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Program Manager Interview Questions

Program managers are responsible for overseeing several company projects that are connected by a common goal. Employers are looking for candidates who excel at people management and conflict resolution. Interviewers will want to know about your leadership and multitasking skills, so come ready to discuss a time you were able to successfully motivate a group to meet an imminent deadline or any experience diffusing issues between coworkers.

Top Program Manager Interview Questions & How to Answer

Question 1

Question #1: What are the warning signs a program might be at risk?

How to answer
How to answer: Interviewers want to know you can identify and solve problems. When answering this question, explain potential risks to a program, as well as how to eliminate these risks with problem-solving skills.
Question 2

Question #2: What is the difference between a program manager and a project manager?

How to answer
How to answer: You want employers to know you have a strong understanding of the job description. If asked this question, explain the key differences between program managers and project managers, including the fact that program managers take a more strategic approach to their position. Go on to explain the strategies you would use if you were hired for the position.
Question 3

Question #3: How do you keep a program on track?

How to answer
How to answer: The duties of a program manager include pacing the team, keeping up with deadlines, and solving problems. An interviewer may be interested in how you resolve conflict in the workplace to keep things on track. They may also want to know your planning process, how you stay organized, and how you communicate with team members.

20,593 program manager interview questions shared by candidates

Three individuals, not including the HR person conducted the interview. We sat in a large conference room with the tables and seats arranged in a horse shoe configuration. Each of the employers sat at the farthest extreme points away from one another. One of the employee neither asked nor answered any questions. One employee sat an texted on her phone. The third employee asked and answered most the questions.
avatar

Infrastructure Program Manager

Interviewed at Panorama Consulting

3.7★
Jun 9, 2017

Three individuals, not including the HR person conducted the interview. We sat in a large conference room with the tables and seats arranged in a horse shoe configuration. Each of the employers sat at the farthest extreme points away from one another. One of the employee neither asked nor answered any questions. One employee sat an texted on her phone. The third employee asked and answered most the questions.

You join Amazon Delivery Experience org that supports a service responsible for vending delivery options across the retail website. The service has a set of hard coded rules in Java and every time that the Product Managers would like to modify those rules, the come to the Developers and ask to change code to implement new rules or changes to the existing ones. To reduce the time it take the Developers to implement changes, your Director asks you to re-design the service such that the Developers don't need to be involved at least when changes are being made to the existing rules. The new system has to remain highly available and salable to support calls from the client services which rely on the output of this service, just like the old system. Assume you have 5 Engineers on a team available to do the work, and your Scrum iterations are a month long. 1) What Questions would you ask? What other information do you need? State all assumptions you make about answers to these questions 2) Please describe key components of the system that you would propose, assuming no external solutions can be purchased. 3) How would the original design change if you were told that traffic to your service is going to grow 50% yr over yr. 4) Would would you potentially try to deliver in the first Sprint? 2nd Sprint? 5) Let's suppose that your director would review the estimates of effort and time it would take to deliver the new system, and wasn't pleased with it as it would take 6 months to build. Instead, he would propose to extract the business rules into the configuration file and deploy it to the 5 client services that consume the output. a) How would you respond to this request? b) Imagine that your team was resisting this approach and only wanted to go froward with the best possible. What would you tell them and how would you reconcile the disagreement between your team's opinion and the director?
avatar

Technical Program Manager

Interviewed at Amazon Lab126

3.2★
Apr 11, 2016

You join Amazon Delivery Experience org that supports a service responsible for vending delivery options across the retail website. The service has a set of hard coded rules in Java and every time that the Product Managers would like to modify those rules, the come to the Developers and ask to change code to implement new rules or changes to the existing ones. To reduce the time it take the Developers to implement changes, your Director asks you to re-design the service such that the Developers don't need to be involved at least when changes are being made to the existing rules. The new system has to remain highly available and salable to support calls from the client services which rely on the output of this service, just like the old system. Assume you have 5 Engineers on a team available to do the work, and your Scrum iterations are a month long. 1) What Questions would you ask? What other information do you need? State all assumptions you make about answers to these questions 2) Please describe key components of the system that you would propose, assuming no external solutions can be purchased. 3) How would the original design change if you were told that traffic to your service is going to grow 50% yr over yr. 4) Would would you potentially try to deliver in the first Sprint? 2nd Sprint? 5) Let's suppose that your director would review the estimates of effort and time it would take to deliver the new system, and wasn't pleased with it as it would take 6 months to build. Instead, he would propose to extract the business rules into the configuration file and deploy it to the 5 client services that consume the output. a) How would you respond to this request? b) Imagine that your team was resisting this approach and only wanted to go froward with the best possible. What would you tell them and how would you reconcile the disagreement between your team's opinion and the director?

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