How do you prioritize tasks and projects for your team?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to understand your decision-making framework when resources are limited. They're looking for evidence that you can balance business impact, urgency, dependencies, and team capacity—and that you can communicate priorities clearly so the team stays aligned.
Key Points to Cover
- A clear framework or criteria (e.g., impact vs. effort, business value, urgency)
- How you involve stakeholders and the team in prioritization
- How you handle competing demands and say no when needed
- How you communicate and adjust priorities when things change
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
- Reference a specific framework (e.g., RICE, MoSCoW, impact/effort matrix) if you use one
- Include an example where you had to deprioritize something important to protect higher-impact work
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: At a fintech startup I led a team of 12 engineers, and we were juggling three major initiatives: a core platform migration, a new compliance feature for an enterprise deal, and a security audit remediation. The product team wanted everything by Q2, but our capacity was clearly insufficient. We had to make hard trade-offs.
Task: My responsibility was to establish a clear prioritization framework so the team could align on what we'd ship first, what we'd defer, and how we'd communicate that to stakeholders.
Action: I introduced a RICE-style scoring (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) and ran a weekly prioritization session with the team and product leads. We scored each initiative, discussed dependencies, and I made the final call when there was disagreement. For the compliance feature, I negotiated with the sales team to split the scope into a Phase 1 MVP we could deliver in time—and we documented the Phase 2 backlog for later. I also created a simple priority dashboard in Confluence so everyone could see what was in flight and what was deferred, with rationale.
Result: We shipped the compliance MVP on time, which helped close the enterprise deal. The platform migration was delayed by six weeks, but we communicated that early and stakeholders accepted it. Team velocity improved 15% because we stopped context-switching. I learned that making the framework explicit and transparent reduced the "everything is urgent" dynamic and gave the team psychological permission to say no.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Deliver Results — "Tell me about a time you had to prioritize competing demands" |
| Structuring unclear situations, resource allocation at scale | |
| Meta | Impact at scale, prioritization under moving-fast constraints |
| Microsoft | Execution under pressure, stakeholder alignment |
| Stripe | Moving fast in ambiguity, technical judgment on trade-offs |
| Uber | Results orientation, entrepreneurship, ownership |