Tell me about a time when you had to communicate a change in direction that you anticipated people would have concerns with.

During an internship project, I had to tell two other interns that we needed to drop one part of our planned feature and rework another part because our testing showed the original approach was causing a lot of errors. I knew they'd be concerned because we'd already spent time building it, and one of them was worried we'd miss the demo deadline. Before our team meeting, I checked the results with my mentor so I was confident about the reason for the change, and in the meeting I explained what we found, what we were changing, and what work could still be reused. I also made sure to ask for concerns, and one teammate raised that the rework might be too big, so we agreed to do a smaller version first and keep the rest as optional. Afterward I updated our task list and took on part of the cleanup work myself. We made the demo on time, and the smaller version was much more stable.

At my first job out of college I was the only frontend developer assigned to build a landing page for a nonprofit, and the product manager plus the client wanted a large autoplay carousel in the hero to match their brand. When I tested it, the carousel caused clear accessibility problems for screen readers and drastically slowed page load on low-end phones, so I anticipated they would be upset about changing the visual idea. I did a quick accessibility check and performance timing, and prepared two alternatives: a static hero with subtle transitions and an accessible manual slider that preserved motion but required user control. In the meeting I explained the specific accessibility and performance issues, showed before-and-after measurements, and walked them through mockups of both alternatives so they could judge the look. They worried about losing the brand impact, so I proposed launching with the static hero to hit our deadline and then A/B testing the manual slider later, and I volunteered to build the accessible slider myself. We shipped on time, the client liked the finished page, and the later accessible slider improved engagement without sacrificing usability.