Engineering manager interview - questions and preparation
Tags: career, leadership
Published: 2021-06-30 06:32:31

---
title: Engineering manager interview - questions and preparation
published: true
date: 2021-06-29 15:00:00 UTC
tags: career, leadership
canonical_url: https://www.notonlycode.org/engineering-manager-interviews/
cover_image: https://www.notonlycode.org/content/images/2021/06/2021-06-engineering-manager-interview.jpg
---

Engineering manager role comes in a lot of flavours and the interview processes for this role at various companies reflect that differences. In this video I'm talking about what kind of interviews and questions you can expect, and below the video you can find a list of questions that you might hear during different interview rounds.

## Video

{% youtube leBL1fw-WJg %}

🎥 timeline:

0:00 developer interview vs manager interview  
0:59 programming interview  
02:20 system design interview  
03:36 system design - how to prepare  
05:30 team management interview  
07:25 stakeholder management interview  
08:20 management interview - how to prepare  
11:05 general interview tips

## Questions

- what is your leadership style?
- how do you define a successful team?
- have you ever had a very high performing team? what made the team work so well together?
- how do you define an individual success?
- what does it mean to be a successful engineering manager?
- how do you onboard a new team member?
- how do you measure individual performance in your team?
- have you ever taken a struggling project and turned it around? how did you it?
- have you ever had a very urgent situation when you had to make a quick decision? what was that and what did you do?
- have you ever had an underperforming team member? what did you do about it?
- have you ever had to put someone on PIP?
- have you ever had a person that was difficult to work with? what did you do about it?
- have you ever had to let go a member of your team?
- have you ever had a conflict between your team members? how did you deal with it?
- have you ever had a conflict between you and some stakeholder? how did you solve it?
- how do you keep track of ongoing work in your team?
- are you familiar with agile methodologies?
- have you ever led a project that failed? what made it fail? what did you learn from it?
- have you ever made a decision that your team didn't like?
- have you ever managed people who are way more experienced than you? how did you help them succeed in their roles?
- do you do 1-1 meetings with your team members? how do you do it?
- have you ever managed a team budget? how did you keep track of it?
- have you ever promoted a team member? how did you help them progress?
- have you ever denied someone a promotion? how did you explain it to them?
- have you ever had to manage multiple urgent tasks? how did you do that?
- have you ever had to manage unclear product requirements? how did you do it?
- have you ever worked with UX designers/Technical Writers/testers/product managers? How did you ensure that you worked well together?
- have you ever built a team from scratch? how did you do it?
- have you ever managed a fully distributed team? how did you ensure the team was successful?
- have you ever had a toxic team member? how did you handle it?
- have you ever dealt with legacy software? how did you balance between technical debt and feature work?
- have you ever dealt with suddenly changing requirements? what did you do about it?
- have you ever worked with Scrum/Kanban/SAFe etc? How do you understand your role in that methodology?
- have you ever dealt with project that missed its deadline? what did you do about it?
- have you ever made a bad decision that affected your team? how did you resolve the situation?

I'll keep updating this post with more questions in the future, and if you have some suggestions, leave them in the comments!