PM interview question: Tell me a time you had a conflict with your developers

How a PM can manage it

As a PM or a TPM — product manager (technical), what conflicts would you face before you can even jump in and manage developers.

(in this whole blog, you = a product manager or a TPM)

List of conflicts

• developers want to develop something that is not relevant to the release
• developers say how users behave
• developers dont want to participate in roadmap
• developers may not want you to know the finer implementation details
• developers are humans too — they react to what you say
• developers would promise a deadline, and if that gets extended
• developers dont understand the scope that was explained in refinement/grooming and they say that in the middle of sprint

Conflict description and resolution

developers want to develop something that is not relevant to the release

Sometimes developers would have added a feature, as a side project or as part of old product vision, but to release the product now, there might be some tech debt that could be accrued without which the product would not be possible to release. the security teams would not want a release without addressing a certain issue, or the test leads would want…