[Music] in this interview question i'll be answering the question tell me about a time when one of your team members had difficulty performing a task so in the case that i'd like to talk about i talk about a feature that i worked at when i was at google and when i was at google i was working on a feature that was relevant for for all intents and purposes relevant to some privacy considerations that google was developing so we're updating some privacy policies and needed to communicate that to our users so this project was somewhat sensitive
and pretty important to make sure we got it correctly now i was working on the project with an engineer and together we were assigned to the project to kind of jam together to see what the right solution was how to implement the solution and how to ship the solution and so when we dug deeper into the problem we came up with a proposal for how to go about the problem we got sign off by the tech lead on the project as well as by some other folks that were relevant to that discussion and we were
sort of green lighted for the project and then we went deeper into the project and uh there were a few delays so um we were supposed to hit the time of i think it was you know a two-week deadline and the engineer on the team said hey like i'm almost there but there's a few things that i just need to get right um so if we can go to the third week um we should be good and we got to the third week and then something else came up also where there was another delay to
the fourth week um and so you know i was starting to get a little concerned folks in management are also starting to ask like hey what's going on here is there um maybe like an issue with the structure or anything like that and i asked the engineer and the engineer said you know nope no problem um you know everything's fine it's just gonna take a little bit extra time and so around this time i was also just kind of curious what was the delay being caused by and all that kind of stuff and so the
next week the fifth week i caught up with the engineer um just for lunch we were just grabbing lunch and i just asked you know hey like how's the project going i know it's taking a long time like you know et cetera et cetera and then the engineer was explaining to me like hey yeah since we needed to hook into this team uh and their internal api we need to do all this process in order to help them uh make sure that we're approved to do this thing because it was privacy and sensitive we needed
to make sure that the api the internal teams api would be permitted to be used by this the tool that we were also going to integrate with basically um and so when we um when i when i found that out i was like oh okay like you know what's been going on like what have they been what's the constraints there and the engineer mentioned you know a bunch of code tests and latency requirements and a bunch of other stuff that they've been asking for that hasn't really been on our radar or anyone's radar and so
you know i started got concerned like okay it seems like the situation here is that you know you're trying to implement something um it's this other team is causing you a lot of delays and and and this is causing some ramifications for our business and for our company because um we can't ship these features until you figure that out and you know until these features are shipped we can't do some other things with our company um so it was causing a little bit of a ripple effect as well and so um when i thought about
that problem i took some time after that lunch i thought about the problem and i sort of came to two possible solutions that could help improve the project development one solution was not using that team's api and finding another way to implement it and another solution was finding a way to expedite that process and so i sat down and talked to the to the engineer and asked him for his opinion like what do you think we should do it seems like these are two approaches have you thought of that like is there a way that
i can help you with that and the engineer said you know i really like this api i think if you know if ideally if we can get this to work it would be awesome um if not maybe there's a workaround we could explore and so um you know i communicated to him like that i would help out with that and try to work on that and so i talked to the other team um the team with the api and sort of just talked to a product manager there and asked them hey you know i know
there's a lot of constraints here you know there's a lot of concerns here with the process we want to make sure we do things right is there any way to expedite this like approval process and the product manager immediately was like yeah like there's this one expedition process you can totally use this process no problem um here's what you need to do to do it and so you know i went back to the engineer we figured it out we brainstormed and then we actually ended up uh working together to use that expedited process got the
feature shift in a week um so that's all done and well but i think the the key insight isn't really about necessarily getting that result but also um one thing that i did with the engineer afterwards was just have a conversation you know um one thing i like to do on every project is do a retrospective and so we did a bit of a retrospective on the project you know what went really well what didn't go so well and what could we improve things like that and um i brought this up with him and said
hey you know i know this got delayed like i wish you had told me earlier so i could have helped you helped unblock you and the engineer said you know hey like that's totally a great point like i didn't think it would take that long so i didn't know whether or not to loop you in like um and we sort of brainstormed some solutions around that um specifically around you know having the engineer communicate their time a little more clearly like hey i'm spending more time doing this this is what i've been doing this week
just so that we all have a sense of maybe how we can jump in and help i think the engineer beforehand had a perspective that oh maybe that was um he might be micromanaged or something like that and i tried to reframe that as an opportunity for us to jump in and help as opposed to needing to to know exactly like what hours were spent doing what thing so i think that was a helpful discussion um and i think uh what was cool about that is it opened up a general broader discussion around career development
for this particular engineer and how they wanted to be a tech lead and you know they get stuck on a lot of issues like this and so we spent some more time talking about it i encouraged the engineer to reach out to their manager to talk more with their manager about it too which resulted actually like you know two years later this person is now an engineering manager as well and um you know i'd like to think that part of our development process and conversation around that was helpful in getting that person promoted and getting
that person on the manager track um and you know for me it was also really valuable because i learned you know there's also opportunities where i could step in a little bit more to help people out to be more proactive and seeing if there are certain issues that could be unblocked with some help or work and also just the importance of grabbing lunch and connecting with people to create that like familial environment in the workplace too so ultimately i mean you know it was a tough time for us and there was definitely a lot of
pressure on us as a team but the conclusion was really awesome and i think the steps that we took to get there were really collaborative and really helpful for our future careers
