Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate.
Use a real decision, the evidence you brought, and what shipped.
Points worth saying
- Name the decision, not a personality.
- Show the evidence you used and the risk you were protecting.
- End with the outcome and what you kept doing afterward.
A full answer
Pick a disagreement about a technical choice, not a story about someone being difficult. A useful shape is: the proposal, the risk you saw, the evidence you brought, the decision, and the result.
For example: a teammate wanted to skip pagination on an internal endpoint because the table was small. You expected a partner team to call it in a loop. You showed the current row count, the growth from the last quarter, and a p95 estimate if the payload grew. You offered cursor pagination with a default page size so the first version stayed small.
Say how you disagreed. You wrote the concern in the design note before the meeting, so the conversation was about the constraint rather than about winning. If the team chose the other path, say what you did to make that path safe, such as a metric and a limit.
Close on the relationship. You kept reviewing each other’s work. Interviewers are listening for whether you can hold a position without making the team smaller.
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