Recent Technical Program Manager Interview Questions

Anonymous Aardvark - "Recently, I had to make a decision that I could automate a part of a process now and help the operations team reducing 9 hours of manual work to 60 minutes for one client. The second option was to fully automate the end to end process that would take 4 weeks of development, but fully automate the process and that could be rolled out across the board. The process was to change the member's paperless preference to paper when a sent email gets bounced 3 times in a row and inform her with a paper"See full answer

Aldar M. - "/my initial thought was to make an example with program integration project that I led a few years ago Stage 1: Project Planning. The first stage of SDLC is all about “What do we want?” my approach was simply take project life cycle structure(initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closure) and elaborate on each stages did i. I lack a details and Excell skills and I should have taken SDLC structure because I fits better with JD. Stage 2: Gathering Requirements & Ana"See full answer

Adib M. - "Situation: This is an example from 2019 where I worked as a TPM in a leading company in the Tax, Accounting and Audit software biz in N. America. All our engineering teams had adopted agile ways of working and utilizing Scrum. Our teams had been at this for a while and were pretty good at planning and executing sprints. We would have quarterly releases to Production but we strived to have Production ready increments each Sprint. Since the software was in use for years , we would often get Pr"See full answer

Push S. - "STAR story weaved around the project 0 to 1 execution with all the technical tradeoffs, issues, and success metrics involved."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

Namu - "Provided an example from my work history where I asked to move the Go-live date to prevent launch date failure."See full answer

Jane D. - "My approach to dealing with difficult stakeholders has always been: Engage - Directly engage with the stakeholder, meet or chat Listen - Listen to what they have to say, patiently. Understand - Understand their POV, even if it is impossible at some times Ask - Ask clarifying questions. Why? When? What? Engage again - Keep them in the loop until there is closure For example, we were in the final stages of a very important, strategic project for our organization. I was leading th"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

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

Hemanth M. - "Start by giving a brief overview of the technical stacks used in our product. Highlight the key technologies, frameworks, languages, and tools employed. This sets the stage for a more detailed discussion. In choosing our technical stack, we prioritized scalability, opting for micro-services architecture to ensure flexibility and ease of scaling components independently. This decision enables us to handle increased user loads while maintaining optimal performance. One trade-off we made was favo"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

Sreenisha S. - "Let me tell you about a time where a website I managed suddenly showed slow performance and the mistake on our side was it was unnoticed until a user reported the issue to management. As a PM for that project, I took full responsibility of the situation and worked with the engineering team to quickly resolve it. This mistake taught me the importance of focusing and monitoring non functional requirements as well in addition to new feature development /adoption where I was mostly spending my time"See full answer

Shasleen I. - "Clarifying Questions Who are we? Traditional elevator company or a new age tech startup Assumption: New age tech based elevator company Any constraints: Budget, etc. Assumption: No What kind of a skyscraper building: Assumption: Commercial. Includes office spaces as well as others Any particular goal with respect to building this elevator? Design best in class elevator providing the best user experience for passengers User needs - Users have the following needs when"See full answer

Ashley C. - "I follow a variation of the RICE framework when prioritizing how I ship product features. I start by looking at: Reach: Because the customer segmentation across our product portfolio is so similar, I tend to hold a lot of weight on product features that will maximize our customer reach with a minimal LOE. Impact: After establishing which customer segments will benefit from the product feature, I determine the urgency and estimated impact on each customer segment based on customer i"See full answer

Alfredo M. - "First, I'd like to ask some clarifying questions and try to narrow down the scope of this question. Among them I would like to ask: Are we looking to optimize for a specific goal or metric? Eg: we want more users/queries or are we looking to increase revenue? Are we testing over a specific aspect of Bing? EG: UI, search quality results, recommendation engine, etc. Duration and size of the test. Available resources or constraints (teams, technology, budget) Now, to ass"See full answer

Aabid S. - "We had a huge launch on September 1st of this year where we completely redesigned our application from the grounds up and also migrated to a new platform (React.JS). This project took us 8 months and the launch was a huge deal for the team. Unfortunately the launch wasn't as smooth as we expected and despite doing multiple rounds of QA, some major issues cropped up in the core part of the app right after launch and our client was quite upset since it was disrupting their day-to-day workflow. "See full answer

Daniel P. - "Okay, so I understand the question: "how does Google Maps compute estimated time of arrival"... There are a couple scenarios when ETA is calculated: planning a future journey, planning current journey. Can we assume scope to the current journey? The learnings will likely be transferable. User inputs to ETA include origin, destination, and route chosen. Let's assume first that the user has chosen an origin, destination, and a route chosen. We can come back to these assumptions later. The way I'"See full answer

Aabid S. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer