and what did you learn?
Currency country entity for broader roll out

Answer 15

MVP launch didn’t include all currencies and countries

Question 16

Give an example of when you saw a peer struggling and decided to step in and help.
What was the situation and what actions did you take? What was the outcome?

Answer 16

Developer with poor results on front end UX for MS Teams channel

Question 17

Tell me about a time you had to make a decision that was beyond your immediate control

Answer 17

1. Session history because manager technically had to make that approval call to start working on the feature
2. Pricing strategy and cross-functional usage

Question 18

Give me an example of an initiative you took that would benefit the whole company or the customer but it wasn’t any particular team’s responsibility, so nothing was being done about it.

Answer 18

1. Feedback skill
2. Session history
3. Strategy to be cross functional and not focus on revenue first, change pricing model to spur engagement and customer satsifaction with existing products

Question 19

Tell me about a time you were able to make something simpler for customers. What
drove you to implement this change

Answer 19

1. Payment method entity - value add was crippled
2. Session history
3. Feedback skill
4. Matching

Question 20

Tell me about a time when you invented something?

Answer 20

Painted door technique with a Feedback skill

Question 21

Describe a challenging problem or situation in which the usual approach was not going
to work. Why were you unable to take the usual approach? What alternative approach
did you take? Was it successful?

Answer 21

Dynamic entity

Question 22

Low hanging fruit
High value - low effort
Give me an example of a complex problem you solved with a simple solution. What made the problem complex? How did you know your solution addressed the problem?

Answer 22

1. Session history
2. Feedback skill
3. Multiple receipts because the workaround was really simple by building a custom intent

Question 23

What was the most innovative thing you’ve done and why you thought it was innovative?

Answer 23

Multiple receipt because I had to work around a complex problem and mitiagated the risk involved in solving this problem

Question 24

Tell me about a time when you took a calculated risk in order to achieve a big
professional goal. What were the tradeoffs? What was the outcome?

Answer 24

1. Strategy to be cross functional risk and less revenue focused
2. Shipping multiple receipts with a non ideal design and compromising feature parity
3. GOMC launch date

Question 25

Tell me about a time you invented something and why you made it?

Answer 25

Feedback skill

Question 26

Tell me about a time when you went way beyond the scope of the project and delivered

Answer 26

1. Multiple receipts -> added reviewing draft queue | 2. Matching cc potential matches in conversation

Question 27

Tell me about a time you took a big risk and it failed. What did you learn? What would you do differently? Give me an example of a goal you had where you wish you could have done better. What was the goal and how could you have improved it?

Answer 27

GOMC campaign, wanted to run remarketing ads only a single day, but messed up the script in adwords which meant our ads never ran at all, and we missed inpressions altogether. I learned to implement a solid QA plan for any release, and make sure that its not the same person who is testing as writing script,

Question 28

Give me an example of a calculated risk that you have taken where speed was critical. What was the situation and how did you handle it? What steps did you take to mitigate the risk? What was the outcome?

Answer 28

1. Session history 2. GOMC launch date 3. MVP launch

Question 29

Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information. How did you make it and what was the outcome?

Answer 29

1. GOMC launch date 2. Payment method design fro payment entity -> ideal Success because users never paid their cc accout for expenses creatred by assistant that were paid to their account 3. Multiple receipts -> how many receipts to optimize for -> best example cause reversible

Question 30

Describe a time when you saw some problem and took the initiative to correct it rather than waiting for someone else to do it

Answer 30

1. Multiple receipts 2. Session history 3. Feedback skill

Question 31

Tell me about a time you where you made an important business decision without consulting your manager. What was the situation/decision, the outcome, and would you have done anything differently?

Answer 31

Session history

Question 32

Tell me about a time when you had to work with limited time or resources

Answer 32

Multiple receipts - did my own research, and no resources from platform team

Question 33

Tell me about a time you had to make tradeoffs between quality and cost. How did you weigh the options?

Answer 33

Multiple receipts -> refactor cost, include both creating expenses and reviewing expenses which meant that I would compromise feature parity

Question 34

Tell me a time your customer was demanding high standards and you couldn’t give them what they asked fo

Answer 34

MVP currency country

Question 35

Tell me about a time when you’ve been unsatisfied with the status quo. What did you do to change it? Were you successful?

Answer 35

Feedback skill

Question 36

If you cannot deliver everything on an MVP, how would you still delight your customer?

Answer 36

MVP launch didn't include currency and country

Question 37

Tell me about a time when you worked to improve the quality of a product / service or solution that was already getting good customer feedback? Why did you think it needed more improvement?

Answer 37

1. Multiple receipts -> proactively resurfaced the draft queue 2. Matching of potential matches in conversation

Question 38

Give an example where you refused to compromise your standards around quality/customer service, etc. Why did you feel so strongly about the situation? What were the consequences? The result? OR Tell me about a time you wouldn’t compromise on achieving a great outcome when others thought something was good enough. What was the situation?

Answer 38

Multiple receipts - > did not want to launch w/o adding in the reviewing draft queue

Question 39

How do you earn trust?

Answer 39

1. Share motivation and goals/data with teams 2. Accountability and ownership -admit mistakes when wrong and take ownership - saying No 3. Fast feedback loops 4. Represent ideas

Question 40

Tell me about a time you had to earn trust quickly

Answer 40

engineering team lost trust in ability when users were not willing to pay for solution. Identified two main reasons for this that I prioritized - cross functional usage and channel availability. Immediately prioritized MS teams for channel and identified project-expene skill colloboration

Question 41

Earn Trust Tell me about a time you had to communicate a big change in direction for which you anticipated people would have a lot of concerns. How did you handle questions and/or resistance? Were you able to get people comfortable with the change?

Answer 41

1. Strategic change =>- [ ] Changed the direction to be more cross functional and that we would stop working on the depth first use cases and what we had initially committed to on roadmap. But also presented the data to engineering team that this is what the customer sees value in paying for 1. Multiple receipts because we changed the premise of the product from being expense as you incur to expense when you want

Question 42

Earn Trust Tell me about a time when someone (peer, teammate, supervisor) criticized you about a piece of work/analysis that you delivered. How did you react? What was the outcome?

Answer 42

1. SMS decision was criticized by engineering team. I accepted the mistake and lack of judgement here. Came up with a plan 2. First job, first job, I incorrectly chose a sampling of controls and a period to test, and as a result I missed a test that I should have failed and had to be called out in a report. This was identified by a supervisor when they reviewed my work, and they mentioned it to me.

Question 43

Give me an example of when you used data to make a decision/solve a problem

Answer 43

1. Experiment 2. Prioritizing expense type design 3. Session history

Question 44

Dive Deep Give me a situation in which it took you asking why five times to get to the root cause OR Tell me about a time you were trying to understand a problem on your team and you had to go down several layers to figure it out. Who did you talk with and what info proved most valuable? How did you use that info to help solve the problem?

Answer 44

dynamic entities

Question 45

Tell me about an important analysis you did

Answer 45

1. Multiplle receipts - conversaiton logs to identify multiple expenses back to back; surveys 2. prioritizing how many users were impacted by changing expense type problem

Question 46

Have you ever leveraged data to develop strategy?

Answer 46

1. Research indicated that users wanted to link their expenses with projects 2. Concept to launch up until strategy to focus on upstream stages of expense lifecyle

Question 47

Leaders are Right, a lot => Identifuying reversible decisions story for when you didn’t have enough data but you to make a tough judegment call

Answer 47

1. GOMC launch date 2. Payment decision design 3. Multiple receipts

Question 48

one where your gut instinct was right

Answer 48

GOMC launch date

Question 49

one where you sought input from some one with a different point of view

Answer 49

1. Payment method design | 2. Experiment

Question 50

one where you tried to disprove your hypothesis or disconfirm your belief

Answer 50

Experiment

Question 51

Tell me about an error in judgment you made in the last year or two. What was it and what was the impact of it

Answer 51

1. E-receipt failure | 2. Not questioning SMS decision

Question 52

Tell me about a time when you made a bad decision and the learning from the experience enabled you to make a good decision later. What did you learn that you were able to apply?

Answer 52

1. E-receipt failure | 2. Launching MVP with only SMS design

Question 53

Give me an example of a significant professional failure. What did you learn from this situation?

Answer 53

E-receipt failure

Question 54

Tell me about a time you made a bad decision

Answer 54

E-receipt failure OR SMS decision

Question 55

Describe a situation where you thought you were right, but your peers or supervisor did not agree with you. How did you convince them that you were right? How did you react? What was the outcome

Answer 55

1. Multipe receipt design method 2. GOMC launch date 3. Misalignment on prioritizing expense type - backup 4. Backup - Experiment

Question 56

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague. What is the process you used to work it out?

Answer 56

1. Experiment 2. Payment method design 3. Misalignment on prioritizing expense type

Question 57

Tell me about a difficult relationship with a stakeholder.

Answer 57

difficult team member, abrasive and dismissive communication

Question 58

Give me an example of when you took an unpopular stance in a meeting with peers and your leader and you were the outlier. What was it, why did you feel strongly about it, and what did you do?

Answer 58

1. Multiple receipt | 2. GOMC launch date

Question 59

When do you decide to go along with the group decision even if you disagree? Give me an example of a time you chose to acquiesce to the group even when you disagreed. Would you make the same decision now?

Answer 59

SMS decision

Question 60

Tell me about a decision for which data and analysis weren’t enough to provide the right course and you had to rely on your judgment and instincts. Give me two to three examples. OR Give me an example of when you had to make an important decision in the absence of good data because there just wasn’t any.

Answer 60

1. Multiple receipt where I didn't know how many receipts to be preapred for 2. GOMC launch date -> not a good example because it is not reversible 3. Payment method design

Question 61

ell me about a time you made a difficult decision and how you knew it was the right solution (include: how you evaluated the options, if you received input, what data you reviewed, etc.)

Answer 61

1. Multiple receipt to ship | 2. GOMC launch date

Question 62

Tell me about a time you had to fix something but had no data or direction

Answer 62

GOMC launch date dynamic entity payment method entity design

Question 63

Tell me about a time when you were faced with a challenge where the best way forward or strategy to adopt was not “clear cut” (i.e., there were a number of possible solutions or the situation was ambiguous). How did you decide the best way forward?

Answer 63

1. MVP solution with no currency country | 2. Payment method design