How did development go? Did you work with the backend?
What is being assessed
Teamwork and engineering maturity: did you "receive tickets and build screens", or did you take part in design, shape API contracts and processes. For middle and above the latter is expected.
Answer skeleton
- Process: methodology (sprints/kanban), how tasks reached you, reviews, branching, CI, release cadence (every two weeks? a release train?).
- Working with the backend: who designed the API, was there a contract before work started (OpenAPI/Swagger), how discrepancies were resolved, mocks for parallel development.
- Your influence: examples where you changed a contract or a process.
- Other roles: design (Figma, design review), QA, analytics.
Example answer
S: Two-week sprints, a cross-functional team: 2 iOS, 2 Android, 3 backend developers, a PM, a designer, QA.
T: Features shipped to three platforms at once, and the main risk was API contracts drifting apart.
A: Before each feature we held a "contract meeting": the backend brought a draft OpenAPI spec and the mobile platforms adjusted it to their needs. I, for example, pushed for cursor-based pagination instead of offset — with offset the mobile feed duplicated items when new ones were inserted. While the backend wasn't ready we worked against mocks via URLProtocol so as not to be blocked. Disputes went into a Slack thread with the decision recorded in the spec, not verbally.
R: Integration took a day instead of a week, and in a year we never hit a "broken contract" in production.