How do you resolve a cross-team dependency in scaled agile?

WHAT THIS TESTS: This question assesses your proactivity, influence, and understanding of scaled agile frameworks. Interviewers want to see if you move beyond a junior mindset ("I'm blocked") to a senior one ("How do we get unblocked?"). It tests your ability to solve problems at the lowest effective level, your willingness to engage in both process and technical solutions, and your capacity to influence peers and stakeholders without direct authority.

A GOOD ANSWER COVERS: A strong answer demonstrates a multi-layered approach, executed in order. First, immediate validation and direct contact: confirm the dependency is real and not a misunderstanding. Use tools like git blame or internal directories to find the right engineer on the other team and initiate a peer-to-peer conversation. Timebox this to less than one business day. Second, if direct contact is unsuccessful, use formal process escalation: have your Scrum Master raise the issue at the Scrum of Scrums, and ensure your Product Manager syncs with their counterpart to align priorities. This creates program-level visibility. Third, pursue technical decoupling in parallel: propose solutions to unblock your own team's progress. This is the key differentiator for a senior candidate. Suggest defining a clear API contract, building against a mocked or stubbed dependency, or placing the new feature behind a feature flag. Finally, mention long-term prevention: discuss how you would use this experience to improve future dependency mapping during the next Program Increment (PI) planning session.

COMMON WRONG ANSWERS: The most common red flag is immediately escalating to a manager ("I'd tell my boss."). This shows a lack of ownership and problem-solving initiative. Another poor response is passivity ("I'd wait for their sprint to end."), which accepts being blocked without exploring alternatives. Blaming the other team or complaining about the process is unprofessional and signals an inability to collaborate effectively. Finally, answers that focus only on process ("I'd file a ticket") without suggesting any technical workarounds are considered weak, as they miss the engineer's primary role in solving technical problems.

LIKELY FOLLOW-UPS: Expect questions that probe the limits of your approach, such as: "What if the other team is in a different time zone and unresponsive?" or "What if their manager explicitly says your request is not a priority?" Be prepared for the behavioral version: "Tell me about a time this actually happened to you and what the specific outcome was."

ONE CONCRETE EXAMPLE: Our team needed a new customerTier field from the Billing API to enable a tiered pricing feature, but the Billing team was focused on a compliance project. I first messaged their tech lead with a proposed schema change to confirm feasibility. Then, our PM raised the dependency in the weekly product sync, highlighting that our feature was a top-line company OKR. In parallel, I used a mock server in our CI/CD pipeline that returned a hardcoded customerTier, which unblocked 90% of our development work. This allowed us to proceed for three weeks until the Billing team could deliver the real API field.