Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
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.
Analytical Problem Solving and Deep Dive
Approach to investigating problems deeply and using data to find root causes. Candidates should show how they question assumptions, form and test hypotheses, triangulate metrics and qualitative signals, use techniques such as multiple rounds of investigation or five whys, and avoid jumping to superficial fixes. Good answers explain how analysis informs decision making and what signals trigger further investigation or escalation.
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.
Agile and Waterfall Methodologies
Assesses understanding of iterative development approaches versus sequential development approaches, when each is appropriate, and how to implement or adapt them in practice. Topics include planning and estimation cadence, roles and ceremonies, typical deliverables, benefits and limitations of each approach, and hybrid adaptations used to fit organizational constraints.
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.
Dependency and Risk Management
Methods for identifying and tracking dependencies and risks that affect program delivery. Topics include mapping dependencies across teams and work streams, identifying which dependencies are on the critical path, planning sequencing to minimize blocking, assessing technical resource and schedule risk impact and probability, developing mitigation and contingency strategies, and keeping risk and dependency status visible to stakeholders and leadership.
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.
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.