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Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager (TPM)

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Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager 

Ohh where do I start? Over the last 6 months or more I have been in the process of being interviewed and I have also interviewed several candidates (yes, yes the irony !). It has been a very interesting journey, to say the least. Which is why I thought it would be a good idea to write this post on “Interview Questions for A Technical Program Manager”. I have learned a lot about what and how one should prepare for technical program manager interviews the various types of questions involved and the different types of jobs out there. To begin one needs to first understand the various types of Technical Program Manager roles out there.

Roles vary and the team’s needs vary on what type of skills they require. My goal in this post is to be as comprehensive as possible in what I believe a Technical Program Manager know and how he/she should prepare for the task ahead.

 I believe one of the most important things is to talk to other tech PMs on what they do and how they do things on a daily basis. Network! Network with people talk to them understand the skills they use and figure out what’s missing or what you are strong and are weak at. Read more on the “Art of Networking”. 

 Recent updates to this post

Recommended Reading: System Design 

Recommended Reading: Scalability 

Recommended Reading: Cloud

Cloud Architecture: A Guide To Design & Architect Your Cloud  – Gives a great overview of all you need to know about the cloud. (AWS centric).  Must read for TPMs. Probably the best material out there! Use coupon “CLOUD-30-OFF for a 30% discount, this is a limited-time promotion.  

Learn the A to Z of Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Gives an in-depth overview of detailed architecture on how a TPM would use the various AWS Services. This would layer on top of all the system design prep. Use coupon “AWS-30-off for a 30% discount, this is a limited-time promotion.  

Most interviews today ask for how you would do X on the cloud and the above two courses would help with that.

Recommended Reading:  For a People Managers

Recommended Reading:  Agile / Scrum / Project Management

Recommended Reading: TPM/PM Interview Prep Guidance 

Recommended Listening:

The book “Cracking The PM Interview” is definitely the most comprehensive book written for technology PMs be it a Product or a Program Manager. It can be used as an effective guide to prep and for Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager. The book covers various things from the very basics of what a Program Manager does to going into a fair amount of detail on big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple etc. A fair amount of advice from industry veterans, to how one should build and format your resume. This book by Gayle Laakmann then goes into extensive detail on interview preparation for PMs with various behavioral questions and answers and also product, case studies, and estimation questions. It also touches some of the basics like defining yourself and cover letters. 

Though this is a must-read this book it does not cover several fundamental areas like:-  interview Questions for a Technical Tools for Program Management: Today there are literally hundreds of agile management tools out there. But knowing one or better both of the most commonly used Agile tools like Rally and/or JIRA would put you in the forefront among your competitors. If you do not have the experience, there are enough and more youtube videos on this so you should be able to pick this up fairly quickly. 

 Also, get familiar with traditional project management tools like Microsoft Project. This really comes in handy when you are dealing with a long ended project spanning several months involving several cross dependent functional groups.

Technology: The book does not cover ANYTHING on various technologies you need to know nor does it cover design questions which are very frequently asked questions during Interviews for Technical Program Managers.  I’ll be trying to deep dive into this, later in this post. 

Product / Program Manager Roles: Also the book does not clearly differentiate between Product and Program Management. I believe Microsoft is one of the few places I know where the Program Manager also works as a Product Manager but in most other places they are separate roles. Both of who work in tandem and have a close relationship, the roles themselves could be very different. In my opinion, a Technical Program Manager focusing on architecture, scalability, and delivery while the Product Owner who primarily focuses on the vision, design, market research, usability and potential revenue of the product being built.

It also does not distinguish between the various types of Technical Program Managers. Over the last couple of years, there has been an explosion in the specificity of the type of roles.

We have Technical Program Managers in the following discipline areas :

  • Front End:  Web, iOS, Android.
  • Backend: API, SDK – Platform.
  • Integration: PM who works with 3rd parties to integrate their APIs.
  • Business Intelligence: Big data, Hadoop, Machine learning, AI, etc.
  • ERP: Implementing Oracle EBS, SAP, SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.
  • Localization: To take existing products/services to international markets.
  • Hardware: Chip Manufacturing. VMWare, Nvidia, Intel, etc
  • Data Center: With all the cloud stuff happening, there is a dearth for datacenter PMs.
  • Process : Lean, Six Sigma, Process optimization, Scrum/Agile Coach, PMO.
  • Launch /Release PMs – Coordinating with 10 or 20 other PMs to get a Program to a launch.
  • Security: Managing Risk, Governance, Compliance.
  • Operations: Stability, Scalability, Monitoring, Disaster Recovery, System Health.
  • UX/UI: Specialize in managing large UX teams to have a consistent story and feel within the product.

Of course, there possibly are many more and there are PM generalists as well. I personally see more opportunities for specialized PMs. So know where you fit in and definitely try to be an expert in your area.

 The Art of Scalability” is a must-read for PMs in the tech world. It is a much harder read compared to Laakmann’s book. It goes into great depth on organizational scalability and technology scalability and building high-performance teams. I would highly recommend this book if you are applying to any modern tech company.    interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.          

NoSQL Distilled: It a very easy read it takes away all the ambiguity and questions you might have on NoSQL. It is a beginners book, very well written. I think this is also a must-read for every technical program manager as most modern systems are moving away from traditional RDBMS to NoSQL this could get you sounding like an expert 🙂 

The “Grokking the System Design Interview” is one of the best solutions to system design questions out there and I can guarantee you it’s well worth the money. It starts with covering fundamentals like Load balancing, Caching, Sharding, Indexes, Queues, Redundancy, and Replication, SQL vs. NoSQL, CAP Theorem, Consistent Hashing, Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent. 

It then moves on to solving the most commonly asked system design questions like TinyURL, Pastebin, Instagram, Dropbox, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Netflix, Typeahead, API Rate Limiter, Twitter Search, Facebook Feed, Yelp, Uber backend. It’s very hard to predict what interview questions you might get asked but if you understand these basic solutions you can use them like building blocks to possibly construct any design question that you may come across. 

Remember that when you go in for your TPM interview at any company the full day loop has 5 rounds and 3-4 out of the 5 rounds are going to be on system design. Which is why I recommend “Grokking the System Design Interview” as a must-read. You can use the “mariogerard10” to get a 10% discount to Grokking the system design. I also have a detailed review of the course here. 

 Once you are done with reading through that the next thing you would want to do is to set up a “Mock System Design Interview“.  This dramatically increases your chances. 

My Introductory Course for TPMs is available now. The goal of this course is to give a good primer to understand the TPM role in detail. This course is of great value to people who have not worked at one of the big tech companies previously.  I presented this course to several fortune 500 organizations and have received over 200 of reviews on Udemy. 

Anyway, I digress, let’s now come back to how one needs to prepare for an Interview as a Technical Program Manager. 

Network & Referrals: First if you have not already started networking, go to meetups, talk to people about the tools, process and the technology they use. Most often you would hear from people you know of opportunities at their organization before it’s even posted these days. Also, in my opinion, it is very important to apply via a referral. Having a referral most definitely helps you stand out from the crowd. Even better if you can have your contact to go and talk to the hiring manager or the HR for you.    interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.          

LinkedIn Premium: It is $30 per month or so. Do I recommend it? Hmm I’m on the fence about this. I would ask you to try out the one-month free offer you automatically get and see what you feel about it. I think it gives me some insight to the people applying to the opportunity. It gives you the breakdown on the number of people and their background. It also matches your “skills” to the job description.

All in all, it’s definitely not worth $30 per month but it kinda tells you if there are a 100 applicants to a job or 10 which is a significant piece of info if you pursuing a referral lead or if you browsing jobs. NOTE: LinkedIn tells you the number of people who have applied for the job via LinkedIn you can assume that there are likely 5x more people who probably found the job through other means or directly applied on the website depending on the popularity of the company. 

Another interesting this is that with LinkedIn Premium you get access to https://www.linkedin.com/learning/  that is a decent resource.

Linkedin, in general, is by far the BEST place, in my opinion, to search for jobs. LinkedIn today is better than www.indeed.com as it offers so much more insight into the job, the company and at the time the poster of the job. It tells you hiring patterns, who has posted the job etc. I strongly advise you to create job alerts that send you the latest right to your inbox every day. The new LinkedIn Jobs app which is a separate app designed for job search is fantastic as well a must-have in my opinion.

Having a good LinkedIn profile also helps. Don’t take this lightly. If you have a link or two on your resume you are sure to get people’s attention and 70% of them are going to click on the links. It is simply human nature to explore. 

Resume: Second is to have a kick-ass Resume! I am not sure why but 70% of the resumes out there are plain junk! They are hard to read, not coherent nor do they cohesively narrate a story; people list an awful lot of non-relevant things, some are way too generic. Try formatting your resume with easy to read bullets. Talk about projects, programs, features you rolled out, detail HOW you rolled them out, the challenges you faced and the end result and what it accomplished all in a single readable bullet point 🙂 How you ask well I’m sure being a PM one of your core skills are to communicate well, show it off on your resume ! 

Try to do your resume well because this is the only thing that is going to get you through the door other than networking and referrals of course. Take a look at your competition here you will see a good amount of the people applying for the same jobs and their resumes.  Get feedback from your friends, mentors, and people you trust. If you don’t think you have it in you get professional help. There are many professional resume writers who specialize in writing tech resumes. If you are looking for something better I have a whole section on what your resume should look like here.  

Certifications: You can read how I feel about certifications in general here. I think to have the PMP and Scrum certification is good and almost necessary. Though I have interviewed and worked with several top-notch PMs who don’t have either. I think they add value when someone is looking at your resume and in more traditional organizations who value certifications over actual experience. Also, certifications help individuals who are trying to break into the TPM role. 

Technical Stuff: Ohh God! This is the tough part simply because as a Technical Program Manager your interview could go anywhere from coding, designing a system, talking about technologies to even specific questions on designing an API or to discussing how HTTPS works. The sheer breadth of things you need to know about is huge. Which I believe is why no one has ever taken up tackling this.

There is no one place where you can learn all of it and most importantly if you do not have a Tech Program Manager experience it is going to be hard to grasp. It also very much depends on the job you apply for, there can be a Sr. Technical Program Manager role for a video conferencing service where they might expect you to have a fair knowledge of video encoding or SPI video packet transmission protocols. Most often they are not looking for you to be an expert or Ph.D. on the topic but a fair understanding and knowledge of how it works. Though “Grokking the System Design Interview”  will surely help you here. 

Elevator Pitch: This is what every interviewer is going to ask you if you get called be it HR or be it the hiring manager. Be concise talk about your education, certifications, your blog if you have one, your GitHub or Stack Overflow rank,  the org you are part of, your team and its core tenets. Add in your key accomplishments and contributions to the team.

 Your pitch should be for 2 to 3 minutes and please don’t put the interviewer to sleep. Be energetic and enthusiastic wake him/her up and have him engaged. Look out for what perks their interests and give more of it. Practice makes perfect if I wake you up in the middle of the night and ask you what do, you got to be able to tell me your pitch even when you are half asleep, that’s how well you got to know it.

After talking 100’s of TPMs from all types of companies from all over the world. I decided that I would create a 101 course for TPMs. Technical Program Management 101  The reason why I bring this up is I find a lot of TPM aspirants who do not understand the role well enough. My request is for you to map what you learn from the course to your elevator pitch. Understand roles and responsibilities and terminology and design the perfect elevator pitch.

I’ll split the Technical Preparation & Questions into two :-

  1. System Design
  2. Terminologies & Technologies

System Design Questions for Technical Program Managers

Again one of the best resources that I know of out there for system design is  – Grokking the System Design Questions & Answers. This has been created and very thoughtfully curated by two individuals from Google and Facebook. 10% Discount code “mariogerard10”

 There is also this fantastic article written by Bogdan Gheorghe of Amazon on “How to be a successful TPM at Amazon” to understand how the leadership principles make things happen.

And also check out “Ace The Technical Program Management Interview !” That was designed to be a comprehensive one stop shop for your prep. Else follow along below.

Remember the depth of system design varies. Here are some foundational links that will help you get a primer of what you need to know on system design. 

 Here are some of the question collected from various GlassDoor Reviews that I would say are useful. 

Technical System Design Questions for TPM

  • Designing an elevator system
  • Design a Parking lot system
  • Shopping cart – How do you store this information when you use multiple servers that are load balanced.
  • How would you design a Twitter Feed? –Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Recommendation system for fashion/clothes and accessories – Fundamentals here. 
  • How does Uber Store & retrieve lat &long for a cab driver?
  • If a user is at x,y give me five of the closest drivers. – Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Extend the product page X and add the auction capability.
  • How are your ensuring security or localization on a mobile device?
  • Design a web-based email system.
  • Describes pieces, components, design, large scale, and use case
  • Design an application like Siri, Cortana or Alexa
  • Design Facebook or the privacy features in Facebook. 
  • Explain different performance scenarios for Instagram architecture. 
  • Explain the different places you have caching in OneDrive.
  • Designing an activity feed system – Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Design  WhatsApp / Facebook Messenger: Issues of each, scaling problems, offline/online users and availability, notification etc – Grokking the System Design Interview” & Link-1 & Link 2 
  • An airline carrier is losing a lot of bags – Design a solution.
  • Design Dropbox etc. – Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Design X’s frequently viewed product page shows the last 5 items you viewed.
  • Design the product recommendation feature based on a user’s purchase history.
  • Design an online poker game or Tick Tack Toe for multi-players.
  • Solve for persistence, concurrency, scale.
  • Instagram –Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Design a URL compression system – Bitly – Link 1Link 2
  • Search engine: basic crawling, collection, hashing etc. (Depends on your expertise on this topic).
  • Autocomplete / Typeahead  Search- Link
  • Design a coupon system for a website like Peach or Uber.
  • Design a picture sharing website. How will you store thumbnails, photos? Usage of CDNS? Caching at various layers etc.
  • Design a push and inbox messaging platform.
  • Design a product based on maps, eg Hotel / ATM finder given a location.
  • Design malloc, free and garbage collection system. What data structures to use? Decorator pattern over malloc etc.
  • Design a site like www.Pronto.com (price comparison, availability on eCommerce websites)
  • When and will you cache, how often would you query,  crawl efficiency, etc?
  • Design a system for collaborating over a document simultaneously (e.g.: google docs)?
  • Design an electronic election / Ballot machine architecture
  • Design a logging system  – Splunk or ELK
  • Design Netflix, Youtube,  Spotify –Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Build a machine learning system to detect if a fake user.
  • How do you design a system with 99.999% availability
  • Design an amusement Park Ticketing system for user ride efficiency
  • Design Uber –Grokking the System Design Interview
  • Design an Inventory Management System
  • Design a Video Conferencing application. – InfoQ Solution 
  • Design any of the above architectures only using AWS, GPC or Azure- For Any cloud team.
  • Troubleshoot a slow website or a slow e-reading device.

So there you go 41 questions. For questions like design Facebook or Uber, the interviewer will likely give you a specific feature he/she is looking to get you started on. Interview Questions for a Technical Program Man

 To answer design questions, one must be very methodical. In my opinion, requires extreme discipline to follow a format and not jump around. Unless you have a fair amount of experience it is an easy place to fail. Preparing for these types of questions is key. 

Start doing these in an exercise book and ask someone you know to review them. Start with a few and then try to get to all of them. The likelihood of you being asked a design question that does not rely on the above principles of architecture is very less likely. If you would like to do some mock interviews reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Good intro to system design on Youtube – Link

Steps on Tacking a System Design Interview for A TPM   Interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.        

  • Ask as many questions as possible to get a clear understanding of the requirements. 
  • Write them down the main use cases on the whiteboard.
  • Ask re-clarifying and scope related questions.
  • Once you have the requirements written down draw up a flow diagram with various components and how they are connected and talk about the possible use cases.
  • Think out loud. Verify your assumptions with the interviewer.
  • Be prepared to write up the APIs specs for the flows and split the applications down by features.
  • Also, you would need to have a fair understanding of various types of databases. When do you use RDBMS vs NoSQL? When do you use a message queue? Which type of queue would you use?
  • Detailing what kind of cache you would use and where.
  • Talk about scaling, Redundancy, DR.

Interviews might even ask you to code a feature if you have had coding experience in the past.  Interview Questions for a Technical Program Mana

Terminologies & Technologies Interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager

 Terminologies & Technologies is a tough one, just because there are way too many to list and even if I did list within a couple of months they are going to be out of date. And then there is a question as to what depth does a Technical Program Manager need to know and what kind of Interview Questions and Preparation he do? The answer is that it varies 🙂

 Cloud for TPMs 

 As you start interviewing you will realize that most organizations today are asking for cloud expertise. For a TPM one of the best resources to learn about the cloud is Cloud Architecture: A Guide To Design & Architect Your Cloud.

This course gives a good overview of cloud-native principles, Scaling on the cloud, Security, and Operations on the cloud. The course covers most if not all the questions you would get asked during an interview.

The other course that is great for TPMs is the “Learn the A to Z of Amazon Web Services (AWS)” course that goes into details of how you would use all AWS services. It goes into the various architecture when using AWS services. 

Here Is My List of Fundamental Technical Workings A TPM Needs To Know:-  Interview Questions for a Technical Program Maager

Terminologies & Technologies

Link

Priority

Caching
Memcache Link High
Memcached or Redis Link Low
A comparative study of distributed caches  NA High
Redis Link1Link2 High
Memcached or Riak Link Medium
Persistent & Ephemeral Data Link Low
CDN Link High
API
Basic HTTP Response Codes Link High
REST Standards Link High
REST II Link High
RESTful.Web.Services Book Link High
Rest vs SOAP Link High
API Idempotence – I Link Medium
API Idempotence – II Link Medium
Immutable Services Link Low
Semaphore and Mutex Simplified Link High
Microservices Link High
Understanding REST Headers and Parameters Link Medium
One API, Many Facades? Link Medium
Pattern: Backends For Frontends Link Low
BFF @ SoundCloud Link Low
Scalability
Throughput vs latency Link High
Capacity Planning Link High
Fault Tolerance, Redundant systems vs High Availability Systems Link High
Apache Mesos & Docker Link Medium
Ring pop I Link Low
Ring pop II Link Low
Architecture In General
OAUTH Blog High
Certificates and HTTPS Link 1, Link 2 High
TCP/IP and Networking Fundamentals Link High
Scalability Harvard Web Development Link High
Starvation and Deadlock I Link High
Starvation and Deadlock II Link High
Why stateless applications are always the way to go Link High
Processes, Synchronization & Deadlock Link Medium
Computer Networking Link Medium
Stateless by Stan Hanks Link Medium
Big Data
MapReduce Link High
Hadoop Basics Link High
Machine Learning Link Medium
Apache Spark (Real Time Processing of data) Link Low
Parquet Link Low
Queuing
Kafka I Link High
Kafka II Link High
Kafka II Link High
Building a Real-time Data Pipeline: Apache Kafka at LinkedIn Link High
ActiveMQ Link Medium
Kafka vs Rabbitmq vs Activemq vs Redis Link Medium
MQueue Link Low
Two strategies for Feed systems Link Medium
Spotify’s Event Delivery – The Road to the Cloud Link Low
HTTP Long poll Socket Link Low
Pub-Sub Link Low
Pub-Sub with Websphere Link Low
Databases
Cassandra High
mongo DB High
Graph DB High
CAP Theorem High
Introduction to NoSQL by Martin Fowler Link High
Other
JASON Formats and Documentation Link Low
Operating systems Link Low
RPC protocol Link Low
Types of pagination – Offset and cursor Link Medium
Design Patterns Link Low
Design Patterns Pluralsight Course Link Low
Algorithms and Data Structures – Part 1 Link Low
Big O Link Medium
Video
Video Scalability Link Low
SPI H.323 (Video Protocols) Link Low
SPI H.323 (Video Protocols) Link Low
SPI H.323 (Video Protocols) Link Low
Recommendations Systems
Global Recommendations Link Medium
Recommendations Systems Link Medium
Netflix launching in various countries & What it takes Link Medium
Hash Table
Hash Table – I Link High
Hash Table – II Link High
Hash Table – III Link Medium
Hash Table – IV Link Medium
Hash Table – V Link Medium
Perfect Universal Hashing Link Low
Cross Datacenter
Inter Datacenter usage? Cassandra Link Medium
Transactions Across Datacenters Link Medium
Distributed Transaction Layer: App Engine Link Medium
Other Interesting Things
Twitter by Hired in tech Link High
DropBox scaling Link High
Interviewing at Google Link Low

 

Cloud Design & Services

Cloud Architecture: A Guide To Design & Architect Your Cloud

Use coupon “CLOUD-30-OFF” for a 30% discount. Valid for a limited time only. 

Link  High

Learn the A to Z of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Use coupon “AWS-30-off” for a 30% discount. Valid for a limited time only.

Link High

 

Streaming Application Design Link  High
The Whys and Hows of Database Streaming Link High
Technical Program Management by Mario Gerard Link High

 Also, a pretty fundamental book to read is “Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites” Its kinda basic, but that what I like about it. 

Check Out This Video On How to “Land Your TPM Job”

Behavioral or Situational Interview Questions For TPMs  interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.    

One important part of Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager is to prepare well for behavioral interview questions. In my opinion, this is the easier part of the interview. All you need to do is have 5 to 8 different stories/project ready which you can use for various questions. Common questions include

  • Describe a situation where used your leadership skills to help your project team meet a difficult challenge.
  • Describe a situation where you should you technical aptitude and solved an issue.
  • Describe a situation where you negotiated a win-win situation.
  • Describe a situation where you changed the process to make it better and more productive
  • Describe the most complex project you have managed from start to finish and what were the challenges you encountered during your path.
  • How have you managed risk in a project?
  • What was a tough situation you faced and how did you overcome it?

You will find a thousand more when you google but if you have real projects that you have executed well you should be able to answer all of these with ease. Always use the STAR methodology  – Situation, Task, Action, Result. Be clear and detailed in your answers. Ask the interviewer if he is following along and if your answer was what he was looking for.

Pure Project Management Interview Questions for TPMs

Answers for the below questions live here.

  1. How would you handle non- productive developers?
  2. If you do not get traction form a fellow TPM on another Team what would you do?
  3. How do you motivate your team of developers?
  4. What are the main things you would look for when you are running a cross-team Program?
  5. Was your loyalty ever challenged ? Give an example of such a scenario and what you did about it?
  6. An example of a win-win situation you have negotiated.
  7. Give an example of a challenging situation you had and how you handled it
  8. Describe a situation where you were the voice of the customer?
  9. Give an example when you took ownership of a program.
    give an example where you insisted on the highest standards and at the same time focused on iterative development
  10. How do you earn the trust of your team members
  11. how did you use your analytical to solve a problem
  12. Example of getting by in from Stakeholders?
  13. A situation where you think target where unachievable and how you overcame it
  14. How do you add value to an already high-performance team
  15. What is the thing you are most proud of?
  16. An example of a stressful/tough situation you encountered. How did you handle it? If you had to do it over again, would you do it any differently?
  17. How do you plan for a project or program?
  18. What in your opinion are the three constraints of a project or program?
  19. What are the tell-tale signs that your project or program is going to fail?
  20. How have you contributed to the success of your programs?
  21. How would you increase the efficiency of your development team?
  22. How would you describe the critical path and float in a program?
  23. How do you deal with stress, pressure, and unreasonable demands?
  24. What are the tools you would use to ensure your program will succeed?
  25. If you come about an early delay in one of your milestones what would you do?
  26. Describe a situation when you had conflicting responsibilities and how did you handle it?
  27. How do you decide if you would like to you traditional project management vs Agile methodologies?
  28. How would you manage cross-team dependencies and deliverables?
  29. Describe a time when your project failed.
  30. What are the various states of a project? – RYG what do the various states stand for ? how do you move a Red to Green?
  31. The importance of data and how you have used data analytics in previous roles
  32. You missed a project deadline. How would you handle it?
Generic Agile Questions for TPMs

Answers to the questions live here.

  1. What are the different types of agile methodologies that you have used and know about?
  2. What are the core components of Scrum that you think are most valuable and what things do you feel are not so valuable?
  3. How would you describe the most effective standup?
  4. What are the best methods of sizing during a planning meeting
  5. What kind of preparation is necessary before you start a sprint planning meeting?
  6. How would you decide your sprint length?
  7. How do you calculate velocity? And how important is this? Where does calculating velocity not make sense?
  8. Have you ever used Kanban? Describe the situation where kanban makes sense and what are its advantages?
  9. Differentiate between cycle time vs Lead time?
  10. What are the key components of having a successful Agile team?
  11. Difference between a burn-up and a burndown chart?
  12. Various Agile tools you have used?
  13. How would you describe a spike in scrum?
  14. Why is CI, CD important?
  15. What is your take on documentation within a Scrum team?
  16. How do you manage dependencies within an agile development team?
  17. What is your take on the SAFe framework?
  18. What is your take on MVP?
  19. When does a scrum team fail and why?
  20. What are the primary advantages of using Scrum?
  21. Common problems of estimation during a planning session.
  22. How do you split large epic stories? Give an example.
  23. have you ever moved a Team to start using agile? If so describe the experience and the hurdles you faced.
  24. How do you prioritize when you groom your backlog or Take stories into your sprint?

Other Random Thoughts Interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.          

If you are looking towards more product-centric roles I would recommend reading-

Salary Negotiations Questions for a Technical Program Manager.          

Every HR recruiter who first screens you will be asking you about your current salary. You may not want to give it away but you should most definitely know what you are expecting and what the company might pay you. For this, I suggest using my previous blog which gives a good salary analysis for technical program managers.

If you do get a chance to interview, you are likely to have a lunch interview. Here is a good article on what to order for lunch 🙂 I am all about the food you know!

Humor    interview Questions for a Technical Program Manager.        

Always show off the lighthearted side of yourself. It helps in lightening the mood. Remember some interviewers are as stressed as you are and many people do not really know what to quiz you on or what they are even looking for. So be polite and professional but try to be light-hearted and humorous.

Finally one of the most important aspects, in every interview either on phone or on-site you will be given a chance to ask questions. This is very important, it shows the interviewer how well you are prepared and also puts forward things that you care about.

Here are some of my favorite questions to ask :
  • What in your opinion what are the most challenging aspects of this role or team?
  • How big is the team what are their backgrounds and experience?
  • What are your short term and long term goals for this team/role?
  • What does a typical day look like for the tech program manager at your organization?
  • What are the primary skills you are looking for?

Preparation and experience go hand in hand one without the other may only get you so far. I am going to try to keep this post current from time to time, so when you do decide to start looking stop by. Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager (TPMs), Amazon, Microsoft,  Google, Facebook, Uber, Linkedin, Oracle.

Please feel free to add your thoughts & comments below and add me to your LinkedIn Network! I love connecting with my readers. And dont forget to check out my TPM 101 course !

Mario Gerard 

The post Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager (TPM) appeared first on Technical Program Management.


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