How do you handle conflicts within your team?

2. Tell me about a time when you have a conflict with co-worker

Situation (S):

• At SaaS Labs, billing service issue.
• Duplicate balance deduction events triggered.
• Risk of wrong charges to customers.

Task (T):

• Ensure system processes duplicates correctly.
• Minimize customer impact.
• Keep design simple, reliable, and maintainable.

Action (A) - co-worker:

• Compare difference between balances.
• Refund or deduct remaining amount.
• Handles partial corrections.
• But complex logic, hard to debug.
• Risky with edge cases.

Action (A) - My Approach:

• Refund previous event fully.
• Process new event freshly.
• Simple, idempotent design.
• Easier to test, debug, and maintain.
• Aligns with long-term consistency.

Conflict Handling

• Initial disagreement with co-worker.
• Considered future use cases & scalability.
• Facilitated open discussion.
• Wrote down pros/cons of both.
• Ran sample test cases for clarity.
• Took QA inputs for easy testing & monitoring.
• Showed simplicity and safety of my approach.
• Conducted team voting for fair decision.
• Acknowledged strengths of co-worker’s idea.
• Built consensus, not forced decision.

Result (R):

• Team agreed on my approach.
• Duplicate issues resolved cleanly.
• Improved system reliability.
• Faster debugging and fewer errors.
• Co-worker felt heard → collaboration improved.
• Outcome reinforced idempotency in design.