This question is a subtle but important variation of the “disagree with leadership” and “decision without data” questions. The emphasis on “the right thing to do” is a deliberate prompt to explore your values, ethics, and principles as a leader.

The interviewer isn’t just looking for technical or business judgment; they are probing your moral compass and your courage to uphold standards, even when it’s hard.

The Core Goal of the Question

The interviewer wants to understand what you stand for. They are looking for a story that reveals your character and your principles in action. They want to see:

  • Your Definition of “Right”: What do you prioritize? Customer trust? Long-term code health? Team well-being? Engineering excellence? Ethical considerations?
  • Your Courage and Conviction: Can you champion a difficult path because it’s the right one, even when the easy path is more convenient or politically popular?
  • Your Ability to Influence: How do you persuade others to do the hard, right thing?
  • Your Pragmatism: Do you understand that doing the “right thing” often involves trade-offs and requires careful navigation?

Principles to Use in Your Answer

  1. Choose a Story with a Clear Moral or Principled Dimension: The decision shouldn’t just be technically hard; it should be hard because it forced a trade-off between a short-term gain and a long-term principle.
  • Excellent Examples:
  • Pushing for a delay to fix a security or privacy issue: Choosing to delay a launch to protect customer trust, even when facing immense pressure to ship.
  • Advocating to pay down significant technical debt: Arguing to dedicate a full quarter to refactoring and stabilization instead of shipping new features, knowing it would slow down the product roadmap but save the system from collapse.
  • Protecting the team from burnout: Pushing back on an unrealistic deadline, even when it meant a difficult conversation with leadership, because you knew it would break the team.
  • Sunsetting a beloved but costly feature: Making the unpopular decision to deprecate a feature that a small group of users loved but was draining engineering resources and holding back the platform’s evolution.

  1. Clearly Articulate the Conflict: Frame the decision as a choice between two competing goods (or a good vs. an easy bad). For example: “The conflict was between hitting our quarterly feature goal and upholding our team’s commitment to long-term system stability.”

  2. Anchor Your “Right Thing” in Company Values or First Principles: Connect your decision to a higher purpose. This shows you’re not just operating on personal whim.

  • “One of our company’s core tenets is ‘Customer Trust is our #1 Priority,’ and I knew launching with this potential data integrity issue would violate that trust.”
  • “As engineers, our primary responsibility is to build sustainable systems. I felt it was my duty to advocate for the health of the platform.”
  1. Show Your Work: Just like in the “disagree with leadership” question, you must show that you didn’t just have an opinion. You gathered data, built a case, and presented it logically.
  • “To make my case, I gathered data on the rising on-call burden, the increase in sev-2 incidents, and the slowing feature development velocity—all symptoms of the tech debt.”

  1. Detail the Difficult Conversation: Walk the interviewer through the process of advocating for your decision. Who did you have to convince? What were their objections? How did you handle them? This showcases your influence and communication skills.

  2. Describe the Outcome and a Lasting Impact: Explain what happened after the decision was made. Crucially, reflect on why it was important. The result shouldn’t just be that you “won”; it should be that the team, product, or customer was better off because of the difficult choice.

Signals the Interviewer Looks For (Strong Hire)

✅ Positive Signals (Strong Hire)

  • A Strong Moral Compass: You demonstrate a clear set of positive values (customer-centricity, engineering excellence, team well-being).
  • Long-Term Thinking: You can see beyond the current quarter and make decisions that benefit the company in the long run.
  • Courage and Conviction: You are willing to take a stand for something important, even when it’s unpopular or difficult.
  • Pragmatic Idealism: You have high principles, but you also understand how to navigate the real world of business trade-offs to achieve them.
  • Ownership of the “Hard Stuff”: You are willing to be the person who initiates and carries the burden of difficult but necessary change.

❌ Negative Signals (Red Flags to Avoid)

  • Self-Righteousness: Telling the story in a way that makes you sound like a lone crusader in a sea of fools.
  • Choosing a Trivial Issue: A story about a minor code formatting debate doesn’t have the required weight.
  • Lack of Impact: The “difficult decision” didn’t actually have a significant positive outcome.
  • Poor Judgment: A story where your definition of the “right thing” is actually misaligned with standard business or engineering practices.

How to Structure Your Answer: The Principle-Conflict-Action-Result Framework

  1. Situation & Principle: “Last year, our team was under immense pressure to deliver three major features for a Q4 launch. However, our core platform was suffering from years of accumulated technical debt, and our on-call load was becoming unsustainable.”
  2. The Conflict: “The difficult decision was whether to push forward to meet the feature goals, which was the easy and politically popular path, or to make the unpopular call to halt all new feature work for a full quarter to pay down that debt. I firmly believed the latter was the only right thing to do for the long-term health of our system and the well-being of our team.”
  3. Action - Building the Case:
  • “I knew an opinion wouldn’t be enough. I spent a week collecting data: I charted the increase in sev-2s over the last six months, calculated the engineering hours lost to fire-fighting, and surveyed the team on burnout levels.
  • I put this into a ‘State of the Platform’ document and presented it to my director. I framed it not as ‘we can’t do the features,’ but as ‘if we don’t fix this now, we won’t be able to build any features reliably next year.’”
  1. Action - The Difficult Conversation:
  • “It was a very tough conversation. My director was concerned about the product roadmap. I acknowledged his pressure but held my ground, anchoring the discussion in our shared responsibility to be good stewards of the company’s technology assets.”
  1. Result and Reflection:
  • “Ultimately, the data was undeniable. He agreed to a compromise: we would dedicate 60% of the team to a ‘Stabilization Sprint’ for six weeks. It was a hard period, but we fixed the most critical issues, automated our deployment rollbacks, and reduced on-call alerts by over 70%.
  • The features were delayed by a month, but the platform was so much more stable that we actually increased our development velocity in the following two quarters. It was a difficult decision, but it was absolutely the right one because it set the team and the product up for long-term success.”