Regaining Trust with your Engineering Partner
This is part of a series to help people think about how to handle that oft-feared question: Tell me about a time you disagreed with your engineering partner.
Disagreements arise when trust is lost. Not all disagreements are related to loss of trust; sometimes, it is about risk or fundamentally different opinions around the problem being tackled, or maybe organization politics that you lack context on.
Regardless of the cause, to regain trust, you need to follow a few key steps:
Identify the Disconnect
Find a Solution to the Immediate Problem
Take Actions to Repair the Damage Over Time
Most commonly, points one and two above are the basics elements of an engineering disagrement story. But if you picked something truly self-reflective, you probably need to address fence mending required after the product was back on track.
You might not always be asked to dive into it, but if you are asked you don’t want to get caught off guard needing to illustrate how you regained trust. Being able to talk about regaining trust shows above-average self-awareness.
The hardest part is getting started…
Introducing These Stories
You can use this simple framework next time you get that dreaded question.
Your response might start something like this:
“I am going to tell you how I learned the importance of balancing technical risk and product growth in partnership with my engineering partner while working on __________ product at __________ company, and we had to build __________ to help __________ customer solve __________ problem despite __________ risk. “
Or you can try the rule of three, and leverage a simple framework:
I am going to tell you when I learned about the importance of tackling disagreements with my engineering partner by (1) looking for signals of discontent at crucial points in the product journey, (2) opening up a healthy dialogue by putting the responsibility for starting the conversation on me, and (3) quickly putting in place a plan to reduce our ________.
Think about your past disagreements with engineering. How did you handle them? Write them out. Find 2 or 3 things you did for each instance. What is the common theme, there is likely some through line.
Closing with Trust Building
Typically your key learning will be identifying the source of the disagreement, so a nice closer will include how you regained trust. If you had to regain some trust, it shows you picked a truly difficult interaction.
It might go something like this:
“In the end, it took a few months to completely get back to our base level of trust, but I did it by doing ______________.”