Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
Requirements Analysis & Problem Decomposition
Break down complex business requirements into smaller technical components. Identify ambiguities and ask clarifying questions. Prioritize requirements logically. Plan implementation approach step by step. Create technical specifications from business requirements.
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.
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.
Positive Negative and Boundary Test Design
Systematic test case design techniques that cover happy path scenarios, error handling, and boundary conditions. Topics include equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis for numeric and string inputs, testing empty and null values and special characters and Unicode, validating error messages and status codes, testing authorization and permission failures, prioritizing cases by risk and impact, and balancing depth of coverage with execution cost.
Handoffs Quality and Escalation
Managing transitions, quality issues, and escalations between teams. Topics include documenting handoffs, creating reproducible bug reports, coordinating triage, deciding when to escalate, providing sufficient context for other teams, and participating in postmortems and process improvements. Candidates should demonstrate ability to keep collaboration productive during high pressure incidents and to improve processes to avoid repeated escalations.
Stakeholder Management and Conflict Resolution
Covers frameworks and tactics for identifying and managing stakeholders, diagnosing sources of disagreement, and resolving interpersonal and interteam conflict. Candidates should demonstrate stakeholder mapping, empathy and active listening, techniques to find common ground, structured negotiation of trade offs, clear articulation of decision rights, use of data to mediate disputes, escalation criteria, and ways to preserve long term relationships and team morale. Includes coordinating alignment across multiple engineering teams, balancing competing priorities, and driving consensus on technical decisions while managing expectations and timelines.
Problem Solving in Ambiguous Situations
Evaluates structured approaches to diagnosing and resolving complex or ill defined problems when data is limited or constraints conflict. Key skills include decomposing complexity, root cause analysis, hypothesis formation and testing, rapid prototyping and experimentation, iterative delivery, prioritizing under constraints, managing stakeholder dynamics, and documenting lessons learned. Interviewers look for examples that show bias to action when appropriate, risk aware iteration, escalation discipline, measurement of outcomes, and the ability to coordinate cross functional work to close gaps in ambiguous contexts. Senior assessments emphasize strategic trade offs, scenario planning, and the ability to orchestrate multi team solutions.
Agile Metrics and Reporting
Covers key agile metrics and how to use them to drive continuous improvement and inform decisions. Candidates should be able to explain metrics such as velocity, burndown charts, cycle time, lead time and throughput, how to surface trends and insights, how to build reports and dashboards, and how to use metrics to guide process changes while avoiding perverse incentives. Include approaches for communicating metric implications to teams and stakeholders and measuring the impact of improvements.
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.