Recent Technical Program Manager Interview Questions

Anonymous Crayfish - "Let me tell you about a time when I solved a problem at my previous company (one of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies). This was an internship and I was coming with almost 2 years of experience and 2 semesters of my graduate program. My experiences have mostly been theoretical or with startups. I've never solved problems at scale. The first week at this team was slow and relaxed, it was just onboarding. The real work started from the 2nd week when I felt like I was pushed into the ocean with n"See full answer

Saket S. - "Agile processes have been a game changer for Software development projects from last 2 decades. But there are situations where Agile practices don't work very well and demand a workaround. Some of those scenarios are mentioned below: No Project Plan or Status reports: Agile Project team does not produce formal project plans or status reports unlike Traditional SDLC Projects. Sometimes it is hard to represent project status to senior executives who are interested in the overall status and risk"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

Praniti S. - "My mistake: I seemed to immediately suggest tools I am familiar with rather than walking through the process of identifying candidate tool sets and prototyping each one"See full answer

Surbhi G. - "I would start by understanding the project requirements and creating a detailed plan with clear milestones. I’d allocate resources effectively and use project management tools to track progress. Following an iterative development approach, I’d ensure regular testing and reviews. Finally, I’d deploy the solution, provide support, and gather feedback to make any necessary improvements." 4o mini"See full answer

Ravi K. - "voice"See full answer

Chozhls - "Product planning requires a strategic approach that balances customer needs, market trends, and business objectives. Here's a structured framework I recommend: Discovery:Understand the Market: Conduct in-depth market research to identify customer needs, pain points, and competitive landscape. Define User Personas: Create detailed user personas to understand your target audience's behaviors, goals, and challenges. Analyze the Problem: Clearly articulate the core problem your product aims to"See full answer

Divya K. - "You will need to start from Browser and go all the way up to Analytic systems and methods. Everything needs to be covered"See full answer

Divya K. - "Explain how you implemented your telemetry and observability in previous projects."See full answer

Anonymous Capybara - "using a relational database isn't a good choice for this system! we need more availability here than consistency (CAP theorem)"See full answer

Adib M. - "Ask if the quality aspect is negotiable? Clearly hoping it is not. Then move on to explain nicely about the iron triangle - scope, time, resources. With scope and resources fixed, the time would need to be variable unless the project is considered cookie cutter, the exact project has been done many times in the past. (which is unlikely). If time cannot be relaxed, then the scope should be variable."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

Prateek S. - "Clarifying questions: Why are we fixing the roads? Is it due to temporary damage or something structural has gone wrong? What is our purpose behind fixing the roads? Increase mobility in an area? Reduce inequality? reduce crime? Assumptions: Roads have had temporary damage due to rain / storm We know the specific roads which are bad and will need to be fixed Want to increase commercial traffic. Want people to visit a specific area which has bad roads and slow moving traffic. W"See full answer

Hans - "Situation: Was given negative feedback about an aspect of my communications. The person said it made them worried because of the brevity and the format of some messages. (Their worry was that a longer negative message was coming) Task(s): Reflected on feedback about my communication style. Acknowledged the point. Assumed best intentions on the part of the person giving the feedback Saw things from the other person's point of view Action(s): In private - Apologised to the person wh"See full answer

Scott S. - " Project Overview: Real-Time Risk Management System Objective The goal was to develop a real-time risk management system capable of processing and analyzing large volumes of trading data to provide near-instantaneous risk assessments. This system was crucial for enabling traders to make informed decisions while managing their exposure to various market risks in real-time. Complexity Factors 1. \\Data Volume and Velocity\\ \\High Throughput:\\ The system needed to ha"See full answer

Chitapuram N. - "Since there is a need for the data to be accurate and consistent without any latency to allocate a spot, can't the data be synchronously synced to replicas after every write as the number of writes are not many per min, instead of read lock phenomena Let me know if i am on a wrong thought here."See full answer

dreamingincode - "In the API design, the interviewer is switching between RPC style (operation based endpoints) and REST style (resource oriented). Sticking to one convention and explaining why it is preferred over the other e.g. REST if the twitter domain maps nicely to resources e.g. /tweet or /follower or /user would help to create a more consistent and unified API. It would make it easier for clients to integrate with the API as well."See full answer