How do you handle disagreements with product managers or other stakeholders about priorities?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to see that you can advocate for engineering perspective while collaborating with product. They're assessing your ability to use data and reasoning (not emotion or territoriality), find compromise when possible, and escalate respectfully when alignment can't be reached—without damaging the relationship.
Key Points to Cover
- Understanding the other party's goals and constraints before pushing back
- Using data, trade-offs, and impact analysis to make your case
- Finding win-win solutions (e.g., phased approach, scope reduction)
- Knowing when to escalate and how to do it constructively
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?
💡 Tips
- Give a concrete example of a priority disagreement and how you resolved it
- Show that you respect product's role—you're not trying to override them, you're partnering
- Emphasize that you focus on shared goals (customer, business) rather than "engineering vs. product"
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: Our PM wanted to ship a feature in 4 weeks. My team's estimate was 8 weeks—we had tech debt and dependencies. The PM was under pressure from sales. We were at an impasse.
Task: I needed to find a path forward that respected both engineering reality and product needs.
Action: I asked to understand the PM's constraints: why 4 weeks? The key customer had a board demo. I proposed a phased approach: we could ship an MVP in 4 weeks that covered the demo scenario—one user flow, limited scope—and deliver the full feature in 8 weeks. I laid out the trade-offs: MVP would require some shortcuts we'd need to refactor later. I used data: our velocity, the dependency graph, and the risk of overcommitting. The PM pushed back—"Sales promised the full feature." I suggested we align with sales on the phased story: "We'll show the vision in 4 weeks and deliver the rest in 8." I made it a joint problem, not engineering vs. product. We brought in the sales lead and got alignment.
Result: We shipped the MVP on time. The demo went well. We delivered the full feature in 9 weeks. I learned that disagreements with product often resolve when you understand their constraints and propose alternatives that meet their core needs.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Customer Obsession, Earn Trust — "How do you handle priority disagreements?" |
| Collaboration, cross-functional work | |
| Meta | Cross-functional alignment, impact at scale |
| Microsoft | Customer focus, collaboration |
| Stripe | Cross-functional work, technical judgment |
| Airbnb | Product sense, technical fluency |