Performance & conflict management

This is the round where polish hurts you. Interviewers want the actual conversation you had with an underperforming engineer, the words and the discomfort, not a tidy framework you read in a book. Specificity is the credibility signal.

Two things are true at once on a lean team: an underperformer is felt immediately and your top performers are watching how you handle it. You have to manage both at the same time and you have to do it without much hierarchy to lean on.