The ultimate guide to engineering manager interviews. Developed by FAANG engineers, prep faster with proven strategies, real-world questions, and a structured approach. Get interview-ready in hours.

Engineers working as individual contributors may want to switch to management roles in the middle of their careers. A significant part of this transition will involve preparing for the engineering manager (EM) interview. This course is meant for folks preparing for an EM interview, enabling them to systematically cover the often-asked questions and strategies to come up with good answers.
The course begins with education about the EM role and the interview process for this role. It then covers the patterns and strategies to answer typical management questions in a story-like fashion. These involve people management, project and cross-functional management, and behavioral questions.
The course has been prepared by experienced engineering managers and directors for top-tier tech companies with years of experience giving and taking interviews for this role. This course will help you to persuasively present your own management experience during the interview and get your dream offer.

Acing the Engineering Manager Interview

From time to time, your team will inevitably face hurdles that will keep it from achieving the goals it set. It's important not to get overwhelmed and to handle the situation calmly. You need to identify the cause and ensure it doesn’t happen again. At the same time, you need to ensure a clear line of communication with the stakeholders so that no one is caught by surprise when deadlines are missed.



# What the interviewer is looking for
- How well you manage communication in such a scenario, and whether you keep people in the loop and flag the issue from the start, or communicate it when it's too late.
- Taking ownership and being retrospective about how to avoid this in the future.
- How you manage stakeholders and deliver news to a larger audience. 
- Whether or not you collect data and come up with alternative options before you talk to management.
- How clearly you plan your next steps.

# What a good answer looks like

“For one of our projects, my team and I were working against a very aggressive timeline around the time COVID-19 hit. When we started, there was a huge business backlog to account for as well, so we planned the project in an agile way. The timeline was set by management, so we could only tweak the scope or the number of people on the project. Toward the end, we started realizing that some things were being missed and the deadline was approaching. That issue was flagged by the engineers whose work-life balance was already out of hand. We sat down as a team and did an estimation activity on the entire backlog. When we had the right data to prove to management that the task could not be completed at the given time, I discussed it with our cross-functional teams.

Once we all had a solid case built, we took it to management along with the cross-functional team heads. We presented our reasons for why the project could not happen on time. One of the reasons was actually from the client’s side. We were receiving a lot of last-minute requirements that were not part of the initial plan. These requirements were critical to their business and had started to pile up and slip into our backlog. We also listed two possible plans for the management. One was that we could bring on additional engineers from within the company. We would give them some of the top-level tasks that were not dependent on other teams. The second plan was to cut the scope of the project. 

It was a very difficult discussion to have with management because this was a very important client, and the survival of the business depended on this project. However, with the right data, we were able to convince them that it would be impossible to achieve the set goals. We involved the client as well to figure out what changes to make. We took a couple of extra people onto our team from within the company and came up with a parallel release, to be ready within the first three weeks of the launch and ship some of the less important features of the project there.

We also did a retrospective activity to figure out as a team what went wrong and how we could avoid it in the future. It allowed people to voice their experiences and give input, which gave everyone a lot of comfort since they knew their concerns were not being ignored.”


Let's examine what project goals are and if you have ever missed these goals.

Introduction

The EM Interview Loop

Management Interview Patterns and Strategies

People Management Questions

Project and Cross-functional Management

Behavioral Questions

Have You Ever Missed Project Goals?