Behavioral interview Questions

1. Tell me about a time you not only met your goals, but exceeded expectations.

There was one time when I was working as a consultant for USAF. On one of the daily standup calls, the client (USAF Project manager) mentioned that most of his other applications do smart card authentication. He wanted to add that feature to the Oracle Application I was working on.

So, even though this wasn’t a formal request from him I ran with it. I started a conversation with Oracle on understanding the products we could leverage to get job done. I set up meetings with their product teams, got to know the product, discussed our requirements, and decided that we could come up with a solution. I implemented that solution in our development environment. I had the proof of concept done before the next sprint started in four weeks.

I just about knocked the project manager’s socks off when I showed him that POC! The feature wasn’t technically part of the project plan, and he had no idea I would try to add it. He was really pleased.”

 

2. Tell me about yourself.

My name is Rakesh Kumar and I have applied for this Engineering manager position because the skills, qualities and experience I have are strong match for the job description. I have excellent level of technical competence, I have a solid background in engineering and I have outstanding project management skills. In previous positions, I always focused on the helping my employer meet their project deliveries on time.

As engineering manager I will achieve success through strong communication and interpersonal skills by making good decisions that are in the best interests of the business and by delegating to my team of engineers to ensure as much work gets completed as is achievable.

If you hire me as your EM, you will see a fast and immediate impact and I will always acts as a loyal and hardworking member of the organization.

3. What makes a good Engineering manager?

Four things make a good Engineering manager – experience within the industry you are working in, technical competence, being commercially aware and the ability to complete projects and tasks quickly and in line with predetermined specification.

A good Engineering manager is an all-rounder and someone who has the relevant management and leadership capabilities to lead a team of engineers to achieve very specific goals within set timeframes.

It is essential that an EM supports the senior management team and he works towards achieving the commercial and financial goals of the business.

4. Tell us about a time when your team members disagreed on a technical solution or implementation. How did you handle the situation?

I was working in a previous company as EM and managing a fast paced product development project with a team of six people. During the initial project brief, two of the engineers disagreed on the best way to implement their particular element of the project.

I took control of the discussion, and asked them individually to outline their proposal including the benefits of approaching things their way. I followed up with probing the questions asking them to provide real life example of where it has worked previously.

After listening to them, I choose the one that I felt would give the best outcome based on the project specification.

As Engineering Manager, I will always listen to my team’s suggestion to find the best way forward and I will never be afraid to take control and make decision that will help us to quickly achieve our objective.

5. If you were recruiting an engineer for your team what would you look for?

There are several characteristics and traits I would look for when recruiting an engineer. Teamwork and technical competence are the first two.

I would want someone who puts the needs of the team first, someone who can collaborate in a professional manner without conflict and someone who has the expertise and experience to perform their duties quickly and to the required standards.

I would recruit an engineer who has a proven track record of problem-solving, someone who can analyze data to develop real life engineering solution and someone who possesses excellent communication skills. The engineer’s attitude to work, their attention to detail skill and their commitment to the organization would be other crucial factors in deciding on the right candidates.

Finally, I would want to hire someone who is passionate about engineering and who takes responsibility for their own continuous learning and development.

6. What are your strengths and weakness?

My strengths include my project scheduling and completion skills, I am renowned for delivering time-sensitive projects to high standards and within budget.

I am confident Engineering manager who makes difficult decisions and who holds his team accountable.

My weaknesses include the fact that I find it hard to say no to the people and I don’t like asking other people for help.

Since I can remember, I tend to say yes when people ask me for help or assistance even if I don’t have the capacity to take on extra work. However, when it comes to me asking for other people’s help I prefer to figure things out for myself which is not always right approach to take.

I am the type of EM who believes there is always something new to learn and I will always be open to constructive feedback from my senior and directors and from other people who I respect.

6. What are your roles and responsibilities as Engineering Manager?

I have below qualifications.

-          Excellent experience in taking a leading role in building complex software system that has been successfully delivered to customers.

-          Excellent experience in communicating with users, other technical teams and senior management to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical design and product strategy.

-          Deep understanding of distributed and service-oriented architectures; delivered large scale commercial enterprise software systems or online services

-          Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment

I broke my time down into four categories:

·        Technical (35%)

·        Managerial (35%)

·        Recruiting (15%)

·        Administrative (15%)

Technical

·         35% of my time

·         Technical work includes writing code, code reviews, hunting down bugs, pairing with teammates, and reading software updates and best practices. As my teams grew, the amount of time I devoted to writing and reviewing code dwindled, but I do think it’s important for engineering managers to spend at least some of their time elbow-deep in the code.

Managerial

·         35% of my time

·         This includes direct people management, creating timelines, strategic planning, and meetings with technical and nontechnical team members. Making sure my team was happy, advocating for them in business meetings, and helping our product team create technical specs were all part of my engineering manager duties at Packback.

 

Recruiting

·         15% of my time

·         Recruiting time included going to conferences, meetups, and coding bootcamps; writing blog posts; meeting with job candidates; and evaluating technical screenings.

·         While I spent more of my time on recruiting when I had an open engineering job, smart engineering managers are always hiring. The best candidates are usually the passive ones who rarely look for a job, so I spent a portion of my time getting in front of them each week.

 

Administrative

·         15% of my time

·         Finally, I spent a few hours per week reading and writing emails, answering questions in Slack, having random conversations, and doing “other” day-to-day things to support my team. As the manager, I tried to keep these kinds of distractions away from my engineering team, but I’d schedule time with team members when necessary.

·         If an engineering manager’s job is to make their team as productive as possible, it stands to reason that most of the administrative work will fall to them.

7. What are the biggest challenges you face?

That’s a great question, Vidal. There are many challenges that the manager faces.

The biggest challenge that I face is to find the balance between retaining the top talent, with extremely good technology, forward-looking features for the product, and managing the technical debt in the team.

This is one of the biggest challenges that I always have faced, but a manager has to find that right balance of getting those roadmap items ahead,

-          how to get the top talent to work on the roadmap items

-          How to motivate the team to believe that they are working towards a great product that’s going to be used by millions and billions of people around the globe.

At the same time, manage the technical debt because coming from the background as an engineering manager, it is very easy just to accumulate the technical debt, and nobody’s looking at it.

8. How do you explain technical debt?

Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.

9. Can you tell us what qualities make you an effective leader?

For me, it's about having a goal, understanding the steps to reach it and knowing who you need to get there.

It's also about never giving up when roadblocks appear. It's not so much about being a boss either, it's more about being a facilitator, a person who empowers others to get behind a project or program who will push it forward until it has its own inertia.

It's about being accessible to others rather than being someone who people fear. It's about working in the trenches with everyone rather than standing outside uninvolved.

10. How You Motivate your team members?

‘In my previous job as a project manager, I used a range of approaches to motivate team members. This started as soon as projects were kicked-off. I delegated tasks to the team and put up a reward for important projects. For instance, if we would successfully finish a project I would take the team to the new restaurant in town.

Once the project started I would schedule weekly meetings where we would discuss the planning and progress to make sure that everybody knew the status and that we were working towards our goals. During these meetings, I would let everybody update the team of their specific progress and discuss what they might need from their teammates. This way the team was motivated to work harder in order to not let their coworkers down.

During the project, I would also check up on all team members individually to see if encountered any issues or if they had any questions. Because I’m the manager I’m responsible for the project as a whole and therefore I want to help out where I can and motivate them when needed. If the project was a success I would report the specific team members that went above and beyond for the team to the directors for a potential promotion. Of course, I would keep my promise too, and take the team out for dinner afterward.’

-> Set Reward when project get succeeded

-> Identify the core member and recommend for promotion

-> During the status meeting, ask to team members to show their achievement

11. Tell me about a time when you found a simple solution to a complex problem?

Current user issue fix done by me which fixed complex problems where we removed all the filtering logics.

 

By this I got appreciation from my US Counterpart and we made sure almost more than 10 issues are directly fixed with this simple fix. So finally here our learning is, we should not assume the things, and we should try to do and at least put some POC and then jump into fixing the problem.

12. Describe a situation when you had a conflict at work and how you handled it.

“While working on a project for a previous employer, one of my team members regularly challenged every solution I presented. He also had a tendency to interrupt and talk over others without listening to their input. I experienced a challenge in maintaining my patience when he interrupted others without listening. It reached a point where our respective managers counseled both of us on our behavior.

“To resolve this conflict, I had to recognize that I cannot change or control his behavior. I also acknowledged that this behavior, from both of us, was likely a result of stress due to the heavy workload of the project. Therefore, I adjusted my own communication style to increase empathy, avoid triggers and build patience with interruptions. We were able to complete the project and maintain polite correspondence whenever we needed to work together after that.”

13. Explain a situation in which you disagreed with your manager and how you handled it.

When preparing data about the success of past projects to request funding for a new project in our department, a supervisor asked me to delete data records for projects that were less successful. I knew that deleting these records would skew the results and representation of our past performance. I expressed this concern to my supervisor, but she insisted that I remove the data.

“After careful consideration, I decided to discuss the issue with the next level of management, which dismissed my concerns and supported the decision to remove the data. Ultimately, I removed data as directed, but I also changed the language in the report to clearly communicate that the reported data represented successful projects to ensure I accurately represented the information. I also documented the situation, including data records removed from reported results, in the event of questioning or an audit.

Code review example when he did not agree about one of my change, I explained the situation, when it was not required to put any check at all. But he did not agree. I met him and explain about the library function and how it is working and finally he accepted my change after going through library function.

He thanked me and immediately updated the information. We completed the project with great success.

“I understood my supervisor’s decision for the request, but I could not compromise my values. I tried to create a compromise in removing the data and adding the language. We did eventually receive funding for our project based on the reports.”

15. How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team? Provide an example.

“In my previous experience, I was working with a group to prepare a presentation for leadership. The group was responsible for conceptualizing an idea and presenting a project plan to implement the idea. We selected an idea and developed an action plan for completing the presentation. Two of the team members wanted to hold daily meetings to discuss the plan and progress. Other team members, including myself, disagreed with this approach because the team had a log to report task progress and completion.

“As long as everyone knew their assigned tasks, we did not think we needed to divert time for meetings that would not move the project forward. We also thought these meetings would use valuable time needed to complete the project. Instead of starting an argument about the meetings, we gathered everyone together to explain their reasoning for their side. Eventually, we decided to hold a daily meeting that would last no more than ten minutes to provide short updates on task progress.”

16. Describe a situation when you had a conflict at work and how you handled it.

To answer this question, provide an example from your work history when you had a conflict with a coworker. It can be helpful to use the STAR method for your response. The STAR method stands for:

Situation: Describe the conflict or challenge.

Task: Explain your role in the conflict.

Action: Discuss the steps you took to resolve the conflict.

Result: Describe the results of your actions.

“While working on a project for a previous employer, one of my team members regularly challenged every solution I presented. He also had a tendency to interrupt and talk over others without listening to their input. I experienced a challenge in maintaining my patience when he interrupted others without listening. It reached a point where our respective managers counseled both of us on our behavior.

“To resolve this conflict, I had to recognize that I cannot change or control his behavior. I also acknowledged that this behavior, from both of us, was likely a result of stress due to the heavy workload of the project. Therefore, I adjusted my own communication style to increase empathy, avoid triggers and build patience with interruptions. We were able to complete the project and maintain polite correspondence whenever we needed to work together after that.”

17. How do you define success ?

I define success in a number  of ways. In the working environment, i define it as excelling in my position and achieving more than that is expected of me. 

For example, in my current role i was expected to deliver my project successfully with high customer satisfaction rating but actually i was able to deliver my project with higher customer satisfaction index and along with that i was able to get another project parallelly and also successfully executed without any hiccup.

I got appreciation from higher management from my company. I consider it as my professional success. I also define success as being able to achieve all of my targets and objectives within my annual appraisal. 

Success for me is also about continuous improvement and continuous learning. I always have something on the go that i am working for.

On a personal level, success to me is keeping fit and healthy and also having my friend and family around me. I am stable and grounded person at home and this allows me to concentrate fully on my work when required.

out of blue : completely unexpected

18. Tell me a time when you had to take a calculated risk at work ?

In a previous job, i had not been there for long when i was offered a promotion. This came entirely out of the blue and while i am very ambitious and enthusiastic, i decided to turn it down. The reason for me turning down this opportunity was based on the fact i genuinely wanted to learn my new role to a high standard, so i could then help the organization and my team develop. 

Although i feel i could have performed well within that promotion, i did not want to risk my reputation and the performance of the company especially as i had only there for a relatively short period of time. This was obvious risk on my parts i may not have been offered the opportunity for promotion again. However it proved to be right decision as my manager respected my choice and i actually went on to be one of the company highest achievers.