Hi Johanna, Trust you are doing fine. I’m preparing for Senior Project Manager role which is scheduled next week on Tuesday 19th November,2013.Kindly provide and send me sample questions and answers and I will try to fit in according to my project experience.As I’m presently working as a Senior Principal Consultant as a CRM Functional roleso I need to relate my experience and narrate to the questions being asked during the interview. So,I would appreciate if you could send me some sample questions with answers to removed Thanks in advance. Cheers Shahjahan. Johanna, Those are some nice questions. However I see that it most suitable for candidates who already have a program/project management profile. Most of the questions requires a reflection of previous experiences as program/project manager.
The senior management interview questions differ from regular assessments as you should demonstrate that you are an experienced professional. JobTestPrep's Senior Manager Amazon Pack is designed for experienced hire, start practising today and land your desired position. Amazon Program Manager Candidate. Interview Details: A lot of the interview questions involved provided detailed examples of my experience in leadership, teamwork, communication, project.
How about someone who was an individual consultant and would like to get into a sub-executive, program management job (well, just assume that they do have right expertise for the new job but no previous experience)? What are the real challenges do you see such people might face during interview? Thanks for the post!
HI Rahul, here are some answers, if I understand you correctly. If people ask why you move from a technical role to a management role, answer them. For.me., I explained that I was looking for other challenges. I liked organizing work so people could deliver value. I liked solving problems in the program “system,” as opposed to technical problems.
You might have different reasons. There is plenty of scope in program management! If you have been a Scrum Master for several years, you might be ready for different responsibilities. I’m not so sure what you’re asking here.
If you struggle with these questions, you should read, or read the posts in the category “agile job search” on the blog. Best wishes to you.
And for people requesting for answers please understand these questions are conversation starters, if you cant answer these questions and are actually looking for the “Right” answers, then you are in the wrong direction. Whats important is to understand that these questions are open ended and are put in front to open up more questions related to what you actually did. So my suggestion is to keep in mind that any answer you give could (and will) turn into a question or call for more explanation, so please be careful in what you say (do not lie!). HI Chanakya, hmm. I don’t often track hours or function points (is that what your FP means?). I talk about the number of full-time people and when those people start and end on the program. I never measure function points or person-hours.
That’s because I insist on no multi-tasking. (Production/product support is a necessary part of work, and if we don’t make it transparent, we never know how much time people spend on it.) I measure feature throughput or feature set throughput over time. Customers don’t buy function points or story points. They buy features. I also don’t measure revenue from the product release. That’s always been someone else’s job 🙂 I realize you might have to look for revenue recognition mid-program. Isn’t it interesting how different we all are?
Hi Johanna, Thanks for the post. Surprisingly I was asked most of the questions listed here in my previous interview, I wish I should have seen it earlier. I am a developer with 9+ years of experience and willing to move to program management track. I have attended only 1 interview till date on this track but couldn’t get through. The feedback was not shared with me, but what I felt was, I was answering the questions more likely sticking to my individual contributor role due to the extensive experience I had. But I would really like to expand my knowledge and thinking into the horizons of an active program manager. Can you please help with a guide for people like me and also give an insight about expectations from an IC moving to this position.
HI Laxmi, if you want to become a program manager, know that “program manager” means different things to different people. Some people use “program manager” when they mean project manager. I suggest you take a look at for ideas about how to be a great project manager. If they mean program manager as in “the person who coordinates many projects for one deliverable”, take a look at.
As of now (July 2015), the book is in beta. I am planning to finish it sometime in the fall of 2015. If you encounter other questions, let me know what you see and hear. I would love to improve this list. Thanks a lot Johanna for this wonderful post.
As insightful as the post is, there is,equally,a wealth of knowledge in the comments of your readers and your replies. I gave 2 interviews recently for a Program Manager’s role (but without success) and found the nature of questions similar to what you have mentioned.
Think I need to prepare better before I head to the next interview. П™‚ Btw, for the benefit of your readers – here are some questions that were put before me: 1. Describe a recent program that you managed? What were your roles and responsibilities?
There were many interjections in-between to understand whether it was really a program that I was managing or a project. What were the major challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them? What was the overall value of the program that you managed? What is my level of expertise with FTFP and T&M?
Some questions of Estimations, Client Communications, Reporting, Stakeholder Management, People Management. Hi Nomusa, Hmm, here are problems I’ve seen: – You depend on a person or team in another cost center.
They do not have the same priorities as you, so they are not contributing to the work. That’s a problem with a really juicy answer! (There is no one right answer. Program managers might do any number of things.) – You’re supposed to work on 5 programs at the same time (or 15 or some large number). As a result, nothing is getting done.
– You have a person on your program team who says he will deliver, but almost never does on time. What did you do? These are three examples, which occur in educational institutions and in corporate organizations.
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I'm applying for Software Engineering in Test. I had my first interview already and i think i did OK. I was asked to write an algorithm to find certain values in a binary tree, and i got it with one small correction, but it took me awhile to solve (20-25 minutes) It also took me a minute to answer his simple web questions (what is a cookie, describe what a browser does to connect to a web site) due to nerves.
I was hoping someone who has been through these interviews before can offer some advice on how to crush this next interview. I need this job and i'm quite nervous! I've already read Programming Interviews Exposed and Cracking the Coding Interview. But i'm running out of ways to prepare. And since my language is C and CtCI is Java, some of the problems you would NEVER want to write in C, but i feel bad skipping them Sorry for the wall of text, but ANY advice would make me feel a whole hell of a lot better.
P.S I promise i'll put a full write up of the whole interview experience once it's all over. I know there are a lot of redditors that ask questions like this. The secret to acing an Amazon interview: Its only 50% about your technical skills. The rest 50% entirely depends on how much of a cultural fit you are for the company. This is very unlike other interviews you'd see at Google, Microsoft, etc. While you may easily ace the technical aspect of it, you may be disqualified if you don't meet the cultural fit bar.
Review their values and principles:. A wise recruiter would have already linked you to that page; a wise candidate would have reviewed that list over and over again. The first phone screen is usually easy. The second one is much harder because that decides if Amazon is going to foot the bill to fly you over, pay for hotel, etc for an on-site interview. There is usually a list of qualified people who are permitted to do 2nd phone screens because of this fact, while almost anyone can start doing first phone screens after a few shadow interviews. The on-site interview can be strenuous as you spend 45-60 mins with each interviewer without much of a break in-between.
Imagine it being a stress test of your capability to work under pressure. Before the second phone screen, and especially before going to an onsite interview, prepare and memorize a list of examples from your past experience that you can directly tie to one or more of Amazon's values. Each interviewer will have one or more Amazon values to test you on. They may do so by asking questions related to your past experience/projects, etc, or they may bundle it up with the technical question they ask you. Usually, they want solid concrete examples, and not any conjured up possibilities or what-if scenarios.
If you can, use the keywords in the values when answering questions, i.e. It would be far better to say 'Using my debugging skills, I dove deep into the code to find the bug', vs 'Using my debugging skills, I searched the code to find the bug', but don't over do it. As for technical aspect of it, don't be hesitant to use C when coding your solution. Just let your interviewer know which language you are going to write your code in. Beware of the language you pick, because it may result in you having to write more code than you would like or have time for. Sometimes, picking a language like Python might be wiser than C. In the on-site interview, bring your own set of fine point dry erase markers if you can - it will literally turn the white board from a 480p resolution to a high-def 1080p one.
Use colors where appropriate, but not silly colors like yellow. When the interviewer asks you a question, the biggest mistake you can make is sit there and think about the solution on your own for 5 minutes. The second biggest mistake you can make is just sit there and talk about your proposed solution for 5 minutes. Instead, get up, and start digesting the details the interviewer gave you and laying it out on the white board in a concise manner. Always discuss potential approaches (yes, more than one!) before you begin coding. Discuss the merits of the approaches and state why you picked one over another.
Your hands need to be writing/drawing while your mouth is yapping away about what your brain is thinking. Don't worry about mucking this up because the interviewer will be busy doing the exact same thing: Listening to you talk, digesting it into his head, and writing/typing notes for feedback. Work through the solution in a step by step manner starting small. Add necessary details as you go on, but don't be afraid to take into account future needs. Write out stub methods for helper functions that your solution will use. If its integral to the solution, implement them, but ask the interviewer if he'd like to see the implementation first.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes. The important thing is that you can demonstrate accepting your own mistakes, and learning from it. If you spent 10 minutes going down the wrong path, don't be afraid to step back, think about it again and give it another attempt. And while you're doing all this, the most important thing you should be doing is communicating 110% with the interviewer about your thought process. For OO and systems design questions, draw boxes and arrows showing relationships and connections. UML is not necessary.
Don't write code unless asked to. Since you're applying for a SDET position, be prepared to give potential test cases for your solution. Make sure you can think big and scale your testing from unit tests to integration tests.
How you may automate an existing manual test, and how you might approach developing a plan for testing. Be prepared to demonstrate knowledge of testing tools/technologies. When the interview asks you probing questions, its generally because he wants to either understand your solution better, or offer another point of view. Don't ever dismiss what the interviewer told or asked you. Being receptive to feedback is probably one of the most important principles the company has. Always go into pros/cons mode and evaluate the possibility of what-if scenarios that have been laid in-front of you. Discuss them.
Okay, that's all I had. Oh, and TryMeNah is just bitter about Amazon. Just look at his post history. Ignorance is bliss. There's an article that ranks interview toughness throughout all companies in the United States?
What a crock of shit. Who can even read stuff like that and take it seriously? Also, let me guess, Palantir is not in the top 2 (major LOL if not, which I'll bet my nutsack it isn't, since crock-of-shit articles like that don't even know of a company like Palantir). Amazon has by far the easiest questions out of any tech company I have seen.
![Amazon Senior Technical Program Manager Interview Questions Amazon Senior Technical Program Manager Interview Questions](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125464634/834282424.jpg)
Not just my opinion, either. The fact that they asked you a fucking binary search question is a case in point. The position is software engie in test, not SE, It doesn't matter what the position is. A software engineer was asked a binary search question in an interview, period. There's no evidence to suggest that these two positions are on different technical levels in the company anyway.
It's a new hire position Which are the ones that ask more algorithm-based questions, which makes it even funnier. Other, more experienced positions are more about system design and domain-specific knowledge.