Top Technical Program Manager Interview Questions

DM - "Clarifying my assumptions first, i.e. "Technical contributions are not just writing or reviewing code". Answer : My contributions to any program I lead as a TPM are as follows : Inputs towards design, architecture review, mapping requirements to the proposed design, reviewing the implementation strategy w.r.t scalable solution, Writing core user-centric test scenarios, Validating proposed design vs implementation estimates vs initial planning. etc... Example : Situation: We are a"See full answer

Surbhi A. - "Authentication verifies "Who you are." Authorization determines "What you can do." Authentication establishes identity, while authorization specifies the actions or resources a user or entity is allowed to access or perform."See full answer

Adib M. - "(1) Discovery: Get to know the stakeholders, PM, Engg team via 1-1. Attend project status meeting where either you are introduced to the stakeholders or actually run it with the goal being to introduce yourself and that you will be catching up on the state of the project in time of the next meeting Understand the Goals of the project and its impact on team and enterprise (2) Planning: Based on current velocity/ burn-rate, estimate what % of the project would be complete at 100% resource uti"See full answer

Mahesh L. - "Preparing for a significant security compliance change can be overwhelming. The most efficient way to achieve GDPR compliance is through interdepartmental collaboration and the use of technology solutions that automate and validate business needs such as policy compliance, data security and required reporting. As the deadline looms, most organizations should already have started assessing the business impact, devising a company-wide implementation plan and addressing additional resource needs. E"See full answer

Y C. - "One way to develop project metrics is around what problem the project is trying to solve within a particular timeframe, at a cost of x dollars and with y quality Scope: Did the project deliver as per the problem statement - over and beyond Resources metrics: Planned resources were utilized to contribute to the success Budget: Did the cost of the project implementation be under the budget or over? Schedule: In-flight milestones were completed on time or not as per the plan Was the proje"See full answer

Amit A. - "When I look to join a company, I think of long term association. Hence, I put a lot of focus on the team that I am going to work with, the culture, the value that I will add to the company & the opportunities for me to learn & grow. Microsoft is one of the pioneers in the tech industry touching the lives of many corporate and consumer clients and helping them to achieve more. To answer your question specifically, i would say -: Microsoft will provide me a platform to work with some of the sma"See full answer

Mohammad shahid S. - "We were working on a very high stake migration project where were suppose to migrate all the traffic (more than 40 million users per day) from legacy to modern micro-services based architecture. Before making this massive migration decision, company has already developed a lot of services outside monolith and we were suppose to utilise those services. Some these services there were PADs responsible to communicate the specific vendor APIs. For each vendor we had a dedicated PAD. Fast forward"See full answer

Ash I. - "Follow STAR Example: In my most recent role at x, we've been working every quarter to set our quarterly goals or even decide for the year but given in 2022 we've been through a great resignation phase there was a high attrition because of which we have overloaded engineering teams. During last quarterly planning, I started to question with my manager about giving a focus to our engineering, so we complete one thing absolutely fine which is more impactful for our customers and add immediate val"See full answer

Scott S. - " Situation In the derivatives trading domain, timely and accurate data is crucial for making informed trading decisions. Our existing data processing system was facing challenges with latency and scalability, which hindered our ability to react swiftly to market changes. To address these issues, we designed a new real-time market data processing platform. Task The task was to develop a low-latency data processing platform that could handle real-time market data ingestion, processing, an"See full answer

Catherine I. - "I always ask to clarify if this is a brand new team. If so, then I focus on bringing in people with strong technical aptitudes(since I'm hiring for software engineering), but also team members that have experience mentoring and good communication is a must. I look for people who have leadership qualities. I emphasize that building a brand new team isn't something I can do on my own, so the initial hires of that team are very important to help me expand it."See full answer

Sagrika S. - "The biggest factor that excites me about technology is its ever changing and dynamic trend. In my life, I have seen the transition from landlines to simple mobile to smartphones, from Cathode tube desktop screen to super slim TFT and many more. I think technology has now (with time) become integral part of human life and getting in-sync with it is like a normal and very cool phenomena."See full answer

Tanu M. - "I always look at the project from three angles, Scope, Schedule, and Cost. To measure the success of the project we also have to look at the other factors, other than the scope, schedule and cost. Here are some of the factors I look at while measuring the success : Metrics : While defining the Goal of the program, we also define the metrics. To assess whether the goal is getting achieved or not, we need to measure the metrics i.e whether the metrics of the program are getting hit or not. For e"See full answer

Ilakiya R. - " Design & Architecture Overview: The system was a scalable, cloud-based web application built to manage customer data and automate service requests. Frontend: React.js: Chosen for its component-based architecture, reusable UI, and fast rendering using Virtual DOM. Backend: Node.js with Express.js: Selected for non-blocking I/O, scalability, and rapid API development. Database: MongoDB: Used for its flexible schema, scalability, and ease of handling unstructured data. Authentication: JWT"See full answer

Anthony F. - "Asked clarifying questions to know if this was a program already in existence, how long the problem had been, causes and how the problem was brought to attention. Using that information, went through a framework (provided generally below): Making sure to review documentation/existing contracts/vendors/plans. Review budget and timeline for the program. Review resources available. Review the data (or gather) and the scope of the project (city center, suburbs, few blocks, whole city, etc). Set mee"See full answer

Nilanjan D. - "I think we can analyse the data that's collected especially the users who are requesting it.if we find that there are set of users who regularly use this service then we may cache the data for those users to speed up processing and better the experience. The fresh data (which will be a delta on the cached data can only be calculated) and the stale data can be left out thereby updating the cache"See full answer

Nithesh S. - "First, let us start with the mission of Amazon: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.” Alignment of recommendations system with Amazon's mission: Suggesting recommendations to the users would be a part of this mission as it would allow users to buy things on their mind for the lowest cost in market (may or may not be true). They might get better prices if they order adjacent items together. For example, i"See full answer

James H. - "I broke the vehicles down by regions in the world. Designed a wireless api interface to sync with a database backend that linked to google maps through another service and api."See full answer

Adib M. - "Clarifying question(s) Is the upcoming deadline an internal milestone or is it an external facing deadline (ie. compliance/ product launch / feature release)? What would be the repercussion/Is there any possibility of moving the deadline (if needed)? Do we know any details on the team member, Jane in terms of how long the sick leave is likely to be? Is it a fever or is it something bigger that could have her out for much longer? Situation: Jane taking sick leave and the project has an upcom"See full answer

S G. - "If it's a product end to end, then there's a lot to say. If it's just a feature on top of a product then I will focus on the complexity and how I break complex tasks into small milestones to partner with XFN teams to nail it. Focus on situation, task, actions and results"See full answer