Have Backbone; Disagree & Commit Flashcards
Tell me about a time when you took an unpopular stance in a meeting with peers and your leader, and you were the outlier.
Situation
Item authoring and preview situation. Item author used to author items that were saved in SQL database. Next in order to preview an Item in Item authoring we had an extra web api call that used to first query sql create proper schema for preview item and then save in raven db then show in preview system.
Task
I took a stance to optimize preview time.
Actions
I analyzed the system
Proposed as soon as item will be authored we will create a read model and save it in ravendb
Item preview time it has to just read ravendb and display items. This will save 20 sec time that we are wasting by sql to ravendb conversion everytime we preview.
Result
Idea was rejected by my VP of software development
He said our customer has no budget and bandwidth to work on this since it’s already working now waiting there expected SLA of 45 sec ( which I brought by creating separate preview system initially )
I learned that I should focus on the customer inputs and their reasons for success.
Tell me about a time when do you decide to go along with the group decision even if you disagree.
Situation
Recent incident we are building classification creation. We had already created classification then added levels in classification. Later on a requirement came that once an item is created levels can not be edited however we can edit the classification name and description.
Task
Decided to propose a solution to customers which will be simple and less fragile.
Actions
I analyzed the current architecture so far everywhere like item , widget we used to do one save and edit
So here I suggested they remove those 2 buttons and just keep creating and saving buttons.
Once classification is created the only show save button allows editing the name and descriptions only.
Results
My architect team rejected this idea and they said since business has already invested money in this direction so let’s just add the finalize button and once that is pressed then you just only allow editing name and classification. Product owners also accepted that proposal
So I just buy that suggestion and proceed. I thought since POs are buying who discussed with end users already then I just agreed with them.
Tell me about a time that you strongly disagreed with your manager on something you deemed to be very important to the business. What was it about, and how did you handle it?
Situation
Business had a requirement to mass insert/update and delete classifications in the new system in the cloud. My architect team and VP came up with a plan to have one excel where we will put all classifications and another column with delete and add keywords. There were 100 authors who wanted to upload a massive amount of classifications.
Task
I decided to help businesses to make the correct decision to come up with a less fragile way of mass insert and delete.
Actions
I suggested to them a new way rather than keeping one excel. Keep 2 independent excel one for delete and one for insert and have 2 independent buttons.
Decision was mostly rejected however when QA started testing the first solution they found many bugs. Mistakenly they wrote delete in some places which got exception if not present and got deleted if present. It was mess
Results
My VP of software development agreed on my decision
I also suggested them to keep schema excel file to be ready to download
It saved 100s of authors to not do mistake while updating classification in batch
Business appreciated this decision since they were involved during QA phase
