Tell me about a time you had conflict with a team member or a manager.

Before starting to answer this behavioral interview question, I would be cautious on the intent on the question. Its basically a part of a**hole test, that I came across in my own intrviews in the past.

For such questions, I would try to find a reason for conflict that was outside of my control when it started or at least until I got to the rootcause of the conflict.

Eg:

Situation:

There was a time I was working with a new Product Marketing associate who just joined my team as an experienced hire. As far as I got to knew, she had a stellar experience in the prior company in marketing role.

This was the first time she was working alongside a product manager. We got into a sitution where she felt that I was stepping over her shoes by getting involved in the product marketing decisions within my product. She reported this to her Manager and I was informed about the concern.

Task:

I sat down with her to undertand the actual concern and tried to identify the root cause of the confusion.

Soon in that discussion, I identfied a few things:

1. She was new to Product marketing role and had limited understanding of the scope

2. There was a clar gap in our associate onboarding process

Action:

I tookt he following actions to ensure there was no such future instance of friction due to this reason:

1. I explained her in detail my role and responsibilities as a Product Manager.

2. I also described to her the decision framework I was using in order to best market the features in the product I was leading.

3. I worked with HR to help setup an onboarding documentation of working with the Product team to help new associates know the scope and ownership of Product Manager

4. I also championed the task of documenting the roles and responsibilites (Talent profile) for Product Manager for internal use. That defined the scope at diff levels.

 

Result:

The ne marketing associate had a much better understanding of what my role was and how I was enabling her for success.

 The document I created, along with the supprot of my peers and blessed by my leadership, ended up being used in external and internal hiring to customize the job posting to reflect the level being hired for.

I had a conflict when I needed to give someone requirements but when I would talk they would seem distracted and they would ask the same question multiple times across various meetings. That became frustrating for me. We both needed to take care of this project as part of our job and I felt like I had to take matters into my own hands because working together felt like such a waste of time. I decided to try to get to know this person better on a personal level so that I could assess how to address this. We started talking about family, life, etc., and over multiple conversations, I was pretty sure that nothing in their life was keeping them from understanding me and I could see so many other areas that this person was strong in. So, in our talks, one thing I learned was that they wanted a different type of job than the one they have, and they shared what their dream job looked like. I convinced them that the things I was trying to have them understand, use, remember were all applicable to them getting that dream job. Once they saw that they could benefit from doing our assignment they were more motivated. Over the next few months, they started asking better questions and remembering a portion of the discussions. The teamwork also improved between us because I went from angry to tolerating as our teamwork got better.