Tell me about a time when you've had to push back or say no to a customer request.

In my last role, a customer asked for us to change the format of a report export because their team was manually combining it with another spreadsheet every week. My first thought was that we couldn't do exactly what they wanted because the export format was shared by many customers, so I talked with the support rep to understand the real pain point before responding. We found out they mainly needed one extra field and a more consistent column order, not a fully custom report. I explained why we couldn't make a customer-specific change that might break other users, but I also suggested a safer configuration we already had and helped test it with support. That solved most of their issue right away, and I added internal notes so if a similar request came in again the team would know the workaround.

At my last job I was a junior developer on a small team building a patient scheduling app used by clinics. One clinic asked if we could remove the multi-factor step for certain staff because it slowed check-ins. I dug into why they wanted it and checked our compliance rules—our product needed to maintain strong authentication and an audit trail for patient privacy, so I couldn't agree to a blanket removal. I explained the legal and security reasons to the clinic contact in plain terms, apologized for the inconvenience, and proposed two alternatives: extend session time for specific kiosk devices and add a fast 'verified check-in' mode that kept full logging. I then built the simpler of the two changes, wrote acceptance criteria, and worked with QA to pilot it with that clinic so we could validate it didn't weaken protections. They were satisfied with the speed improvement and I kept notes for the team about how to evaluate similar requests going forward.