Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
Cross Team Coordination and Dependencies
Covers strategies and practices for planning, executing, and governing work that spans multiple teams and external stakeholders. Key skills include dependency mapping and critical path analysis to determine what work blocks other work and what can be parallelized; release planning and sequencing across teams; integration testing and deployment coordination; and risk identification and mitigation for teams that are on the critical path. Candidates should be able to describe communication and governance rituals such as cross team standups, scrum of scrums, program increment planning, weekly dependency reviews, and escalation protocols. Practical tooling and artifacts include dependency trackers, shared issue boards, visibility dashboards, RACI matrices or clear owner commitments, and cross team milestone plans. At larger scale candidates should show judgement about scaling frameworks such as the scaled agile framework and Large Scale Scrum and when to adopt them versus lightweight coordination. Interviewers will probe trade off conversations and stakeholder facilitation, how to resolve conflicting release priorities, how to remove cross team blockers, and how to measure and improve cross team flow and delivery predictability.
Risk Management and Contingency
Proactively identifying project risks, assessing likelihood and impact, and developing mitigation and contingency plans. Covers general risk planning and contingency strategies as well as identifying and mitigating technical risks such as complexity, performance, and integration issues, tying risk assessments to timeline and scope decisions and establishing monitoring and trigger conditions for contingencies.
Risk Management and Dependency Resolution
Identify and assess technical and organizational risks early, prioritize them by impact and likelihood, and develop mitigation and contingency plans. Document dependencies, proactively unblock critical cross team dependencies, set trigger conditions for escalation, and communicate residual risk to stakeholders. Demonstrate use of risk registers, risk scoring, trade off analysis, and explain how technical complexity and dependencies influence timeline estimation, team composition, and program decisions.
Technical Literacy for Project Management
Knowledge and communication skills that enable a project manager to credibly engage with engineering and technical teams. Candidates should demonstrate familiarity with system architecture concepts, application programming interfaces, databases, cloud platforms and deployment models, testing and monitoring strategies, security and compliance considerations, and scalability and performance trade offs. This includes understanding technical choices such as monolith versus microservices or SQL versus NoSQL, estimating technical effort, reading and interpreting technical documentation and diagrams, facilitating technical discussions, translating product requirements into technical constraints, and working with engineers to surface and mitigate technical risks.
Structured Problem Solving and Frameworks
Assessment of a candidate's ability to apply repeatable, logical frameworks to break ambiguous problems into manageable components, identify root causes, weigh options, and recommend a defensible solution with an implementation plan. Topics include defining the problem and success criteria, gathering context and constraints, decomposing the problem using mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive thinking, generating alternatives, evaluating trade offs by impact and effort, and sequencing execution. Interviewers will look for clear narration of the thinking process, use of data and evidence, awareness of assumptions, and the ability to adapt a framework to different domains such as product, operations, or analytics. This canonical topic also covers systematic analysis techniques, methodological rigor, and presentation of conclusions so others can follow and act on them.
Project Planning and Prioritization
Covers end to end approaches for defining, scoping, scheduling, and executing projects while making trade off driven prioritization decisions. Candidates should be able to break down complex initiatives into phases and milestones, estimate timelines and resources, identify and sequence dependencies, determine critical paths, and create realistic schedules. Demonstrate frameworks and criteria for prioritization such as impact versus effort, business value, urgency, technical debt, team capacity, and strategic alignment, and explain how to balance feature development, bug fixes, and maintenance. Include how to translate strategy to implementation plans, allocate resources, coordinate across design and engineering, manage changing scope, handle timeline compression and risks, and communicate status and trade offs to stakeholders to secure buy in and ensure delivery.
Project Ownership and Execution
Ability to lead and deliver complex projects end to end, including defining the project charter and success criteria, creating and maintaining realistic plans, managing scope schedule and dependencies, coordinating cross functional teams, mitigating risks, and ensuring delivery quality. This also encompasses embedding a quality culture, attention to detail, balancing speed with polish, and examples of raising execution standards or introducing process improvements.
Program Execution and Cross Team Coordination
Evaluate skills for executing complex multi team programs from planning through recovery. Topics include owning end to end delivery sequencing work managing inter team dependencies dependency mapping critical path analysis buffer planning timeline planning and adjustment resource allocation across competing projects coordination cadences escalation patterns and diagnosing and recovering from delays. Interviewers expect concrete approaches to keep engineering velocity while managing shared resources and competing priorities.
Outcomes and Progress Tracking
Mindset and practices for defining success and tracking progress across projects programs and roles. Covers how to define measurable success criteria align work to objectives and key results and key performance indicators set baselines targets and guardrail metrics and choose appropriate review cadences. Includes team and agile measures such as velocity burndown cycle time sprint completion rates and capacity planning as well as program and product measures such as adoption usage business impact and technical health. Also addresses how to visualize progress with dashboards run regular tracking processes communicate status to different audiences and avoid misuse of metrics for punitive evaluation.