Tell me about a time you had to handle a high priority task that came from leadership and how you approached prioritizing it against other work

In my last role, I was working on a small bug fix and a cleanup task when my manager told me leadership needed a usage report issue fixed that day for a customer review. I first asked what was driving the urgency and learned the report was going to be shown externally the next morning. Before switching, I checked whether my current work needed to be left in a safe state and pushed a partial update so nothing was hanging. Then I focused on the report issue, asked a teammate for a quick review on the risky part, and kept my manager updated on progress and on the other work I had paused. We got the fix out that afternoon, and the next day I confirmed the report looked correct and re-aligned with my manager on when to pick up the delayed tasks.

At my last internship, I was helping update a set of onboarding emails when our VP asked for a quick fix to a broken discount code in the checkout flow because a promotion was launching that afternoon. I asked my lead how many customers were affected and whether there was a deadline tied to a campaign, and once I understood that sales was already sending traffic there, I paused my email task and switched to the checkout issue. I let my lead know exactly what I was stopping, then I tested the code change in a staging environment first so I wouldn’t make the problem worse. After I pushed the fix, I checked with support to make sure the code was working for real users and then went back to my original task. What I learned was that when something comes from leadership, I still try to get the context first, communicate clearly, and make sure the work I’m pausing is in a good state before I move on.