How do you handle situations where the team is divided on a technical approach?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to see that you can facilitate healthy debate and reach a decision without damaging team dynamics. They're assessing your ability to listen, synthesize, and make a call when consensus isn't possible.
Key Points to Cover
- Creating space for each perspective to be heard
- Identifying the real points of disagreement
- Using data, prototypes, or time-boxed experiments when helpful
- Making a decision and ensuring everyone commits to it
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
- Show you value dissent—disagreement can improve outcomes
- Emphasize "disagree and commit" once a decision is made
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: At a payments company, we had to choose how to handle idempotency for our new API. Half the team wanted a database-backed approach (store request IDs, check before processing). The other half wanted a distributed cache (Redis) for speed. Both had merit—DB was simpler and more durable, Redis was faster but added operational complexity. The debate had gotten personal, and we were blocking progress.
Task: I needed to facilitate a decision, ensure both sides felt heard, and get everyone to commit to the outcome.
Action: I ran a structured debate: each side had 15 minutes to present their case with pros, cons, and risks. I asked clarifying questions to surface the real disagreement—it turned out to be about operational burden, not the core design. I proposed a time-boxed spike: one week to prototype each approach and measure latency, failure modes, and ops overhead. We ran the spike, and the data showed Redis was 3x faster but added a new dependency; DB was sufficient for our current scale. I made the call: we'd start with DB for simplicity, with a documented path to Redis if we hit scale limits. I asked everyone to commit to the decision and to revisit in 6 months. I documented the decision in an ADR.
Result: We shipped on time. The DB approach worked for 18 months before we needed to optimize. The team appreciated that their views were heard and that we used data to decide. I learned that "disagree and commit" works when people feel the process was fair—even if they didn't get their way.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Have Backbone Disagree & Commit — "Tell me about a time the team disagreed on an approach" |
| Collaboration, structuring unclear situations | |
| Meta | Cross-functional alignment, making hard calls |
| Microsoft | Candid feedback, growth mindset |
| Netflix | Judgment, candor, acting in company's best interest |
| Stripe | Technical judgment, cross-functional work |