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People and delivery

An engineering manager interview on growing and supporting engineers while keeping plans, priorities, and incidents honest.

These prompts are original practice. They are not questions from a named employer or a live hiring loop.

  1. 1.You inherit a team that runs a payroll service. Your predecessor canceled one-on-ones whenever a release was near, which was most weeks. What is the best first change?

  2. 2.In one-on-ones, an engineer on a bike-share app spends the whole time reading out ticket status. What is the most useful change?

  3. 3.Which piece of feedback is the most actionable?

  4. 4.When is the best time to give corrective feedback about a specific behavior?

  5. 5.A senior engineer on a clinic scheduler ships great code but leaves blunt, dismissive review comments that newer engineers dread. No one has complained to you. What do you do?

  6. 6.You give one engineer only positive feedback because they seem sensitive. At review time you plan to rate them below expectations. What is the core problem?

  7. 7.Why keep a running note of each report's work and feedback during the year?

  8. 8.You ask your team for feedback on your management and get silence. What is most likely to help?

  9. 9.A report becomes visibly upset in a one-on-one after you give hard feedback about missed commitments. What do you do?

  10. 10.Before you can fairly say an engineer is underperforming, what must be true?

  11. 11.An engineer on a grain co-op's inventory app has missed deadlines for six weeks. Their work used to be strong. What is the best first step?

  12. 12.What is the main purpose of a performance improvement plan done well?

  13. 13.You draft a goal for a performance improvement plan: 'Improve code quality.' What is wrong with it?

  14. 14.An engineer on an improvement plan is clearly improving, but one goal is now impossible because the project it relied on was canceled. What do you do?

  15. 15.Your team on an event ticketing site has no written levels. Two engineers argue over who deserves the bigger project. What is the lasting fix?

  16. 16.An engineer believes they are doing great, while you think they are below expectations. What is the most likely root cause?

  17. 17.An engineer's problem is a skill gap rather than effort. What support helps most?

  18. 18.After a fair improvement plan, an engineer clearly cannot meet the role's bar. What is right?

  19. 19.A team on a hotel booking site has carried one low performer for a year. What cost do managers most often underestimate?

  20. 20.A top performer on a car rental app is rude in meetings, and two peers have asked to move teams. How should you treat it?

  21. 21.You take over a team that builds a pet adoption site. What should your first month focus on?

  22. 22.What is calibration in a performance cycle mainly for?

  23. 23.In calibration, a peer manager says their engineer is 'clearly senior, everyone knows it,' without examples. What is your most useful response?

  24. 24.An engineer asks what it takes to be promoted to senior. What is the best answer?

  25. 25.You told an engineer they would be promoted next cycle, and the committee said no. What lesson applies?

  26. 26.An engineer on a county library catalog did solid work, mostly on tasks you scoped for them. For a senior promotion packet, what is usually missing?

  27. 27.An engineer says they want to grow but cannot say how. What helps most?

  28. 28.A strong senior engineer wants to manage, mainly because it looks like the only way up. Your company has a staff engineer track. What do you do?

  29. 29.You rate every engineer 'exceeds' this cycle. What should you expect calibration to ask for?

  30. 30.What is the main risk of a forced ranking where someone must land at the bottom every cycle?

  31. 31.Why decide which skills a hiring loop will assess before interviews begin?

  32. 32.In a debrief for a payments team role, the most senior interviewer speaks first and strongly, and everyone else agrees. What practice prevents this?

  33. 33.An interviewer's entire feedback is 'not a culture fit.' What do you ask for?

  34. 34.A candidate for a logistics team aces the coding round but is dismissive toward the junior interviewer. The debrief is split. What is the strongest stance?

  35. 35.Your team keeps rejecting candidates other teams would hire, saying the bar must stay high. What do you check first?

  36. 36.What is the main purpose of a structured interview with a shared rubric?

  37. 37.You need to fill a role fast on a food delivery team. A so-so candidate is available now. What is the best judgment?

  38. 38.Why include interviewers with different backgrounds on a loop?

  39. 39.A new hire on a dental office booking app has been there three weeks and has not shipped anything. What would speed them up most?

  40. 40.Which is a good sign that onboarding is working?

  41. 41.The onboarding doc for a ferry ticketing service is out of date. Who should keep it current?

  42. 42.You are the bottleneck on every design review for a tax filing app because you still review them all. What is the best fix?

  43. 43.When you hand a project to someone to help them grow, what should come with it?

  44. 44.You delegated a migration to a mid-level engineer. They picked an approach you would not have, but it is sound. What do you do?

  45. 45.A tech lead you appointed is struggling, and their project is slipping slightly with weeks to go. What is the right response?

  46. 46.As a new manager, you still write the hardest code on the team. What is the main risk?

  47. 47.An engineer asks you to make a technical decision that they are fully able to make. What is often best?

  48. 48.A strong engineer on a parking app tells you they got an outside offer. What should come first?

  49. 49.Which is the best early warning sign that an engineer may leave?

  50. 50.Two engineers on a warehouse picking system keep clashing in code review, and each says the other is the problem. What is the best first step?

  51. 51.Two engineers argue in every review about formatting and naming. What lasting fix helps most?

  52. 52.What does psychological safety on a team mean?

  53. 53.After an outage, a junior engineer on a utility billing team admits they hid a mistake for two days because they feared blame. What does this signal?

  54. 54.In team meetings, two vocal engineers dominate and remote members rarely speak. What helps most?

  55. 55.You make a call the team disagrees with, after hearing their views. What practice builds trust?

  56. 56.An engineer makes a sexist joke in a team channel, and others laugh nervously. What do you do?

  57. 57.A quiet engineer on a recipe app keeps missing interesting projects because louder peers volunteer first. What do you change?

  58. 58.An engineer learns that a recent hire at the same level is paid much more. What is the right response?

  59. 59.On-call for a pharmacy refill service pages someone about 15 times a week, mostly for alerts no one acts on. What is the best first fix?

  60. 60.What makes an alert worth paging a person at night?

  61. 61.On a team of six, one engineer handles most incidents because only they know the system. What is the risk and the fix?

  62. 62.An engineer who was always reliable has become irritable, misses small things, and works late every night. What do you do?

  63. 63.Your team is on track for a launch only by working weekends, now for the third month. What is the manager's job?

  64. 64.During a heavy on-call week, what should happen to the on-call engineer's planned project work?

  65. 65.After a night of pages, the on-call engineer joins standup at 9 a.m. What policy is healthiest?

  66. 66.A product lead asks for a firm date on an invoicing feature for plumbers that has not been designed yet. What is the best response?

  67. 67.Why do estimates for large software projects run late far more often than early?

  68. 68.Your team commits to 10 items each quarter and finishes 6. What is the most useful change?

  69. 69.What is the main value of a capacity plan for a quarter?

  70. 70.Halfway through a quarter, it is clear a project for a transit card app will miss its date by a month. When do you tell stakeholders?

  71. 71.A team on a moving company's scheduler estimates tasks in hours, and the estimates are always far off. What helps most?

  72. 72.On a long project, which milestone gives the most honest signal of progress?

  73. 73.Mid-quarter, leadership wants your team to take on a second large project without dropping the first. What do you do?

  74. 74.Three stakeholders each say their request for a ski resort pass app is the top priority. What is the best move?

  75. 75.A sales leader asks for a custom feature for one big client of a campground booking platform. It would take a month. How do you say no well?

  76. 76.When is technical debt worth paying down now?

  77. 77.Your team wants a full quarter to rewrite a legacy order system for a florist marketplace. Product says no. What is the best path?

  78. 78.How do you best explain technical debt to a non-technical stakeholder?

  79. 79.Which approach keeps technical debt from piling up without big rewrites?

  80. 80.Your roadmap has 14 items marked priority one. What does that tell you?

  81. 81.A director sends an urgent request mid-sprint that would take two days. What is the right default?

  82. 82.A known vulnerability affects a library in your credit union app, and a feature launch is due this week. What do you prioritize?

  83. 83.A legacy service for a laundromat chain's payment kiosks has no tests and breaks on every change. A feature is due. What is a sound approach?

  84. 84.Your team's launch depends on an API from another team that keeps slipping. What is the best first step?

  85. 85.When is escalating a cross-team blocker the right call?

  86. 86.You and another manager agree to escalate a dispute. How should you do it?

  87. 87.Your manager asks you for a weekly update. What makes it most useful?

  88. 88.Your director keeps promising dates to customers before asking your team. What do you do?

  89. 89.Your manager decides to cut a reliability project you think matters. What is the right approach?

  90. 90.What does 'no surprises' mean when managing up?

  91. 91.A partner team keeps changing an API you depend on without notice, breaking your builds. What lasting fix helps most?

  92. 92.A stakeholder on a museum ticketing project only hears from your team when there is a problem. What would help most?

  93. 93.During a checkout outage on a grocery delivery app, several people are fixing things at once and talking past each other. What should you set up first?

  94. 94.What makes a postmortem blameless?

  95. 95.A postmortem for a court e-filing system says 'human error: engineer ran the wrong script.' What should the team ask next?

  96. 96.Postmortem action items keep piling up undone. What helps?

  97. 97.An executive asks for the name of the engineer who caused an outage. What do you do?

  98. 98.Why hold a postmortem for a near miss that caused no user impact?

  99. 99.During an incident, a stakeholder keeps messaging the responders for updates. What helps most?

  100. 100.What is the purpose of an incident severity scale?

  101. 101.Standup for a team of nine on a real estate listings site takes 40 minutes. What is the best fix?

  102. 102.Retros keep raising the same issues, and nothing changes. What is the best fix?

  103. 103.What is a retrospective meant to do?

  104. 104.Your team spans time zones nine hours apart, and decisions stall while people wait for meetings. What helps most?

  105. 105.A remote engineer on a tutoring marketplace says they feel left out of decisions made in the office. What do you change?

  106. 106.What is the main risk of judging remote engineers by how often they appear online?

  107. 107.A new manager has added weekly planning, refinement, a demo, a retro, and two syncs. Engineers say they have no focus time. What is the best step?

  108. 108.What does a team's definition of done help with?