Tell me about a time you worked well as a part of a team?

Showed initiative

Before I became a team lead, there was a time when my team took over another team’s product.
Since we took over, we now had to manage this product’s infrastructure and deployments.
The previous infrastructure code was maintained by a single engineer.

The problem here was that the previous person hard coded many values and was using his own libraries.
It was difficult to manage his code.
Adding new features took a week instead of a day.
That’s because we had to first understand his code.
Sometimes, we had to reachout to him to get more context. This cost a lot of labor hours

I proposed to my team that we spend two weeks rewriting his infrastructure code.
I believe that if we spend two weeks now, it would be easier for us down the road.
I suggested to my team that we meet in a room everyday and spend 2 hours of uninterrupted time rewriting and re-building his previous code.
I also had to negotiate with the development team to suspend their releases.
I told them that they can benefit from this since releasing new features would be faster in the future.
My team and the development team were on board.

As a result of this effort, we were able to add new features within 2 days.
The development team was able to have frequent release.
All this happened because, we got together, refactored the code according to my team’s standards

From this experience, I have learned that cost of maintaining poorly written code increases with time
It's better to fix the issue as team early before it becomes much more complicated