This week in pm-clinic: interviewing managers
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
Times have changed at my company and I’m looking for a management role. I was hired as a software developer, but have picked up some project management work through promotions. Since I have no experience either interviewing potential PMs/managers or being interviewed myself, I don’t know what to expect in seeking out a FT management position.
What are three questions you ask of any project manager you interview? What is the minimum criteria to get a hire? How do you deal with ambiguities of assessing management skill, compared to something more easily demonstrated in the interview, like programming or design knowledge?
The three questions I ask:
1. Why do you like being a PM? (I want someone passionate)
2. Tell me about a time when you missed an obvious solution to a problem.(not only do I want a problem solving example – but I want to see if they are straight with me).
3. What have you read lately, and what are you reading now? (always hire smart people. Smart people read).
Not an exhaustive list, but here are a few I love…
1) Explain something to me in 5 minutes. Communication is so important in most of the PM roles I work with. Folks who add focus to communication, understand their audience and speed up what they say by leveraging what the audience knows are so valuable.
2) If you had $100 million in venture capital all of a sudden and no constraints, what would you do? Great PMs have specific ideas floating in their heads, and they assert a role in the situation that bares some resemblance to an actual PM.
3) If you started work tomorrow, what would you do? How would you solve the problem?
I work for company with several PMs only so my main goal is to have people I can rely on and they can work unassisted. In this situation I ask:
1) Most important thing you’ve learnt in previous job. It tells you how the person looks on his/her environment and which things are important for him/her.
2) I describe situation with several major dealys in a project, development team you can’t relay on, customer’s growing anger, few deadlines set by you overrun. Then I give 10 more days to act before another deadline comes and ask what would you do. I seek for some creative thinking there – something completely different than “I’d go to high management and ask for help”. To be honest I haven’t yet heard the answer that stunned me.
3) That’s not the question, but the observation during whole interview: If the person is stressed? If the person is communicative? If he/she has any problems with expressing what he/she intended to say? If he/she is honest? The information I want to gather is simple – if I want to work with him/her. We’d work together on some projects so we better have similar approach to key tasks.
PB, maybe your second question is a little perplexing. Good project managers take corrective action way before situations get that bad.
My answer would be that it’s time to stop and take a walk. Then call the whole team together (preferably in a park or on the roof) to identify the problems and their causes, and to work out some creative solutions and workarounds.
Then we’d agree who needs to do what to turn things around in the next ten days. Hopefully in the process we’d re-energise and remotivate – if not, that needs to be part of the recovery plan too.
(Perhaps not a stunning answer, but it’s off the top of my head and I offer it with conviction.)
Fred, you’d be surprised when you heard answers to the question. Most of them are nothing more than either “go, ask the boss” or “give some more to the customer, maybe it would be enough to calm they down”.
To be honest I don’t know stunning answer by myself, but hey, there’s always a time to learn – even during an interview. Btw: If I heard someting stunning I’d employ him without any hesitation.
And your answer is for me good (even very good) – allowing team to go to the park instead of just sitting and trying to develop something is a creative way of thinking.