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

As an engineering manager, you're not always confined to working with your own team. You'll be required to collaborate with other teams, such as multiple engineering teams or cross-functional teams, on numerous occasions. To smoothly achieve the combined goals of both teams, you’ll have to maneuver carefully to make sure goals are aligned. Your interviewer wants to know how you drive alignment across teams. 



# What the interviewer is looking for 
- Are you looking at things from both teams’ perspectives, or are you only looking at them from a product perspective?
- How thoughtful are you about dependencies?
- What work do you put in to align the dependencies?


# What a good answer looks like

“When I have a project that's being defined, and it includes multiple teams, I make sure to identify all the dependencies when making the project plan. That way, they can be baked into the project plan with proper timelines. I make sure to have meetings with the team managers beforehand and figure out a final project plan collaboratively.

When you start meeting other teams to discuss your project, it’s important to understand how it aligns with their team’s mission or the company’s larger mission so you can pitch it correctly. It's also helpful to have an impact factor so the other team can assign your project the right priority and agree on timelines.

I also make sure to explicitly define the dependencies and whether or not it is an API or UX review, and how many hours of the QA team’s time it will take up. This way, you can avoid surprises, and everybody knows what needs to be done and when.

I make sure to set up recurrent alignment meetings to ensure everyone is on the same page and to address any challenges that the team is facing during the execution phase.

Multiple dependencies can sometimes be challenging when communicating with the leadership. So, we make sure to list those complex dependencies in the projects. Understanding those challenges at the start proves to be helpful later on.

To foster friendly engagement for long-running projects, we've sometimes had team events where the teams could interact in a relaxed, social setting and get to know each other better. This helps reduce friction considerably, and subsequent issues can be managed far more smoothly.”

 





Let's discuss how to plan a project that involves multiple teams.

Introduction

The EM Interview Loop

Management Interview Patterns and Strategies

People Management Questions

Project and Cross-functional Management

Behavioral Questions

How Do You Plan a Project That Involves Multiple Teams?