In an interview for a manager position, I got the following question:
Say your team has been working on product A for months. Then one day your manager tells you that another team has been working on a very similar product, and in order to avoid duplication it has been decided that your team will stop working on this project. How do you react? What do you say to your manager and to your team?
It turns out that this scenario is not uncommon at my workplace, where competing departments fight each others for the same clients. My manager forbids me to collaborate with the teams which are building products similar to ours. This problem is way above my pay check. So my answer was an elaborate version of "Politics sucks and there's nothing much I can do about it".
The interviewer was clearly not impressed by my answer. Is my attitude about the work duplication issue wrong here? Or was I wrong to answer honestly to the interviewer?