How to Answer “Tell Me About a Time You Disagreed With a Colleague”
“Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague. How did you resolve it?”
Why interviewers ask it
Conflict happens in every team. The interviewer wants to see that you disagree respectfully, focus on the problem rather than the person, and can reach a decision without damaging the relationship.
What they want to hear
- A real disagreement about work, not personalities
- Listening and understanding the other side
- A resolution and what you learned
How to structure your answer: STAR
- 1SituationThe project and what you disagreed about, briefly and neutrally.
- 2TaskWhat you needed to achieve, and why it mattered.
- 3ActionHow you raised it, listened, used evidence and found common ground.
- 4ResultWhat was decided, the outcome, and how the relationship ended up.
Example answers
Made-up examples to show the shape of a good answer. Yours should use your own experience and numbers.
Our finance lead wanted the month-end report to keep its 30 separate tabs because that’s what the executives were used to. I thought it hid the numbers that mattered. Rather than argue in the meeting, I asked her which five figures people actually asked her about, and built a one-page summary with those, keeping the tabs behind it. We sent both versions for one month. The executives started using the summary, and she suggested we drop 20 of the tabs. We cut ad-hoc report requests by about a third, and she now brings me in early on reporting changes.
A senior engineer on my team wanted to cache our pricing data for an hour to reduce database load. I was worried it would show customers stale prices during sales. I wrote up the risk with two real incidents from the previous year and proposed invalidating the cache when prices change. He pointed out the extra complexity, so we agreed to test both in staging. Invalidation added about a day of work and removed the stale-price risk; we shipped that version. He later asked me to review his next design.
Mistakes to avoid
- Blaming the other person or making them the villain.
- Choosing a story where you simply gave in, or simply won.
- No outcome. Say what was decided and what happened.
Other ways it’s asked
- “Tell me about a conflict at work.”
- “Describe a time you had to work with someone difficult.”
- “Tell me about a time you pushed back on a decision.”
Check your answerPaste your answer into the free STAR checker to see what’s missing, or practise it in a mock interview.
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