00:00tell me about a time when you faced
00:02technical and people challenges at the
00:07hey everyone welcome back to another
00:09engineering manager mock interview today
00:12we have christina and we're going to be
00:15behavioral or tell me about a time type
00:17question so before we get into that
00:19christina do you mind just telling the
00:20audience a little bit about who you are
00:22and what your background is
00:24sure hi kevin hi everyone i'm christina
00:27i'm currently working for google as
00:29engineering program manager and i'm with
00:33prior to google i was with discovery
00:35media company as a technical program
00:38great thanks so today i'd like to ask
00:40you this tell me about a time when you
00:42face technical and people challenges at
00:49sure just taking a notes
00:56time when i had technical and people
00:58challenge uh okay um would you mind
01:00giving me like 10 seconds so i collect
01:04structure the answers a little better
01:16i'll be telling you about a feature uh
01:18that i was leading an effort to deliver
01:21while i was with discovery and i'm
01:24thinking i'm gonna structure my answer
01:27i'll give you an intro to the to the
01:28project team structure and
01:31uh kind of inputs we had for the project
01:34then and walk you through the events
01:36that led us pretty much the technical
01:38and people challenges and then uh
01:40explain how i dealt with that and
01:42handled that as a tpm for the project
01:44does that sound good for you yeah this
01:46structure sounds good
01:48all right uh so uh about the project so
01:51we're building a feature called uh meal
01:55the goal was to allow our end customer
02:01the recipes that they want to cook for a
02:04specific time of a day or specific day
02:07of week or months so they kind of have
02:10the plan laid out in advance rather than
02:12plan something in rush so uh
02:17goal was to deliver this project by
02:20september because at that time uh
02:23everyone thought that people would be
02:25back to schools and offices by september
02:28and the goal was to deliver this
02:32uh this was a pretty large effort we
02:36three and a half months of
02:39development and including qa tested
02:41including releases and we had five teams
02:44involved there were ios team android
02:47team two different back-end teams plus
02:50uh editorial team who was uh creating a
02:53content and uh presets of data
03:00so we started this project end of may
03:04and our estimations were perfectly uh
03:07laid out till uh end of summer we
03:10thought we'll deliver that thing like
03:12last week of august by the time
03:15but then uh what happened uh that our
03:18company signed a contract with uh with a
03:21new platform where uh in contract we
03:27feature parity from ios and android to
03:30two additional platforms web and roku
03:34uh the nuance that this um contract
03:38created for us is the backend technology
03:41for the api layer originally we thought
03:44about rest apis as a kind of
03:49services apis and our ios and android
03:54aware how to work with rest that was
03:56commonly used technology so there was no
03:59additional technical complexity with
04:01integration with rest apis but this new
04:05raku platform uh created a need to
04:09write api layer not with rest technology
04:13but with a graphql so graphql allows
04:19uh minimize the response size
04:23content size that you are receiving from
04:25the backend with requesting just
04:27specific fields that you need in the
04:30rest you would just get a
04:32body of response and it contains all the
04:35data no matter what you need in graphql
04:37you're requesting specific resources
04:48continue doing what we are doing with
04:52uh spend another three to four weeks of
04:55limited vacant in time
04:57later in the year to
05:00create a parity in this api layer just
05:05or we need to change
05:07the backend technology now at the
05:10beginning of the project to avoid
05:12like duplication of uh
05:16of same services but
05:18uh client teams were not aware how to
05:21work with graphical that was totally new
05:25uh so that's pretty much what happened
05:28that's a technical challenge what to do
05:30here people challenge was that obviously
05:33changing the technology was
05:35uh meaning change in the timeline and
05:38business stakeholders were absolutely
05:40not happy about that
05:43uh obviously we needed to come up with
05:45some trade-offs and agree with
05:47engineering and product teams what to do
05:49next so as a tpm i get together with
05:53engineering leads and we walk through
05:56options what we can do uh get
05:58estimations for them and outline them to
06:01products so pretty much we had three
06:03options option one the worst
06:07we would still deliver this meal
06:08planning project in the regionally
06:11planned timeline but
06:14this four weeks of rework later in the
06:16year would affect our yearly roadmap of
06:19the product so kind of
06:24yearly roadmap for just one feature
06:28we are changing the technology but our
06:30estimate for integration with new
06:34was around additional four weeks
06:42spikes we call them spikes it's like a
06:44ticket to do some research analysis
06:47uh something without like story point
06:49business deliverables so we estimated
06:52that to two weeks of spikes for android
06:54and ios team to understand how to work
06:56with technologies how to restructure
06:58client code uh to work with those plus
07:01additional two weeks for unforeseen
07:03complexity of integration since we
07:05didn't really know what to expect
07:09cut scope cut scope simplify designs for
07:12this feature and potentially those cuts
07:16might allow us to save some time
07:18so we outlined those three options to
07:21business stakeholders uh
07:26option two or three anything except for
07:28option one uh first response from
07:33they don't wanna do cut they don't wanna
07:35change the timeline they don't really
07:37care what technology we would use we
07:39need to deliver this feature by that
07:41time so we had a few rounds of internal
07:44conversation uh about the impact and
07:47uh what any options would mean for us
07:50and like argument that we would deliver
07:52meal planning by end of august but
07:55we would have to cut months or even more
07:57of features for the roadmap
08:01with our stakeholders and we started
08:04rounds of design revisions and scope
08:08cuts were you able to have any input on
08:10the decision making here or was it just
08:12100 up to whatever the business
08:17well so i obviously shared my vision
08:20like what we need to do and like why
08:22it's better to do maybe short-term
08:23sacrifice for long-term goals
08:27but the decision was mostly on the
08:29business side of things
08:37once we like when we started this
08:39conversation as if not enough stuff was
08:43uh one of the ios engineers gave a
08:45notice two week uh two weeks notice that
08:51obviously without scope cut even without
08:53change of technology we won't be able to
08:58part of thing on time because we didn't
09:00have any other resources to borrow or to
09:02replace that person with so all those
09:06uh kind of forced business side of
09:10things to make a decision into into the
09:12side of uh design scope cuts so after
09:15they proposed some scope cuts we did
09:18three estimations and how much time we
09:22can save for that and our initial like
09:24four weeks of time increase ended up
09:26being two weeks of size increase of time
09:29increase so that's what we've agreed
09:32upon new timeline was
09:34mid-september but kind of we were doing
09:37our best to deliver that faster but
09:39realistic was mid-september
09:42so i think at this point this was
09:44already sometime in mid-june so about
09:46like two weeks little less than two
09:49weeks took us all this
09:51uh back and forth with uh different
09:53teams but after that i can say that uh
09:56project went out smooth and we delivered
10:02those additional two weeks so we were
10:05perfectly accurate with our
10:09cool so i think that's about it do you
10:13yeah i'm wondering if you know hindsight
10:15is always 20 20 but if you were to do
10:18um was there would there be anything
10:20that you would do differently
10:23yeah actually one thing that like
10:26retrospectively still brings me into
10:31particular component of this feature we
10:33were building a custom calendar
10:37at that time product team felt very
10:40strong that we need to build a custom
10:43calendar component rather than use
10:46something out of the box that ios or
10:51and only effort on that feature was
10:54about three weeks i think three to four
10:58for that custom calendar so
11:01product team was pushing that it's uh
11:03coming after the research that users are
11:05given feedback that that calendar is
11:07very important and they really want to
11:10fancy pretty designed calendar
11:13but i think for still think that for
11:15kind of mvp version of that feature we
11:18should have gone with just custom
11:21calendars to roll this out faster to
11:23spend less time on initial version
11:26to save time on all those communications
11:31just releasing something working in mvp
11:35and then improve this calendar over time
11:38if analytics show that there is a huge
11:40usage by end users of that specific
11:43calendar and uh once we released the
11:45feature analytics showed that less than
11:48i think it was around 0.3 percent of
11:53coming to that flow where that calendar
11:58it was real kind of waste of
12:01three weeks like maybe two weeks of
12:03waste so it was very very expensive
12:05feature without much of a outcome at the
12:08so i think in that area i still not sure
12:10what should have been my arguments there
12:13but i think we should have
12:16discussed more that particular
12:19yeah thanks for servicing that so i i
12:21don't have any other follow-up questions
12:23thanks for sharing your your answer for
12:25this mock interview um
12:27all in all i think this was a great
12:28interview i really liked your
12:29communication and how you laid out
12:31everything very clearly with the
12:33structure in the beginning and i thought
12:35that you did a great job diving deep
12:37into the details and i had some
12:39follow-ups there that i
12:41really liked your answers to so
12:43thanks for your time on on our show
12:45today and i'm wondering for you also if
12:47you have any thoughts that you wanted to
12:49share with the audience on how to answer
12:50these types of questions or anything
12:52that you might do differently to improve
12:55your answer if you were to answer this
12:58yeah sure so what i would mention that
13:01even i know that this is like mock
13:03interview i'm still getting getting
13:05nervous and i still feel that it's
13:07interview and pressure so when you're
13:11just getting ready for those types of
13:13questions your answers sound more
13:15structured and more clear to you than
13:17when you're trying to answer so
13:20that's probably normal do you just have
13:22to be ready for this additional level of
13:26what i would suggest to other people is
13:28to really do a great homework on
13:31different like behavioral tell us about
13:34retrospective into your past background
13:37like preparation of cases so that helped
13:39me a lot i did spend a lot of many hours
13:42getting ready to different types of
13:46you can find easily on exponent or
13:48through the internet somewhere else um
13:51it it would really kind of pay off if
13:52you spend the time at home uh getting
13:55more ready for those those questions
13:57yeah behavior questions definitely
13:59require a lot of thinking and doing a
14:01lot of homework on your own just so that
14:03you know what to say whenever you get in
14:06any of these questions
14:08but all in all thanks for your time
14:10christina and for the audience at home
14:12good luck with your upcoming engineering
14:16thanks so much for watching don't forget
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14:29thanks for watching and good luck on
14:30your upcoming interview
