Was there a time you disagreed with the team? How did you resolve it?
What is being assessed
Whether you can disagree constructively: argue with data, listen to the other side and accept the team's decision even when it isn't yours. Red flags: "I'm always right", "I just did it my way", a story with no outcome.
Structure: STAR
- S — what the disagreement was about and who was involved.
- T — what had to be decided and why positions diverged.
- A — how you argued (data, a prototype, measurements), how you listened to the opponent, how a decision was reached.
- R — what came of it and what you took away, especially if the team went with a position other than yours.
Example answer
S: The team wanted to adopt a third-party analytics SDK that added 12 MB to the binary and swizzled UIViewController.
T: I thought the price was too high, but product insisted: funnels were needed by the end of the quarter.
A: Instead of arguing in words I built a one-day prototype: a thin wrapper over URLSession plus an event queue on an actor, and measured size and launch time. I showed the team the comparison: +0.3 MB versus +12 MB, but with no ready-made dashboards. I listened to product's argument — dashboards were needed "yesterday". We agreed: take the SDK now, but behind my AnalyticsTracker protocol so it could be replaced in one sprint.
R: The release shipped on time; six months later the SDK was replaced by our own implementation in three days thanks to the abstraction. Takeaway: the best argument is a working prototype and a reversible decision, not being right.