Work Stories

Vault
ChromaFund

More Questions

Ownership

  1. Tell me about a time when you took on something significant outside your area of responsibility. Why was it important? What was the outcome? * I was a developer at a startup, and product owner of the backend of the web product. The front end dev team was turning out new UIs and they needed testing. I took on this responsibility to walk through every new feature, looking for bugs or incompatibilities. Its important to find bugs before the customer does. The outcome was a much more fully tested UI.
  2. Describe a time when you didn't think you were going to meet a commitment you promised. How did you identify the risk and communicate it to stakeholders? Is there anything you would do differently? * Nodejs project. A backend transition was planned, switching the ondisk format from json (inefficient but simple) to protobuf (very efficient). The change to the end user was speed of operations. The site was becoming noticably slow. Involved a lot of code changes. The first 75% of the changes went very well. The code was compartmentalized well. The last 25% hit a lot of code debt. We had to change our schedule, by changing the points assigned to that ticket. It was something that users would appreciate but werent expecting it, so we didnt notify the users. In the end the feature was rolled back. The task changed to do more refactoring to get all of the node.js code using a single set of methods for disk access.

Customer Obsession

  1. Describe a difficult interaction you had with a customer. How did you deal with it? What was the outcome? How would you handle it differently? * often my customer was the biz dev department. they had an expectation of new features to sell to new and existing clients. often their schedule was not informed by software team feedback. this led to mismatches between what was promised and what was possible. this sometimes made our scheduling difficult because our team also made a schedule based on the roadmap and the dates were very different.Basically it came down to breaking down the tasks again and again into something easier to estimate, and communicating the list of tasks to biz dev, so they had an idea as to what was involved in any given roadmap line item. After a few weeks of back and forth our schedules started to sync. Differently would be earlier communication.
  2. Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer. Why did you do it? How did the customer respond? What was the outcome? * A customer wanted their location tracking app to work with the site. It uses different json data to push location data. After looking at the job and realizing it was doable in a reasonable time frame, I extended the API to include the new format. The result was better than I expected because then I enabled the format of two other apps and it started a small ecosystem of apps that were compatible with the site.

Earn trust

1. Tell me about a time when you had to communicate a change in direction that you anticipated people would have concerns with. What did you do to understand the concerns and mitigate them? Were there any changes you made along the way after hearing these concerns? How did you handle questions and/or resistance? Were you able to get people comfortable with the change?