Tell me about a time when your team's goals were out of alignment with another team you relied on in order to meet your goal.

On a recent project, my team needed an API change from another team to finish a small internal tool. At first I assumed they were just slow to respond, but when I reached out directly to their engineer, I learned they were in the middle of fixing reliability issues and our request would create extra testing work for them. I worked with my lead to narrow our ask to the minimum change we needed for the first version and I wrote up clear examples so they could review it quickly. That made it easier for them to fit the work in, and we shipped the tool a week later with a simpler first release. After that, I started checking dependency assumptions earlier and trying to understand what work my request creates for the other team.

On a small project to add a clearer order confirmation flow, my team was waiting on final visuals from the design group, but they were tied up with a company-wide rebrand and couldn’t deliver in time for our planned release. I proposed building a temporary confirmation page using our existing component library so we could test the flow with customers and not block the launch. I then set up a quick review with the designer to agree on what could be temporary versus what must be preserved for the final design, and we added clear acceptance criteria and a timeline for swapping in the polished screens. We launched on schedule, collected useful user feedback that shaped the final design, and afterwards I made it a habit to invite a design contact to our planning meetings so expectations are aligned earlier.