TPM Role Understanding

Program management interview preparation

For program management interviews, we recommend starting with our program management primer. Also, take a look at the following, which outlines how companies think about program management.

Here is a summary of the video:

Communication and influence. Make sure you communicate in a structured way and use data to anchor your arguments whenever possible.
Navigating ambiguity. Show you use program requirement documents and roadmaps to align stakeholders and move forward despite ambiguity.
Stakeholder management. Show you are proactive about managing stakeholders by constantly making sure everyone is aligned and trying to anticipate issues before they arise.
Technical partnership. Make it clear you're comfortable diving into technical details when your team needs you to.
Strategic insight and creativity. Show you never lose sight of the product's users and that you find creative ways of solving their problem.
Execution. Explain how you measure the success of your programs and proactively solve issues before they become bottlenecks.

This will give you an opportunity to refresh your memory on all key aspects of project management including: scope, schedule, resources, cost, quality, communication, risk, stakeholders, etc.

In addition, if you're interviewing for a TPM role in software development, you should make sure you're on top of common concepts used in Agile project management. A great resource here is Atlassian's Agile project management guide. In particular, we recommend brushing up on the difference between Kanban and Scrum, and the common structures used in Agile projects (e.g. epics, stories, themes, etc.).

Similarly, if you're applying for a hardware TPM role then you'll want to be on top of the different engineering validation stages (EVT, DVT, PVT).

Once you've refreshed your memory on project management best practices you should go through the list of program management questions we've listed in the previous section and draft answers for those.

Technical interview preparation

As a reminder, you can expect three types of questions in technical interviews: system design, technical explanation and coding questions.

For system design questions, we recommend studying the following video as a starting point.

Here is a summary of the video:

Communication. Make sure you ask clarifying questions, gather requirements and communicate out loud in a structured way.
Designing to scale. Get to a first design in less than 20mins, and then dive into how to make it scalable, reliable and efficient enough so that it can be used at "planet scale".
Concrete and quantitative solutions. Be familiar with common design patterns (e.g. sharding data) and ready to estimate the cost generated by the system you designed (e.g. read from disk / memory).
Trade-offs and compromises. Proactively call out the trade-offs and compromises you've made in your design. Iterate the design if necessary.

In addition to studying the video above, we recommend studying our system design interview prep guide. The guide covers a step-by-step method for answering system design questions, and provides several example questions with solutions.

Alternatively, if you’re looking to save time and access everything you need in one place, we recommend taking The System Design Strong Hire Course. The course includes detailed lessons on system design fundamentals and how to answer system design interview questions, plus mock interview videos with FAANG ex-interviewers and more than 100 practice questions.

For technical explanation and coding questions, we recommend learning the step-by-step method we've developed. To practice, you can use that method to craft answers to the technical questions listed in the previous section.

Leadership interview preparation

For leadership interviews, we recommend starting with our leadership and people management primers, followed by the this , which outlines how companies think about leadership. Notice that some elements overlap with the Program Manager and Technical interview. Here is a summary of the video.

Communication and leadership style. Show you are comfortable with "emergent leadership". Explain how you're leaning on different people at different times in the lifecycle of a program.
Navigating complexity and ambiguity. Make it clear you're good at keeping all your stakeholders up to date. And that you can protect your team's time when necessary.
Working with teams. Show that you've got empathy for other people's opinions. And that you can create alignment without generating frustration.
Vision. Be ready to articulate the mission of the program you're currently working on, to explain who your users are and how you're solving their problem.
Delivering results. Show that you deliver results by running a clear process with goals and metrics to measure progress. In addition, make it clear you're leaving room to adapt and be creative.

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