You're driving a launch that depends on three teams that don't report to you, and one of them keeps deprioritizing your work. How do you keep delivery on track?
role-specific · Senior level · product-management
What the interviewer is really asking
Assesses whether a senior PM can drive cross-team delivery through influence and shared accountability rather than formal authority, and surface a chronically deprioritized dependency before it derails the launch.
What to say
- Make the cross-team plan and the dependencies visible and shared — a single tracked critical path with named owners and dates — so deprioritization shows up as a concrete risk to a shared goal, not a quiet PM-to-PM problem.
- Understand why the team is deprioritizing: competing commitments, an unconvincing 'why', or unclear scope — then either re-make the case for impact or get the priority conflict adjudicated by the leader who owns both goals.
- Reduce the dependency's cost where you can (tighten the ask, sequence it earlier, offer to staff or spec it) and escalate the trade-off, not the person, when the priority genuinely can't be reconciled at your level.
What to avoid
- Don't try to command teams you don't manage; demanding compliance without authority just earns resistance and gets your work deprioritized harder.
- Don't let a slipping dependency sit silently until it's late; you own surfacing the risk even when you don't own the team.
- Don't escalate it as a complaint about the other team — frame it as a priority conflict for a shared owner to resolve, or you poison the relationship you'll need next quarter.
Example answers
Strong: On a launch needing platform, data, and mobile, the data team kept bumping our work for their own roadmap. Instead of nagging, I put the whole critical path on one board with owners and dates and reviewed it in a weekly cross-team sync, so the slip was visible to everyone. I dug in and learned their leader hadn't connected our work to a goal they were measured on, so I reframed the impact and tightened our ask to the minimum they actually needed to do. When the priority still clashed, I took it to the director who owned both roadmaps as a sequencing decision, not a complaint — they made the call, and we landed the launch.
Weak: I'd keep reminding the team and their manager that we need their piece, and if they still don't deliver I'd let my manager know they're the reason we're going to miss.