Engineering Manager Behavioral Interview Questions

Kanishkan V. - "I responded with a project that I was a part of during my capstone class. I described how I used HTML, Python, and PostGRESQL in conjunction to create a functioning website using SCRUM."See full answer

Pramod S. - "Engineering Managers (EMs) juggle multiple responsibilities, which can vary significantly depending on the company, team, and organizational needs. One of the most critical skills for an EM is strategic thinking. This includes setting a clear vision for the team, participating in roadmap planning meetings, and crafting actionable roadmaps to guide the team toward its goals. In addition to strategic thinking, an EM must excel in three key areas: People Management: This involves ensuring te"See full answer

Delyan P. - "Leadership though empathy - I helped underperforming engineer to break into product since she had great product qualities like good attention to the user.. Now she is my peer and we cross-collaborate extensively. I have earned her trust and she can go the extra mile when my team needs some support."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

Shawn S. - "Context: As a people manager, my biggest thing is to foster psychological safety for my team members and the way I do that: building rapport between me and my direct reports, weekly team meetings I ensure all voices are heard, have people share about themselves and encourage them to get to know one another. Team members had a good understanding of each other’s working style. One of the recent projects my team was responsible for building out the espresso test framework on android. This was"See full answer

Anastasiia V. - "First, I would operationalize the term "slip" by asking: What’s slipping — delivery, scope, quality, or decision-making? Second, I would ask the following questions that help me shape the possible causes for the "slip": What is important for us in this project delivery: time/quality/scope? What is the priory of this project? Is it urgent? Do we have a strict customer or other stakeholder commitment? Is it a big project that involves multiple teams or is only one team involved"See full answer

Howard H. - "We have to work with the c-suite to understood the direct quartly outcomes or goals. This could be our epic and then we try to break that down into business value and complexity . This will allow us to prioritize whats next. From there we can structure a mvp to cover maybe some of these areas to understand the estimation of this work. After the first couple weeks we can structure a roadmap and then define when"See full answer

shg - "In my experience, project success translates to three things: Customer Success => Quality increments to service leading to customer success. (Measure by KPIs like customer satisfaction score, SLA, Revenue growth etc) Team Success => High Team morale with successful execution and collaboration of project. Individual Success => Individual career goals and aspirations are met I think the later two are difficult are measured via KPIs. Although there can be indirect KPIs to measure those as we"See full answer

BePostive - "· How well the team is self-motivated and contributing overall success of the company by releasing high quality bug prone releases · Growth of their team members · Does the manager encouraging and supporting career switch based on the individual desire or passion"See full answer

MM4 - "Success can be measured in various forms, both quantitatively and qualitatively. How many projects were delivered on time? Is the team tracking well against timelines? How often do they need to be course corrected? How much of the architecture is scalable when features are built on top of their work? What is the technical quality of the work produced by the team? How often are engineers from the team looped in for advice, mentorship outside the team? How often & why are interp"See full answer

BePostive - "· Sometimes I have to step back and think through and respond later, not giving decision then and there · Manage between written vs oral communication, I tend to do mode of communication like oral during releases rather written"See full answer

Graig - "Reflect leadership quality in software engineering team"See full answer

Neo S. - "I gave an example of a situation where on the project we needed to onboard 110 applications into the system to get their account and entitlement information for quarterly access review work stream. Traditionally we could have gone manual route and could have done it manually one by one which would have required more time and resources. I actually understood the applications and how they are built by talking to application owners and then based on the data bucketed them and found the pattern that"See full answer

Graig - "I faced twice and it always slows down the career trajectory of engineers with complete context loss of previous hard earned projects"See full answer