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Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with your manager.

  • Related to Behavioral
  • For Generalist PM
  • Asked at Google
  Google
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Answers (2)

We had a product wherein you can create your own survey with custom questions and custom background. This had a bug wherein if you choose a dark background then your questions(written in black text) were not clearly visible due to bad contrast. I suggested a simple solution to put small white pane behind each question. My manager said it is a childish solution. Then went on to plan over engineered solutions like introducing colour themes and translucent background. I reluctantly agreed. Then we took his approach for higher approval from a principal engineer. The principal engineer rejected his approach and suggested the same thing that I had originally proposed. In the end my solution was implemented. I respected the chain of authority during this process.

Situation – A time I disagreed with my manager was when I decided to stay on leading the design effort for Google for Hotels.

Task – Pre pandemic, in order to improve awareness and discovery of Google Nest Hub units, I was placed on a “Bet” project to scale smart displays to hotels. After the pandemic, I was tasked to focus on the consumer experience instead of hotels but I had an idea for a design that could lift the project off again.

Action – I decided to pitch a framework to my manager that was already tested on google assistant mobile in which we could put forth a much more voice friendly framework to regain our traction and reignite the conversations again with our previous partners. She didn’t agree that it would make a lot of impact but if I was willing to potentially sacrifice my time on the consumer side, that I could focus on it for the time being. Thus, I pitched the new framework to my trifecta team, business development and our system integrators. It was positively received and we moved forward to test it in our beta hotels. We used momentum from the positive feedback from these hotels using the framework to further our scope of business development which ultimately helped push the project to launch.

Result – As a result, I showed my manager that through this data and new partnerships that this framework could really work and push the project to go live even during the pandemic. She agreed, and we decided to go forward to launch in which it created the most impact of any project on the Google Assistant team in Q3.