Engineering Manager Behavioral Interview Questions

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

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

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

Ushita S. - "A clarifying question: Is this question asking about when I met a tight deadline in a project or how did I manage a project that had a tight deadline? The answer uploaded to this question is good, I would also add 'creating a critical path from overall project schedule and then making sure that none of the deliverables in the critical path are sacrificed in order to meet the tight deadline' as an action taken."See full answer

Bipin R. - "As you know, this is the most important question for any interview. Here is a structure I like to follow, Start with 'I'm currently a SDE/PM/TPM etc with XYZ company.... ' Mention how you got into PM/TPM/SDE field (explaining your journey) Mention 1 or 2 accomplishments Mention what you do outside work (blogging, volunteer etc) Share why are you looking for a new role Ask the interviewer if they have any questions or will like to dive deep into any of your experience"See full answer

WaterBuffalo - "One of the most challenging situations was joining a new startup to realize that they did not figure out their core product and that customers were dissatisfied and leaving in droves. I worked together with the leaders to understand the core issue and the reasons that the customers were leaving. Then together with the team, we set out to map out those core issues and the gaps that we had in our product. We then worked towards designing a new solution to address those gaps and build an MVP. W"See full answer

Umang S. - "Scenario - I had joined a product in my current company as a PM midway through its development. It is a very sensitive product with a major public services company. As the product was close to its go-live date, it had to go through many checks and many signoffs. A couple of them were through data policy department and the platform department, of which we were using all of the components for our product. We needed policy sign off to authorise the use of data to understand user interactions and"See full answer

Ayinde B. - "I was working for my friend building streams at venues across the Chicago land area for FGC (fighting game tournaments), I adjusted and engineered his equipment to be set up permanently that's until covid came around at least. I used OBS to give visual appearances to stream watchers. So we're talking about subscribe, follow, and donation notifications and things of that nature for viewers to know they contributed in one of those ways. I set up proper sign-up scheduling for participants to lock t"See full answer

Astro S. - "Please provide a transcript. One grasps 150 words in a video, but can grasp 250 words when reading text."See full answer

Vikas T. - "This is coming from an Amazon manager who are taught to PIP people out. The first part he said is completely opposite with Amazon. They just pull people randomly into the room and put them either on dev list or PIP. This is unfortunately true for all of Amazon."See full answer

Anjali V. - "I feel this is more about "Describe a time when I failed or struggled" rather than "Project Failure"."See full answer

Aishwarya J. - "Looking into licensing data for users to match with the validity of their plans , to set up reporting okr's and metrics from the ground up and future problem sculpting for future feature additions I developed the metrics from the existing data tables , with uniform interpretation for datasets used across teams, keeping the modifications done in alignment with the requirements of the stakeholders. Hypotheses for licensing metrics was laid out in a defined manner where it was feasible to cherry"See full answer

Mrinalini R. - "A good answer is describing an experience where you either proposed something that was selected after discussion or an alternate approach was taken, or you disagreed with a decision and argued for something else, either successfully or not. A good answer would be you had cogent arguments, the decision went another way for some reason, and you then fully backed the decision (agree to disagree is another way of stating it). You did not take it personally and you fully committed to the deci"See full answer

Ra R. - "In my time at Snapp! I was in charge of communicating the product backlog to our CEO. We had a shared Jira board that he had access to and I made specifically for him. One day he saw me in the office and said he doesn’t know anything about our backlog and that’s because I failed to communicate with him. I got upset at first because of the fact that I made the dashboard exclusively for him. But I tried to ask questions to understand his point of view in depth. He then mentioned he doesn't have t"See full answer

Adib M. - "Notes from the Video. 1-1s are two way feedback. Important tool to discuss things that are not possible in group setting feedback to employee by manager feedback to manager by employee Feedback to employee can vary by the type of performer the employee is (a) high performer (b) meets expectations (c) under performing Dos and Don't Avoid project discussion as they can be obtained else where. Focus on feedback to employee. Unless there is a critical project item to be d"See full answer

Ben G. - "Situation - A time I dealt with conflict while on a team was while I was working at Shopify on physical and digital gift card refund point of sale solutions. The situation was that we were dealing with complex technical constraints including not changing particular UI components behavior to act as they should be intended. On the refund screen, the existing design was using a toggle on the same screen to bring up a modal for gift card selection to either select digital or physical options. Thi"See full answer

Ross B. - "I most want to communicate a few principals of conflict resolution that I believe were integral in this situation, which are mutual respect, a results orientation, an unwavering focus on the user. To that end, here’s how I’d like to structure this answer: First, I’ll tell you about the project we were working on, to provide some background for you. Second, I’ll describe the disagreement. Third, I’ll describe how we arrived at a solution, and finally, I’ll discuss how those 3 conflict resolu"See full answer

LateArriver - "A mature manager. Great conversational answer. I wish more sessions with him"See full answer

Anna D. - "Situation. Initially, my team consisted of young guys who were hired by team leaders based on hardskills. Previously, the company had just begun the transition from a process-based to a product-based approach. In the process of searching and selecting candidates, the interests of the team and the product owner were not taken into account. The candidate didn't pass a behavioral interview on soft skills. Thus, the team consisted of diverse and talented guys, but not very interested in fast wor"See full answer

Vikas T. - "Too much talk nothing concrete to know about the person that I am interviewing."See full answer