Describe a situation where you had to influence a technical decision without having direct authority to mandate it.

behavioral · Mid level · general

What the interviewer is really asking

Assess influence without authority, stakeholder communication, and evidence-based persuasion.

What to say

• Set the context: what decision was being made and who held the authority.
• Explain the approach you used to build the case — data, prototypes, risk framing.
• Describe the outcome and whether your recommendation was adopted, partially or fully.

What to avoid

• Don't describe going around the decision-maker rather than persuading them.
• Avoid making the story about your technical correctness rather than the collaborative process.
• Don't omit cases where you were overruled — explain what you learned.

Example answers

Strong: Our team was defaulting to a monolith for a new service. I built a lightweight ADR comparing deployment complexity, scaling cost, and failure isolation for both approaches, and ran a 30-minute design review. The team adopted a modular monolith as a compromise — not my full proposal, but a meaningful improvement. The document became the template for future architecture decisions.

Weak: I complained about the decision in retrospectives until they got tired of hearing it.