Program delivery
A technical program manager interview on planning, tracking, and landing cross-team engineering programs on time.
These prompts are original practice. They are not questions from a named employer or a live hiring loop.
1.A technical program manager (TPM) is starting a program to add multi-currency support to a payroll service across five teams. What should the first program document pin down?
2.Which milestone is best written for a cross-team clinic scheduling program?
3.Midway through a county library's new catalog search program, a director asks to add e-book lending to the same launch. What should the TPM do first?
4.Why does a program charter list explicit non-goals?
5.A grain co-op wants a new scale system, a member app, and a billing rewrite all in one release. The billing rewrite carries the most uncertainty. What plan is usually strongest?
6.What makes a milestone useful for tracking a program?
7.A ferry ticketing program has four teams, each building a separate layer. Which early milestone best reduces integration risk?
8.A sponsor asks when a school district portal program will be done. The teams define done as code merged. What should the TPM push for?
9.What is the critical path of a program?
10.A task off the critical path has two weeks of float. It slips by one week. All else equal, what happens to the program end date?
11.On a parking app program, the payments integration is on the critical path and slips five days. Nothing else changes. What is the effect?
12.You join a pet insurance claims program with eight teams and no dependency map. What do you do first?
13.A food bank inventory program looks on track until the mobile team learns it needs a new auth scope from the identity team, which has a six-week queue. What practice would most likely have caught this sooner?
14.A transit card program's critical path runs through a fare service rewrite. Which change would actually shorten it?
15.A recipe app's search service is on the critical path and running late. A director offers four extra engineers next week. What is the main risk?
16.Two teams on a hotel booking program each say they cannot start until the other ships its API. What is the best move?
17.A utility billing program tracks cross-team dependencies only inside each team's own tracker. What is the main problem?
18.In a RACI chart (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed), how many people should be accountable for a given deliverable?
19.On a ride-hail driver onboarding program, the trust team and the payments team each think the other owns vendor billing for background checks. What should the TPM do?
20.What is the difference between responsible and accountable in a RACI chart?
21.A dental chain's scheduling program lists 14 people as consulted on every decision, and decisions take weeks. What change helps most?
22.What does a TPM usually own on a cross-team program?
23.Three weeks before a museum ticketing launch, you find that no one owns the runbook for the refund flow. What do you do?
24.A plan lists 'Platform and Mobile teams' as owner of the push notification migration. Why is that a risk?
25.Before a hard design debate on a freight tracking program, what should the TPM confirm?
26.What belongs in a useful risk register entry?
27.What is the difference between a risk and an issue?
28.A telehealth video program depends on a new media server that no one on staff has run in production. What is the best mitigation?
29.Why attach a trigger to a risk, such as 'if the vendor sandbox is not ready by May 1'?
30.A credit union program decides to accept the risk that a rarely used report may be late. What does accepting a risk mean?
31.A farm equipment rental program's risk register has not changed in six weeks, though the program has changed a lot. What does that most likely mean?
32.With 30 open risks on a program, how should a TPM decide which to raise to leadership?
33.What is a pre-mortem?
34.A campus housing program has many teams that are new to a cloud platform. How should the TPM handle the extra uncertainty?
35.A ski resort pass program has reported green for two months. One week before launch it jumps straight to red. What does this most often indicate?
36.What should a weekly status report to executives lead with?
37.A team lead asks you to keep their milestone green because they will catch up next sprint. The evidence shows they are two weeks behind. What do you report?
38.What should amber mean on a program status report?
39.Why define what red, amber, and green mean at the start of a program?
40.On a city permits program, you learn on Tuesday that a key integration will miss its date. The status report goes out Friday. What do you do?
41.Why is 'the service is 80 percent done' a weak status signal?
42.A florist marketplace program reports to both the CTO and the team leads. How should the reports differ?
43.When should a TPM escalate a cross-team conflict?
44.What makes an escalation effective?
45.Why agree on an escalation path at program kickoff?
46.On a fitness studio booking program, the payments team keeps putting your integration behind its own roadmap. You have raised it with the lead twice. What next?
47.A new TPM avoids escalating because it feels like admitting failure. Why is that a problem?
48.A director you escalate to replies, 'Just make it work.' What is the best response?
49.What is the main purpose of a launch readiness review?
50.At a go/no-go meeting for a tax filing app, every criterion passes except that rollback has never been tested. What is the right call?
51.Why set go/no-go criteria weeks before launch?
52.Which item belongs on an operational readiness checklist?
53.A grocery delivery program is launching a new order router. Which rollout is usually safest?
54.Who should make the final go/no-go call for a launch?
55.Launch is at 9 a.m. for a rental car app. What should be in place before then?
56.Two hours before a conference app launch, QA finds a bug that shows the wrong session room to 2 percent of users. What is a sound approach?
57.Two teams on a solar installer portal will integrate in eight weeks. What is the most useful thing for them to agree on now?
58.What do consumer-driven contract tests help catch?
59.A water utility program schedules integration for the last week before launch. What is the main risk?
60.Midway through a podcast platform program, the provider team wants to rename a required field in its API. Three teams consume it. What should happen?
61.Why ask a provider team to publish a mock server early in a program?
62.An API contract for a hospital lab results feed lists only fields and endpoints. What is most important to add?
63.Two teams each say their side works, but end-to-end tests in a shared environment keep failing. What should the TPM push for first?
64.Under semantic versioning, which API change should bump the major version?
65.A program must move 40 teams off an old job scheduler. What usually drives most of the timeline?
66.Which teams should go first in a large migration?
67.Adoption of a new logging library is stuck at 30 percent of services. What usually helps most?
68.Why set and announce a date to turn off the old system in a migration?
69.A warehouse robotics program is moving inventory data to a new database. What reduces cutover risk most?
70.How should a TPM track progress on a 60-team migration?
71.Near the end of a migration, two teams say they cannot move before the old system shuts down. What should happen?
72.Why do migrations often stall even when the new system is clearly better?
73.The platform team says every team has moved to the new auth service. What should you check?
74.An insurance quote program will miss its date by three weeks. What options should the TPM bring to the sponsor?
75.A milestone on an e-signature program has slipped one week, four weeks running. What should the TPM do?
76.When replanning after a big slip, what is the most reliable input?
77.Two features are late on a language learning app. One unblocks a large school district contract; the other is UI polish. How should you focus recovery?
78.How should a schedule slip be communicated to stakeholders?
79.A youth sports league app must be ready by the season start. Scope has to shrink. How should the TPM approach the cut?
80.A team's estimates have run 40 percent low on each of the last three milestones. How should the plan use their next estimate?
81.A program's date is fixed by a regulator. When work runs late, what is the main lever left?
82.Why use a change control process once a program's scope is set?
83.A stakeholder on a laundromat app program says a requested change is tiny, just one screen. What should the TPM do?
84.What should a change request record include?
85.Why have a change freeze in the days before a major launch?
86.A small program with three teams has a change board that meets monthly, and changes wait weeks. What is the better approach?
87.During a launch freeze for a bakery chain's ordering system, a fix for customers being charged twice is ready. What should happen?
88.Why keep a decision log on a long program?
89.A weekly sync for a newsroom CMS program has 25 attendees and rarely ends with a decision. What should the TPM change?
90.What makes an action item from a meeting likely to get done?
91.A team wants to reopen a toll road app design decision made a month ago. What should the TPM ask?
92.What is the most important outcome of a program kickoff meeting?
93.An airline loyalty program depends on a partner's points API, due in eight weeks. What should the TPM do now?
94.Which contract terms matter most for a vendor on the critical path?
95.A vet clinic program's text message vendor says its API will be four weeks late. What do you do first?
96.From a schedule point of view, why identify a fallback for a critical-path vendor early?
97.A partner on a theater seating program keeps saying it is on track but misses demos. What should you ask for?
98.A wine shop's checkout redesign program has launched. Which metric best shows whether it succeeded?
99.Why set a baseline before a program starts?
100.A clinic program shipped every milestone on time, but patient wait times did not improve. How should it be judged?
101.Which is a leading indicator for a migration program?
102.A team estimates two weeks to add a cache in front of the database for a real-estate listings site. Which question best tests the estimate?
103.A team plans to rename a column in a busy Postgres table in a single deploy. What risk should the TPM flag?
104.An architecture review for a dog walking app shows every request going through one auth server with no replica. What should the TPM ask about?
105.A team says a new service is fast enough after testing with 10 users. Launch expects 50,000 daily users. What should you request?
106.Two services update the same order in separate databases. A team assumes both updates always succeed together. What is the risk?
107.Why do TPMs often ask teams to ship risky changes behind feature flags?
108.A team cannot estimate a new integration because no one knows the vendor's API. What is the best next step?
109.A team plans a one-hour window to copy 8 terabytes of data to a new store. What should the TPM ask?