hardBehaviouralScenarioMidSeniorStaff
You are taking questions after a talk and a developer says your API's error handling is a mess and cost their team two weeks. They are partly right, and the fix is not yours to promise. What do you say, and what do you do afterwards?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Concede the accurate part specifically and immediately, separate the part you disagree with and argue it on facts, commit only to what you personally control - carrying it to the owning team and reporting back - and never invent a roadmap date to end the moment.
Use developer relations as the thread through the responding to public criticism of your explanation: name the signal, then say what changes when it moves.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- The same criticism appears in a widely shared forum thread rather than a room. What changes about your response, and what stays identical?
- Engineering reviews the complaint and concludes the current behaviour is correct and will not change. How do you go back to that developer?
- How do you handle a critic whose facts are simply wrong but whose frustration is real?
- What would you do differently if the person raising it were a paying enterprise customer's lead engineer rather than an anonymous attendee?
Related questions
- Your DevRel programme reports growing impressions, follower counts and packed conference sessions, but finance is asking what it returns. How would you show whether the work is driving adoption, and how would you defend the budget when you cannot attribute cleanly?hardAlso on developer-relations and developer-advocacy5 min
- Your advocacy team can either build things - an SDK, sample apps, better reference docs - or publish things: posts, talks, videos. Both compete with the product roadmap for the same engineering time. How do you decide the split?hardAlso on developer-relations5 min
- You are given a topic and thirty minutes to prepare a ten-minute presentation. What do you build?mediumAlso on public-speaking5 min
- You are asked to design a product that does not exist, and the setup is missing details you would need in real life. Do you point that out?mediumSame kind of round: behavioural5 min