Practice: Setting Up Projects for Success

What the interviewer is looking for:

• Key project management skills: Stakeholder alignment, review process, delegation, standups, sprints, milestones, retrospectives, QA, etc.
• Experience directly managing a large, successful project.

Remember: Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on what kind of project management process to use. Whether you prefer Scrum, Agile, Kanban—or nothing at all—it's more important to show that your management style is nuanced and effective.

Here's what a good answer looks like:

"There's no shortage of ways to run a successful project, but there are a few really important things to think about. First, it's important to clarify what success actually means — in my mind, success means three things: Shipping an impactful project that solves a business need, meeting the deadlines set internally, and keeping up team morale.

To ship the most impactful project, you need to get alignment and buy-in from all the team members: engineers, product managers, marketing, sales — whoever has a stake in the project. It's important to get alignment before work is scheduled for the team, so that we know how much development time is required, how many people to staff the project with, and which engineers are best suited for the job. It's also useful to plan out dependencies: Is this project blocked by another team's work? Can we parallelize the development?

To meet deadlines, there are several processes I've found to be helpful. First, it's important to work with engineers and product to set a timeline and commit to regular checkpoints or milestones, allotting time as needed for design, development, and QA. When possible, I always try to pick a senior engineer to serve as the tech lead or DRI (directly responsible individual) for each project and empower them to run this process with the rest of the team. Typically it will be this person's responsibility to help translate all the project requirements into tasks, so that it's easier to assign work and track progress.

Finally, regular standups or syncs help improve communication between different parts of the team, increase velocity, and uncover issues faster. This is a good practice in general, but it's especially valuable if the project involves people across different teams—or remote employees—who are less likely to interrupt each other to ask questions. Of course, it's inevitable that some issues will come up that put a project at risk, but this process can help identify those issues faster."

Explanation

Did you notice that defining project success, getting stakeholder alignment, and planning for potential issues take up half this answer? This is truly the mark of an experienced manager. Remember, interviewers want concrete details, but the big-picture must come first, as it must in real project management scenarios. The second half goes into details. This interviewee clearly understands core project management processes and has experience running things. This has allowed her to build a mental framework for mitigating problems and delivering projects successfully.

Try it yourself

Record yourself answering this question. When you're finished, score your answer on the criteria below.

Great answers:

• Demonstrate an ability to anchor on the "why" (business goal) even when working on very complex projects.
• Demonstrate experience managing a large, successful project.
• Show competency in core components of project management like stakeholder alignment, the review process, delegation, stand-ups, sprints, milestones, retrospectives, QA.

Grading Rubric

Anchors on the "why".

☐ Your answer begins with context. You talk about high-level business goals and end users before jumping into details.

☐ Your answer specifically defines success.

Has experience managing large projects successfully.

☐ Your answer includes detail on the project scope and the impact it had. Use numbers to quantify wherever you can.

Competent in core project management practices.

☐ Your answer includes stakeholders. Most importantly, you want to talk through how you got buy-in and how you were able to balance their interests.

☐ Your answer talks through the main project management processes you follow (e.g. stand-ups in agile.) Be sure to include examples of what came out of each.

☐ Your answer includes details around how you organized your team and what the results were. Be sure to mention lessons you learned.