Of course. This is an excellent and very common behavioral question, especially for senior and staff-level roles. It’s designed to probe your emotional intelligence, adaptability, and focus on outcomes.

Here’s a breakdown of the principles you should use and the signals the interviewer is looking for.

The Core Goal of the Question

The interviewer wants to see if you are a mature, adaptable, and influential leader who prioritizes project success over personal preferences or ego. They are assessing your ability to navigate the complex human dynamics that are inevitable in high-stakes projects. For a Staff Engineer, this is not a “nice-to-have”; it is a core job requirement.

Principles to Use in Your Answer

  1. Focus on the Shared Goal, Not the Blame: Frame the story around the project’s success. The narrative should never be “I was right, and they were difficult.” It should be, “We had different, valid approaches, and our initial friction was putting the project’s goals at risk. Here is how I solved that.” This immediately shows maturity.

  2. Demonstrate Empathy and Seek to Understand: The first step in your story should be an attempt to understand your colleague’s perspective. Why do they work that way? What are their pressures? What past experiences inform their style? Explicitly state that you took the time to understand their “why.”

  3. Be Proactive, Not Passive: Don’t just say, “I gave in and did it their way.” A Staff Engineer is a leader. Show how you actively engineered a solution to the collaboration problem. This involves proposing a new way of working, finding a middle ground, or creating a new process that accommodates both styles.

  4. Show Flexibility in Your Actions: Talk about the specific things you changed. Did you start providing more detailed written updates for a colleague who preferred asynchronous communication? Did you schedule brief, regular syncs for someone who needed more verbal touchpoints? Did you adopt a new tool or documentation template? Be concrete.

  5. Connect Your Adjustment to a Positive Outcome: This is crucial. Your adjustment wasn’t just to make someone happy; it was a strategic move to achieve a goal. Quantify the result. Did it unblock the project? Did you ship on time? Did it improve code quality? Did it build trust and lead to a more effective long-term partnership?

  6. Reflect and Articulate the Learning: End your story with what you learned. A great answer shows self-awareness. Perhaps you realized your own style has blind spots, or you discovered a new, more effective way to collaborate that you’ve used on subsequent projects. This shows a growth mindset.

Signals the Interviewer Looks For (Strong Hire)

The interviewer is constantly scanning for signals that you operate at a Staff Engineer level. Here’s what they want to see:

✅ Positive Signals (Strong Hire)

  • Maturity and Low Ego: You put the project and the team’s success first. You don’t speak negatively about your colleague; you frame them as a peer with a different, often equally valid, perspective.
  • High Emotional Intelligence (EQ): You demonstrate an ability to “read the room,” understand others’ motivations, and adapt your communication and behavior accordingly.
  • Pragmatism and Outcome-Orientation: You are focused on getting the job done effectively. You see collaboration styles not as personal quirks but as variables to be managed to achieve a successful outcome.
  • Influence Without Authority: You didn’t need to be the manager to fix the situation. You persuaded, negotiated, and led by example to create a better working relationship and process. This is a hallmark of a Staff Engineer.
  • Problem-Solving at a “Meta” Level: You didn’t just solve the technical problem; you solved the collaboration problem. You diagnosed the root cause of the friction and engineered a systemic solution (e.g., a new communication protocol, a hybrid design process).
  • Ownership and Accountability: You took it upon yourself to fix the situation. You didn’t just complain to your manager or let the friction fester. You owned the relationship’s health as part of owning the project’s outcome.

❌ Negative Signals (Red Flags to Avoid)

  • Blaming or Arrogance: Describing the colleague as “wrong,” “slow,” “micromanaging,” or “clueless.”
  • Passive Compliance: “My teammate was very particular, so I just did whatever they asked to avoid conflict.” This shows a lack of leadership and influence.
  • Escalating Unnecessarily: “We couldn’t agree, so I went to my manager to have them sort it out.” A Staff Engineer is expected to solve most of these issues themselves.
  • Focusing on Trivial Issues: A story about a disagreement over variable naming or code formatting is too low-level for a Staff role. The conflict should be about something more substantial, like design philosophy, risk tolerance, or communication strategy.
  • A “Hero” Narrative: A story that paints you as the lone genius who saved the day by convincing everyone else they were wrong. Collaboration is about finding a better “we,” not a stronger “I.”

How to Structure Your Answer: The STAR(L) Method

Use the STAR(L) method: Situation, Task, Action, Result, and Learning.

  • Situation: Briefly describe the project and the people involved. “I was the tech lead on Project X, a critical new microservice. I was paired with another senior engineer, ‘Alex,’ who was the domain expert for the downstream system we were integrating with.”
  • Task: Clearly state the differing styles and the problem it was causing. “My style is to move fast, build a quick prototype, and iterate. Alex’s style is very meticulous, preferring a comprehensive upfront design and risk assessment before writing any code. This clash was causing us to spin our wheels in the design phase, putting our tight deadline at risk.”
  • Action: This is the core of your answer. Detail the steps you took, highlighting the principles above.
  1. “First, I scheduled a 1:1 with Alex, not to debate, but to understand his perspective. I learned he was burned on a past project that failed due to a lack of planning, so his caution was rooted in a very real experience.” (Empathy)
  2. “Recognizing his concern was valid, I proposed a hybrid approach. I suggested we time-box the upfront design to one week, focusing only on the core API contract and the top 3 failure-mode scenarios he was worried about.” (Proactive Solution)
  3. “For the internal logic, I suggested we could use my iterative, prototype-driven approach. This compromise gave him the stability he needed for the public contract while giving me the velocity I needed for the implementation.” (Flexibility)
  4. “We agreed to use a shared decision log in Confluence to make our progress and choices transparent, which satisfied his need for documentation and my need for momentum.”
  • Result: Explain the positive outcome with metrics if possible. “This hybrid approach completely unblocked us. We finalized the design in four days, delivered the service 10% ahead of schedule, and the integration was flawless. More importantly, Alex and I built a huge amount of trust and became a highly effective team for the rest of the project.”
  • Learning: Conclude with your takeaway. “My key learning was that the ‘best’ development process is context-dependent. By blending our styles, we created a more robust process than either of us would have individually. I now actively seek out differing perspectives at the start of any major project to build a stronger, blended approach from day one.”