Overrule rarely, and only when the cost of being wrong is high or the decision is hard to reverse. When you do, explain the reasoning openly, acknowledge the merits of the approach you rejected, and give the engineer real ownership of the implementation. Set an explicit trigger that would make you revisit, so the decision stays evidence based rather than a matter of who has the title.
Why interviewers ask this
The interviewer is probing whether you can exercise authority without destroying autonomy. They want a high bar for overruling, transparent reasoning, and care for the relationship afterward. They also listen for whether you have ever been wrong and admitted it, because a manager who has never revisited an override is either not paying attention or not being honest in the room.
How to structure your answer
- State your bar for overruling rather than persuading.
- Describe the decision and the reasoning you shared openly.
- Explain how you kept the engineer's ownership intact.
- Name the trigger that would reverse the call.
Example answer
My bar is high: I try to influence rather than override, and I only pull rank when a decision is expensive to reverse. The one I remember was a plan to build our own job scheduling layer instead of using an existing one. The design was good, honestly better suited to our shape of work, and the engineer who proposed it was one of the strongest people I have worked with. I overruled it because we were four months from a funding milestone with two open roles, and taking on infrastructure we would then own forever was a maintenance commitment we could not staff. I gave that reasoning out loud in the design review rather than privately, including the part where their design was technically better, because the team needs to see the actual constraint. Then I asked them to own the integration work, which had real scope in it. I also wrote down the condition to revisit: if we hit specific limits on the third party option, we build. Eighteen months later we did exactly that.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- Have you ever overruled somebody and been wrong?
- How do you keep senior engineers engaged if you overrule them?
- How do you decide which decisions you should not be making at all?
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