Give me an example of a time you provided feedback to develop the strengths of someone on your team.

On a project to clean up some recurring support issues, I worked closely with another newer engineer who was really good at turning messy bug reports into clear reproduction steps. I told him specifically that this wasn't just being careful, it was a real strength because it helped the rest of us fix issues faster. I asked if he'd be open to taking the first pass on our next triage summary, and I shared an example format that had worked well for me. He did that a few times over the next month, and the summaries were strong enough that the team started relying on them during investigations. He later told me that hearing that feedback made him more confident taking ownership in that area.

At a small startup I worked with a teammate who wrote really clean, efficient code but always avoided presenting their work, so their ideas rarely reached product or customer-facing teams. I told them I thought they had a real talent for breaking down hard problems into simple solutions and that others would benefit if they shared those approaches more often, and I gave two short examples of times their code made a tricky bug easy to fix. I offered to help them prepare a five-minute demo for our next weekly review, we put together two slides and did one run-through together, and I suggested a couple of short phrases to use when answering questions. They did the demo, handled questions confidently, and the product manager immediately asked them to scope a related improvement. Over the next couple months they volunteered for more demos and gradually took on more stakeholder-facing work, and they later told me that the early encouragement and practice made them feel comfortable stepping up.