How do you build buy-in for a major change initiative?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to see your approach to getting people on board—through involvement, communication, and addressing concerns. They're assessing your ability to lead change by bringing people along rather than imposing it top-down.
Key Points to Cover
- Involving key stakeholders early in shaping the change
- Communicating the "why" and benefits repeatedly and through multiple channels
- Creating quick wins to build momentum
- Addressing concerns proactively and adapting based on feedback
STAR Method Answer Template
Describe the context - what was happening, what team/company, what was at stake
What was your specific responsibility or challenge?
What specific steps did you take? Be detailed about YOUR actions
What was the outcome? Use metrics where possible. What did you learn?
đź’ˇ Tips
- Reference change management frameworks if you use them (e.g., Kotter, ADKAR)—but keep it practical
- Emphasize that buy-in is built over time through consistency and follow-through
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: We needed to adopt a new incident response framework—moving from ad hoc firefighting to a structured PagerDuty-based on-call rotation with postmortems. Engineers saw it as more process and bureaucracy. We had 30 engineers across three teams, and past "process improvements" had been rolled out top-down and largely ignored.
Task: I was responsible for driving adoption. The goal was 100% participation in the new on-call model within six months, but I knew I couldn't mandate it—I had to build genuine buy-in.
Action: I started by involving skeptics early. I pulled together a working group of six engineers—including two who'd complained about process—and asked them to help design the rotation and postmortem template. They shaped the rules: how often we'd rotate, what constituted a "major" incident, and what postmortems would look like. I also created quick wins: we ran a dry run with a non-production system, and the first real incident under the new process was resolved 40% faster because we had clear ownership. I shared that metric widely. I communicated the "why" in every channel—all-hands, Slack, and 1:1s—tying it to engineer burnout and customer trust. I addressed concerns proactively: for those worried about alert fatigue, we tuned thresholds together. I made myself the first person on the rotation to show I was in it with them.
Result: We hit 100% adoption in five months. Postmortem completion rate went from 20% to 95%, and we saw a 50% reduction in repeat incidents over the next year. I learned that buy-in comes from involvement, quick wins, and consistent follow-through—not from better slide decks.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Bias for Action, Deliver Results — "Tell me about a time you drove a major initiative" |
| Collaboration, innovation, team building | |
| Meta | Moving fast, cross-functional alignment |
| Microsoft | Execution, customer focus |
| Stripe | Building great teams, cross-functional mentorship |
| Airbnb | Mission alignment, building community internally |