Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
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.
Spotify Business and Technical Knowledge
Demonstrate familiarity with Spotify product offerings and platform characteristics, including music and podcast streaming, catalog management, personalization and recommendation systems, real time data processing, and the advertising platform. Understand common technical challenges for streaming businesses at scale and how organizational structure and recent technology initiatives shape delivery. Explain how technical program management work connects to Spotify business goals and strategic initiatives.
SIEM Query Language & Rule Development (Splunk SPL, KQL, or equivalent)
SIEM Query Language & Rule Development (Splunk SPL, KQL, or equivalent)
Ownership and Project Delivery
This topic assesses a candidate's ability to take ownership of problems and projects and to drive them through end to end delivery to measurable impact. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete examples in which they defined goals and success metrics, scoped and decomposed work, prioritized features and trade offs, made timely decisions with incomplete information, and executed through implementation, launch, monitoring, and iteration. It covers bias for action and initiative such as identifying opportunities, removing blockers, escalating appropriately, and operating with autonomy or limited oversight. It also includes technical ownership and execution where candidates explain technical problem solving, architecture and implementation choices, incident response and remediation, and collaboration with engineering and product partners. Interviewers evaluate stakeholder management and cross functional coordination, risk identification and mitigation, timeline and resource management, progress tracking and reporting, metrics and impact measurement, accountability, and lessons learned when outcomes were imperfect. Examples may span documentation or process improvements, operational projects, medium sized feature work, and complex or embedded technical efforts.
Influence and Organizational Change
Covers approaches for influencing technical direction and driving changes in processes or ways of working without formal authority. Candidates should show how they build credibility with senior engineers and architects, propose and defend technical approaches, pilot and scale process improvements, measure adoption and impact, overcome resistance, and use stakeholder engagement and data to create sustainable organizational change.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Assesses the ability to work effectively across product management, engineering, design, and business functions. Topics include adapting communication styles for different audiences, clarifying roles and responsibilities, running effective cross functional meetings, aligning goals and success metrics, managing handoffs and dependencies between disciplines, and building durable working relationships across teams.
Deliver Results
Focus on delivering meaningful outcomes despite obstacles by maintaining persistence, measuring success through concrete results, and holding oneself accountable for execution quality. For product managers this includes delivering on schedule, within budget, and to agreed quality standards while clearly communicating trade offs and recovery plans.
Strategic understanding of Spotify's business and priorities
Strategic understanding of Spotify's business and priorities
Leadership and People Development
Coach and develop others through regular feedback, mentoring, delegation, and creating stretch assignments. Demonstrate approaches to grow junior program managers, technical leads, and engineers by setting development plans, sharing career guidance, enabling learning opportunities, and fostering a culture of feedback. Include examples of how you measured growth, transferred responsibility, and scaled team capabilities.