A time you had to make a difficult decision

Kellogg 2: Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style. (450 words)

GiantTech’s new B2B AI product, Selfdrive for Service, was launched in January 2024. As product strategy lead for Selfdrive for Service, I worked directly with prospective customers to help define the user experience they needed. However, within two weeks of the launch, a new $1.5 billion customer trying out the product asked us to remove one of the data-integrations in the application, saying that they would not use the service otherwise because it could cause privacy risks for their company data.

This created a problem, because smaller customers, including a Boston-based environmental non-profit, relied heavily on this data-integration component. The VIP customer contacted GiantTech’s Corporate Vice President of 365 Customer Service, Mary Berry, saying that they would be happy to purchase the product, so long as the data-integration was taken out. Looking at the bottom line, Mary asked me to remove the data integration and rework the application around the needs of the VIP customer.

I faced a difficult decision: do I risk losing our smaller, socially-good and loyal customers in order to accommodate a larger customer, or do I push back and ask Mary to consider a compromise, even at the risk of expending company time and resources during a critical period when there were other priorities that Mary would want me to focus on instead.

I decided to try a potentially risky compromise: I proposed expanding our product’s functionality while preserving its customizability by breaking the Selfdrive for Service application into two pieces - “GiantTech” and “Custom.” GiantTech CFS would be the official base-level offering of the application, and Custom CFS would let customers add data sources depending on their particular business needs. This would allow both large and small customers to use our product in the ways they needed. However, implementing this new dual offering would require a huge engineering effort as well as compatibility testing for existing customers, and we were already on a tight timeline.

Over the next two days, I prepared the proposal and built a timeline for engineering and testing. I booked 15 minutes on Mary’s calendar and pitched the new compromise, fully expecting her to decline and possibly even object to the proposal as a waste of resources. However, to my delight, she was immediately on board with the new plan: she understood how powerful this offering could be. By the next morning, I had put the new dual product offering into action. Today, all customers with a Selfdrive license can harness this improved customizability themselves.

Pushing back against a managerial decision and taking full control of a large project had a major impact on my leadership style. Today, my perspective is more holistic, always retaining consciousness of the entire product development cycle.