Behavioural rounds for engineering managers

Amazon’s preparation page for software development managers asks candidates to describe the size and scope of the teams they managed, their daily management techniques and how hiring decisions are made. It also gives an example question about the best hire you have made. A manager’s round asks about outcomes reached through other people, so a story about your own code at its best can miss the question entirely.

Below are the stories a manager loop asks for, the public research and ladders behind them, and the arc of one story told with the care a people story needs.

A manager’s stories are about outcomes reached through people

Public descriptions of the job agree on what to look for. Microsoft says its managers “model, coach, and care”. Google’s guide to structured interviewing looks for people managers who can empower a team, shape a long-term vision and develop their direct reports. Google’s Project Oxygen analysed over 10,000 data points about its own managers and found ten behaviours of effective ones, among them coaching, empowering the team without micromanaging and supporting career development. Dropbox’s ladder describes its M3 engineering manager as guiding “a team of ICs to deliver business, and customer impact” while setting clear expectations and addressing performance issues.

Nine stories cover what a manager loop asks about. The list is MySmartCoPilot’s:

Area	The stories to prepare
Hiring	A hire you made and why; a hire you would not repeat
Growth and performance	Someone you grew into a bigger role; underperformance handled fairly
The team	Conflict between two of your reports; a change to the team’s health
Delivery and operations	A delivery you recovered; an incident and its follow-up
Stakeholders	A time you said no to a stakeholder

Amazon’s page adds that different interviewers are assigned to evaluate different areas, so the people questions are spread across a loop, and a second question on hiring needs a second hiring story.

Each story needs more than an engineer’s story does: the team in numbers, the process you followed and what you changed afterwards, with nobody’s private details in it. Step through how Sameer, an invented engineering manager, answers a question about the way he hires:

The drawing shows the whole scene; its 7 steps are listed below.

Every step as text

1. The team. Sameer, an invented engineering manager, opens with his team: eight engineers who own a payments API, and 26 offers made in two years. Size and scope come first, so the interviewer can weigh everything after.
2. The decision. His decision: every loop would score each competency on a written rubric. Before it, offers went to whoever the loudest interviewer liked, and he says so without naming anyone.
3. The process. The process that kept it fair: every interviewer wrote feedback before the debrief, and the debrief compared evidence against the rubric. A manager's story names the process, because fairness lives there.
4. The outcome. What changed for people: the median time from first interview to offer fell from 43 days to 26.5, and more offers were accepted. Candidates heard back faster, and every decision had written evidence behind it.
5. What changed after. One hire he would not repeat taught the loop something: a gap that was in the notes had been waved through in a debrief. The rubric now treats a weak answer on a must-have skill as a no.
6. The confidentiality check. Before telling it, he checks the story: no candidate or engineer is named, and nothing private about anyone is said. The interviewer hears the process and the principles, which is what they assess.
7. The whole arc. Team, decision, process, outcome, what changed after, and a confidentiality check: six parts. An engineer's story can stop at the result; a manager's story ends with the system that changed.

Sameer’s story ends with the system that changed, the rubricrubric: A written scoring guide that says, for each thing being assessed, what an answer at each score contains. Google uses the word for its anchored rating scales. More in “How interviewers score behavioural answers” every loop now uses, rather than with his own work. That ending is what separates a manager’s answer from an engineer’s.

Hiring stories, with the rubric and its measured effect Pro: opens with a Pro, Premium or Ultimate pass

In this part:

• Underperformance, told with care and confidentiality
• Delivery and incidents, run through a team
• Stakeholders and the team’s health
• The confidentiality check, run on three stories
• Practise: three manager stories
• Interview questions
  • What do interviewers look for in an engineering manager's behavioural answers?
  • Tell me about a hire you would not make again. What did you miss, and what did you change afterwards?
  • Tell me about a time someone on your team was not meeting expectations. What did you do, and how did it end?
  • Tell me about a time a senior stakeholder wanted something your team could not deliver by the date they needed. What did you do?
• Key takeaways

1 diagram · 2 runnable examples (JavaScript) · 3 interview answers · about 27 minutes

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Terms in this lesson

calibration

Comparing ratings against shared written standards, as interviewers do in a debrief or managers do in a review, so that the same evidence gets the same rating whoever gives it.