Recent Moments

Current Responsibilities

Team Management:

Improve team culture Staffing and scope Motivate and focus

People Management:

Happiness and development of engineers Set clear expectations and deliver feedback

Technical:

Improve technology and development practices Communicate effectively about software engineering

Process: Continuously improve value delivery process

Example Questions

What are you looking for in a new position?

Growth. Learning. A meaningful mission. A culture that embraces creativity and data.

Why did you become a manager?

Because I tend to enjoy spending time face to face with colleagues exploring the software inter personal challenges we face when we write software together.

What does great engineering culture mean to you?

Respect. Creativity. Focus. Compassion. Productivity. Mission clarity. Knowledge Sharing.

Can you give some examples of how you have encouraged that type of culture in your team?

What strategies have you used in the past to motivate your teams?

Can you tell me about a time when one of your employees made a mistake or failed. How did you handle it?

Can you tell me about a time that you disagreed with a tech lead or senior engineer and how you handled it?

Can you tell me about how you have helped an engineer develop their career?

Can you give a high level overview of a system you or your team has worked on, could be current or previous experience, whatever they are most comfortable with.

Stash Invest. Trading and Debit backend systems in partnership with APEX and Greendot. A message based architecture with a client facing RESTful API.

Can you tell me about your experience with agile methodologies?

Many years of learning and coach. ~10yrs ago became a certified scrum master. Strong advocate or Pivotal’s XP practices.

Passionate about teams understanding, owning and establishing their own grass roots agile processes. Their roles, responsibilities, ceremonies, artifacts and work flow.

What does a good user story look like? What is its structure?

Designs. Structure Acceptance Criteria. Estimate of relative complexity. Customer focused. A place holder for a conversation. An agreement.

Team Management

Give me a quick overview of your team. How many people are on your team? What are the roles? Who reports to you? What’s the team mission?

I manage a team of 12 people. Given some recent reshuffling not everyone in that team directly reports to me. For example our one QA and one iOS engineer on my team reports to someone else. Currently only 3 people directly report to me. At times it as been up to 6. I tend to try to keep it to less than 6. My 3 current direct reports are all backend engineers. The team name is “Home+” and our mission is to improve engagement by 15% in the next quarter through improved ‘subscription’ management, debit spend insights and stock back activation.

Tell us about a time when you made an improvement for your team. What were your strategies for enacting and evaluating change?

What do you look for when hiring engineers? If you can give an example, e.g. talk about how you chose your last hire, that would be perfect.

Depending on the role I work hard to establish an assessment rubric that encompasses the teams goals and needs. A set of questions and ‘good/bad’ answers that we as a group can use. One example metric I like to see is a strong sense of SOLID principles, Clean Code principles, Test Driven Development, and a passion for mastering pair programming.

What do you think are important qualities in a high-functioning team? How do you encourage those?

Respect. Creativity. Focus. Compassion. Productivity. Mission clarity. Knowledge Sharing.

When a problem arises on the team, how do you decide at what point to step in and address it?

I do my best to let teams mature without intervention because I believe it helps them develop strong bonds. If I hear in regular 1:1s from a number of difference voices and a specific problem is reoccurring and I can’t find a good way to empower them to address it, then I tend to gather the group together and attempt to investigate the issue in a structure meeting such as a retro or a post mortem.

If it’s an issue with an individuals performance then I would obviously take a different approach.

Have you ever disagreed with a product manager about the priority of tasks or if something needed to be done at all? How did you handle it?

I tend to be very focused on the goals of the Product Manager at all times. I tend to work to ‘inform’ the Product manager and then adopt their approach. For projects that are technical in nature, I tend to work with the product manager to explain the value of the project. If I am unable to form a values agreement with the Product Manager then I tend to accept their perspective.

I generally appreciate that the Product perspective is very Data and Customer focused.

What is the role of a tech lead?

This is often different depending on how the team decides to operate.

In my current team. The TL is responsible for:

Tell us about a time when you had to overcome an obstacle to accomplish something.

Establishing an event schema with the debit team. The challenge revolved around thinking through from a DDD perspective who should take ownership of a new data store that tracks your running “last 30 day” spend.

Both tech leads on both sides of the fence were unable to form an agreement.

After many months of schema negotiations we eventually realized that we had been thinking about this problem of ‘aggregation’ wrong. Instead of it being a product team issue we realised that data science already had an efficienty daily aggregation process strategy and the data store ready for us to use.

Basically, in this case we solved the issue by bouncing it with a wider net and gathering more feedback.

People Management

Give me a BRIEF overview of your recent experience, and what are you looking for in a new position.

Let’s talk about 1:1s. What’s the purpose of 1:1s with your direct reports? How do you hold effective 1:1s?

Weekly. Regular. Well thought out. Different for everyone. Structure. Connected. Demonstrating follow through on both sides. CAMPS. Relevant.

Let’s talk about career development. What is career development? Tell us about how you have helped an engineer develop their career.

Stretch assignments, coaching, connecting people with opportunities across the business. Rewards leaders who pair with juniors to ramp up to equals.

Tell us about a time when you had to handle an under performing employee.

Madelyn. Conflict based discussion.

Tell us about a time when you had to resolve a conflict or disagreement.

Isha & Kyle.

It’s important to be open-minded. Tell us about a time someone changed your mind.

Evan on being more data focused on internal feedback.

What have you done recently to further your own development as a leader? What was your key takeaway from that?

Let’s talk about feedback. Tell us how you go about sharing valuable feedback. Can you give a specific example?

Isha. Kyle. Coaching everyone.

Have you ever dealt with an unhappy team member? What strategies helped?

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How do you handle your authority, people assuming that your opinions are direction.

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Dealing with cross functional teams, reports outside their area of expertise.

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Technology & Development Practices

Can you give me some examples of SQL vs NoSQL databases and why you would use one vs the other?

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Can you describe the difference between synchronous and asynchronous architectures? REST vs Event Driven

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What are the differences between statically typed and dynamically typed languages?

Static typed languages (java) are those in which type checking is done at compile-time, whereas dynamic typed languages (ruby, python) are those in which type checking is done at run-time.

Can you describe TDD and why you might want to use it?

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Why is CI/CD valuable?

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What kind of metric reporting tools would you use for front end users?

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How have you managed and prioritized technical debt in the past?

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Process

Take me through your current team’s structure and how they plan and work. What do you see as your role in the process?

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What do you really like about it?

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What can be improved?

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How have you managed expectations with your stakeholders?

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What would you consider good indicators that agile is working for your organization, and that your efforts are succeeding?

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Are there any common process metrics that you would track? If so, which metrics would you track and for what purpose?

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Tell us about a time you used data to make a decision.

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What retrospective formats have you used in the past?

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How would you recommend following-up on retro action items?

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