I recently found a great document that I’d saved off for myself some time ago. It was all of my favorite interview questions that I like to use when hiring. I’ve probably interviewed hundreds of different people in different (mostly tech) roles at this point and I thought it would be useful to share some of these questions with you. Maybe you’re a manager looking to switch up your questions or maybe you’re an interviewee trying to prepare for your next interview. Either way, I hope you find these helpful! Two weeks ago, I posted the general interview questions I use. Last week, I talked about hiring product managers. This week, I’ll talk about the job function that I’ve personally spent the most time in. Here are my Project Manager interview questions (my favorite ones are in bold).
Project Manager Interview Questions
Project Managers and Scrum Masters are extremely important hires. I’m going to use these titles interchangeably here as I believe these questions apply to both roles if you’re in a software company, but they are certainly not the same thing. I call roles like these the “glue” within our organization. Without Project Managers, things fall apart. (I put great managers, product managers, UX, and DevOps experts in this “glue” category too.) A good Project Manager who works well with your teams can accelerate work and enhance your culture.
Agile Process & Transformation Questions
These first two questions, as written, are specific to organizations that care about agile software development and want to find candidates that are a good cultural fit. In reality, you could replace “agile software development” with whatever processes and frameworks you’re using and you’ll get a lot of information out of these questions. I particularly like to hear about what candidates dislike about the frameworks we’re using. An experienced Project Manager or Scrum Master has seen a lot of different process instantiations and always has some things they’d improve.
- Tell me about your experience with agile software development. What’s great about it? Are there aspects that you dislike?
- One of the biggest challenges in this job is continuing to move the whole development organization towards an <insert process here, but inserting “agile software development” is common> framework that works for us. <Describe where you’re at right now.> Tell me about a time when you modified a basic process like scrum or kanban for a team. What did you change? Why? How did you go about making the change? What was the result?
For this second question, I’m looking for whether they make smart, conscientious decisions when it comes to processes. Bonus points if they talk about removing bureaucracy. I do love a good process simplification exercise!
Project Management Experience Questions
The following questions allow me to find out more about a candidate’s experience. There are no better experiences than failures, after all. So you’ll see a version of my failure question from the general questions list here as well.
- When do you know that a project is off-track?
- Tell me about a time when one of your projects failed. What did you learn from the experience?
- Tell me about the process(es) that you use with your current teams. What would you like to continue doing when you come here?
- Can you describe your most significant career accomplishment related to successfully leading a project to completion?
It’s not all about failures. It’s also fun to watch how candidates light up when you give them the chance to do a little bragging about the projects they’re most excited about.
I use the third question to understand how they run their teams today. It’s an opening for them to talk about what’s working well and what’s not. I love hearing that project managers can do a little retrospecting on themselves or their teams. I also use this question to determine whether they understand that processes can’t really be lifted directly from one team and applied to another team. I expect to hear that they’ll want to do some observation and get to know the teams before they start to change a bunch of things in our organization. After all, a good organization has done some process legwork already and will want to hand over well-functioning teams to their new employees. There will be some things we’re doing right and some that can be improved.
Communication Questions
I can tell a lot about a Project Manager’s communication style by the way they answer the other questions. I also like to know how Project Managers communicate across the organization and how they might communicate with me, their manager.
- How do you “manage up” — not just with your immediate manager, but also with other executives and departments?
A Project Manager can be a major hire, especially if you’re working in a smaller company. I’d love to hear what other questions you tend to ask your project hires. Write me a comment if you’ve got some great ones!
