Professional Technical Project Manager Interview Preparation Guide

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Every project hits a snag along the way, but not every project manager is aware of that delay until it’s more pronounced or even beyond repair. The ability to monitor and track the progress of a project and tell immediately when it’s not meeting the benchmarks you set in the planning phase is perhaps the most important duty of a project manager.

Some level of change is inevitable, but as a project manager, it’s important to quickly adapt to those changes. Explain to your interviewer how you continue to keep your team on track whenever any project changes pop up.

It’s important to show that you have leadership skills when you answer this question. Be thorough about your daily tasks when it comes to managing your team’s performance—for example, perhaps you hold weekly strategy discussions and meetings. You’ll also want to provide specific examples of how your management style has resulted in positive team performance.

Even project managers have to answer to someone. Responding to executives and stakeholders requires a different approach than the one they would use with teams and vendors. Part of their duties includes managing stakeholders who hold a position of authority over the project manager. That takes a subtle touch.

In a nutshell, the interviewer wants to see how, in detail, you’re able to succeed as a project manager. After all, meeting (or exceeding) customer expectations when it comes to project delivery is your ultimate goal. It’s important not to be vague and give a generalized answer; you’ll want to give precise examples and details about your process.

They better! The last thing you want is a project manager who carries everything on their shoulders. That’s nuts. But this is a bit of a trick question, or at least one that has an implicit question embedded in it. What you really want to know is not whether they delegate, but how they delegate. This is a great way to weed out the micromanagers.

Not all projects are executed under one roof. With more dynamic project management tools and a global workforce to choose from, many project managers might never meet the members of their team, at least in the real world. Then there are the necessary resources that will be outsourced, which involves a different management technique than when working with employees. Knowing how they would manage people and resources can be a crucial point in your decision to hire or not to hire.

Easily delegating responsibility is an essential quality of any project manager. Be sure to discuss a relevant example that assures the interviewer that delegating responsibility comes naturally to you.

It’s likely you’ve had to deliver bad news in the past as a project manager, and your interviewer wants to see how, exactly, you go about doing so. They want to see that you’re considerate and upfront with everyone, that you have all of the facts first, and that you’ve thought about how this news will impact all of your team members—not just the person you’re delivering the bad news to directly.

Talking about managing a project will inevitably lead to a discussion of leadership style. There are many ways to lead, and all have their pluses and minuses. Depending on the project, a project manager might have to pick and choose how they lead, ranging from a top-down approach to servant leadership. See how well-versed they are on leadership techniques.

Everyone makes mistakes; character is defined by how you deal with them. This question will allow you to first gauge the candidate’s honesty. If they say that they’ve never made a mistake, you can rest assured that they’re not being truthful and their resume can go into the circular file. However, when they tell you about the mistake they’ve made, note if they take responsibility for it (that will reveal their level of maturity) and, of course, how they resolved it.

Be honest about any short-term project goals you have currently, as this shows the interviewer that you are enthusiastic about your projects and that you’re goal-oriented. When it comes to discussing your career goals, be sure to include the company you’re interviewing with as part of your goals. If you’re interviewing with a recruiter for job placement, you may not have a specific company in mind and that’s okay—just be sure to be clear about what type of role you see yourself working in.

Where there are people, there are conflicts, and even the best projects have people problems. Good teams collaborate and trust one another. If there’s a problem between two or more team members, it must be resolved quickly. But this can also apply to stakeholders, vendors, etc. A project manager is a bit of a psychologist who must know how to resolve conflicts quickly.

It’s easy to forget that project managers are people, too. They are hired to perform and lead a project to success, but they can suffer the same setbacks as anyone on the team. The difference between a good and great project manager is the ability to monitor oneself and respond proactively to any drop offs in performance.

It’s crucial as a leader to not only ensure your team stays on the right track, but is motivated about the projects they’re working on. Maybe you give praise for a job well done as a form of motivation. As long as you can clearly demonstrate past examples of how you’ve motivated team members, there’s not really a right or wrong answer here.

The interviewer wants to see that you’re a critical thinker and effective problem solver. Even if you don’t have a specific example to talk about, explain that you always care about your team members and would want to uncover the root of the problem, and find out why, exactly, they’re unhappy. While it may not be possible to please every disgruntled employee, the interviewer just wants to see that you would make an effort to rectify the situation and be professional about everything.

This question is a tough one for candidates to handle as it tells the interviewer how honest you are with yourself and compels you to talk about an instance when you failed. Your interviewer wants to see how you handle setbacks, because no matter how good you are at your job, they will happen. Most importantly, they want to know that you learned from these experiences. When you give your examples, explain how you used those setbacks to improve as a project manager overall.

This is a question that is designed to ask about leadership skills. Explain what has been best for you and use examples of how your delegation style has worked well in the past. Even if you’ve never technically led a team before, it’s important to find an example of how you might’ve delegated in the past.

This question is about discovering any lessons they learned from that project. Everything is a learning experience, and each project offers lessons from which a good project manager grows.

Sometimes, no matter how much due diligence you put into assembling a skilled and experienced team for the project, someone underperforms or creates conflicts. While the project is rolling, you don’t have time to stop and tweak your team. Rather, the project manager must deal with the problem and resolve it. This comes up with even the best team, so any capable project manager would know how to nip underperformance in the bud.

Well, if you are a project manager you might already be thinking that there can’t be one skill that is enough to be successful. And, you are right. Your answer could be leadership skills, communication skills, or time management skills. What the interviewer is looking for is the justification for the answer. So, before you blurt out anything, have your reasons ready.

From meetings to project management programs and everything in between, there’s an endless list of tools and processes that project managers use to stay organized. Be sure to list as many tools as you can think of that you’re familiar with to demonstrate your knowledge of project management software and other tools.

Whether it’s deadline goals or overall project goals, setting goals is an important part of being a project manager, as it motivates team members and helps to keep projects on track. Be sure to give specific examples that demonstrate how you’ve set goals for your team in the past and how you’ve tracked these goals. For instance, you might have set a project completion goal for a specific project that required everyone to complete their part by a certain date. Perhaps you regularly checked in with team members to see if there were any obstacles that could stop them from meeting that deadline, and if so, you offered possible solutions.

As a project manager, you’ll need to effectively communicate with your team for all projects. Communication challenges will arise; nobody expects that this won’t happen. What the interviewer wants to see, however, is how you’ve handled these challenges in the past. It needs to be evident that even with communication issues, you were still able to effectively work with your team. For example, perhaps instead of being able to have face-to-face meetings when necessary, you were able to put together web chat meetings. Think of a time when something like this happened and how you dealt with the communication challenges efficiently to ensure that the project outcome was still a good one.

Knowing that a project is not keeping to its schedule is only as important as being able to get the project back on track. Once a project manager is aware of the discrepancy between the actual progress and the planned progress, what steps do they take to get the project back on time without jeopardizing the enterprise? Any project manager worth hiring will be able to answer this with practical specifics.