How You Prioritize When You Have a Large Amount of Work
GoogleSoftware Engineer · Onsite
Last updated
A behavioral interview question asking how you prioritize when you have a large amount of work, illustrated with a real example. It tests the criteria you use to order work, how you handle dependencies and conflicting requests, what you choose to defer, and how you communicate those trade-offs.
In a behavioral interview for a software engineer role at Google, you are asked: if you have a large amount of work, how do you prioritize? Explain your approach and illustrate it with a real example.
Clarifying Questions
- Is the work all mine, or is it shared across a team that I am coordinating?
- Do the competing tasks come from one stakeholder, or from several with conflicting demands?
- Should I describe a general method, a specific time, or both?
Hints
Hint 1
What gets dropped: A prioritization story only convinces if something was deprioritized. Decide what you said no to or delayed, and how you told the people affected.
Hint 2
Whose priorities: Consider whose goals the work serves and who should agree with the order you chose, not only how you would sort a list.
Follow-up questions
- Two stakeholders each say their request is the top priority. What do you do?
- Tell me about a time your prioritization turned out to be wrong. How did you notice and recover?
- How do you prioritize when a production incident lands in the middle of a deadline?
- How do you keep unplanned requests from consuming your planned work?
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