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Technical Program Managers (TPM) at top FAANG companies manage and coordinate all aspects of a project, from defining its requirements to assessing the final product. A hiring manager looks for engineering managers with excellent team management and communication skills, technical knowledge, and much more.
Answers to technical program manager interview questions must demonstrate your ability to understand any program's technical and project management aspects. Go through this article to examine the most important technical program manager interview questions and answers. It’ll help you outperform the competition with thorough preparation and professional guidance.
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Technical program manager interview questions fall into three categories - behavioral, technical, and program management. These can include hypothetical/situational, leadership, system design, technical, and coding questions.
Let’s look at the top questions asked in TPM interviews. These questions will assist you in anticipating what to expect during these interviews and developing a solid strategy for navigating difficult technical rounds.
When preparing for technical program manager interview questions, quickly go over your previous jobs and projects. Create a compelling story that showcases your experience and skills to their fullest.
Begin with your program management experience and how you have gained experience in all aspects of project management, team members, budgets, time constraints, and clientele over time. Share your most recent technical interests and skills gained while working for a software development firm.
It is one of the most crucial technical program manager interview questions. The interviewer looks for your response structure, flow, and clarity of thought. Ensure that you describe how you drive projects and teams to meet company objectives.
These strategies help bring the best out of your team members:
Prioritizing tasks in a program helps ensure successful and timely completion. To prioritize the tasks, you should:
Leadership quality assessment is an integral part of technical program manager interview questions. To earn trust within a team, a TPM must:
Dependency management is one of the most crucial and complicated topics for technical program manager interview questions. To handle dependencies in cross-functional teams:
Also, check out some Technical Interview Tips to get hired at FAANG companies.
The most challenging aspect of Amazon Interview Questions for Technical Program Managers is that they cover a mixture of behavioral and technical questions. Let’s look at how to answer some of the top Amazon TPM interview questions.
Amazon interview questions for technical program managers are primarily concerned with Amazon's leadership principles. Prepare an answer for each principle that includes specifics and numbers from your work experience. Amazon recruiters can drill down into the specifics of Amazon interview questions for the technical program manager. Here are Amazon’s leadership principles:
It is important to understand the concept of RAID to answer technical program manager interview questions. You can use this to answer any tricky question. RAID in project management stands for:
Amazon interview questions for senior technical program managers often cover threading and multithreading concepts. A thread is an independent unit of execution. It is created within a process or an application being executed. Multithreading is when multiple threads are executed in a process simultaneously.
The memory structure of an operating system, including stack and heap, is often a part of technical program manager interview questions.
HTTPS is an advanced version of HTTP which implements an SSL/TLS to encrypt the information transmitted between a server and a client. The added layer of security makes HTTPS the better alternative for websites handling sensitive data, such as e-commerce websites or those requiring users to log in using their credentials.
This is a common technical program interview question asked at Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The steps are:
A load balancer is a device that acts as a reverse proxy and balances network or application traffic across several servers. Load balancers redirect multiple instances of the same microservice components as they scale out, while an API gateway connects microservices. An API gateway is an API management tool between a client and a collection of backend services. It acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregates the various services required to fulfill them, and returns the appropriate result.
Sharding is a method for distributing a single dataset across multiple databases. It is a form of scaling known as horizontal scaling or scale-out. This enables larger datasets to be split into smaller sets and stored in various data nodes on multiple machines. It increases the total storage capacity of the system.
Get some Facebook Technical Program Manager Interview Prep Tips here.
Google technical program manager interview questions cover a variety of topics, including the cloud network, Google strategies, products, and more.
A clear understanding of the cloud is critical for answering technical program manager interview questions. Cloud computing is an application-based software infrastructure. It stores data on a remote server by using at least one data server connected to the Internet. When a user sends files over the Internet to the data server, the cloud storage saves a copy. The user can retrieve this information copy whenever he wants from the data server through a web-based interface.
Technical program manager interview questions can be about specialized tools and features used to improve a process. The most valuable tools for improving process activity are:
TCP is used in applications that prioritize reliability, such as file transfer, emails, and web browsing. Unlike UDP, TCP is reliable because it guarantees data delivery to the destination router. It provides extensive error-checking mechanisms. At the same time, UDP is suitable for applications where speed is more important such as video conferencing, online gaming, and live streaming.
Take a look at some more Google Technical Program Manager Interview Questions here.
Practice these technical program manager interview questions to ace your next interview.
This completes the list of most crucial technical program manager interview questions asked in FAANG+ companies. You can practice these questions and mock TPM interviews to nail your interview prep.
Q.1 How do I prepare for technical program manager interview questions?
The best way to prepare for the technical program manager interview questions is to read the company's leadership principles and prepare for architectural design questions.
Q.2 What skills does a technical program manager require?
Leadership, management, communication, technical expertise, and strategy are the core skills. As a TPM, you must exhibit soft and hard skills while answering technical program manager interview questions.
Q.3 What does a technical program manager do?
A technical program manager is in charge of one or more company projects. They collaborate with cross-functional teams in hardware and software to take a product or feature from concept to launch.
Q4. How can you negotiate the salary while answering technical program manager interview questions?
In a technical interview, wait for your turn to put up questions. You can politely bring up the salary negotiation. Be firm and do not use a range. You must do prior research on market value and prioritize your requests accordingly. However, never mention personal needs. Your final offer will depend on how well you negotiate.
Q5. How much does a TPM make?
The average annual salary for a Technical Program Manager in the US is $142,873 (Glassdoor).
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