Describe a situation where you had to resolve a disagreement between team members. How did you approach it?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand your conflict resolution skills. They want to hear how you would dig into the disagreement, facilitate a discussion, and guide the engineers to find a resolution. They are looking for a collaborative, team-focused approach.

Example response:

When I was leading a team of 5 engineers, two of them had an ongoing disagreement about the best way to structure part of our backend architecture. One wanted to take a microservices approach while the other preferred a monolithic architecture. This disagreement had been going on for weeks and was creating tension on the team.

To resolve it, I first met one-on-one with each engineer to understand their perspectives. This helped me identify the core pros and cons of each approach from their point of views. I then brought them together and facilitated a discussion focused on the objective tradeoffs, like ease of scaling versus development speed.

I made sure each engineer felt heard, then offered my own perspective on which approach may work better based on our near-term roadmap and technical constraints. By the end, we arrived at a hybrid model that everyone could get behind. Keeping the discussion focused on the facts rather than opinions was key. This situation improved team cohesion and taught everyone that architectural debates are fine as long as they remain constructive.