Tell me about a time you needed another team to change course or commit resources, but you had no authority over them. How did you get them on board?

leadership · Senior level · general

What the interviewer is really asking

Assess influence without authority: building a coalition, framing a shared interest, and landing a cross-team outcome through credibility and negotiation rather than escalation.

What to say

• Set up the dependency concretely: what you needed from the other team, why they had no built-in incentive to give it, and what was at stake if they didn't.
• Walk through how you found their interest, not just yours — what reframe, data, or trade made saying yes the obvious call for them.
• Name how you closed and protected the commitment: who you aligned with first, how you made it visible, and what you gave back so it held.

What to avoid

• Don't make the punchline 'so I escalated to my manager / their manager' — that signals you couldn't influence peers.
• Avoid framing the other team as blockers or 'not getting it'; it reads as someone who can't see other roadmaps.
• Don't stop at 'I convinced them in a meeting' — without the follow-through, the commitment is just a verbal yes.

Example answers

Strong: Our checkout team needed the platform team to ship rate-limiting before our Black Friday launch, but it wasn't on their roadmap and they reported to a different director. I pulled their on-call data and showed that two of their last three Sev2s traced back to the exact unbounded traffic we'd add — so the work protected their pager, not just our launch. I co-wrote a one-page proposal with their tech lead, gave them naming and design ownership, and offered two of my engineers for the integration. Their director approved it that week. It shipped on time and their incident rate on that path dropped to zero the next quarter.

Weak: I kept asking and when they wouldn't prioritize it, I raised it with my skip-level and they were told to do it.