Describe a time you experienced a conflict with an engineer on a team you worked on.

Remember to select an example of a time you experienced a professional conflict rather than a personal conflict. While personalities can clash in the workplace, airing out these conflicts may leave your interviewer with a poor impression. It is best to stick to an example where you disagreed about the scope of a story or the prioritization of work within a backlog.

"We use Jira to manage our backlog in my current role as a product owner. The engineers on my team sometimes get together privately and discuss technical work they feel is important. The tech lead was in the habit of creating technical backlog items in Jira and prioritizing them as he saw fit. I would then later see the items in the backlog prioritized over important work that had already been planned for release by a specific date. The team would get upset with me when I would move them down in the list accordingly, and it caused a lot of conflicts.

I went to the tech lead and asked if he would make a list of the technical backlog items and meet with me to discuss them before adding them to Jira. That way, we could collectively discuss the priority and ensure they were ranked with the customers' needs in mind. This change in the process helped me to understand the backend of the system and the needs of the engineers, and it helped our tech lead understand the customer perspective. Ultimately, the change in the process added a lot of value."