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There are some great suggestions already, however, it sounds like many comments are focusing on their experiences as a tech manager and not the interview preparation, which was your question. I interview a lot of technical managers, and beyond technical chops, I focus mostly on communication skills, charisma, and personality. I tend to ask a lot of behavioral/situational questions to understand how the candidate woul…
Roughly, we'd be looking for:
-- Technical: Will engineers trust you to help improve what they build and how? For example, can you architect across the stack and advocate best practices for code quality? Do you like leading from behind? As a startup, can you pitch in as needed?
-- Project management: Will you make development more predictable and productive? For example, as a feature moves from product design to implementation to production, will you help engineers technically spec, scope, decompose, tackle, & maintain features? Can you help with roadblocks, such as identifying risky parts, and making sure collaborations happen?
-- Product management bridge: Will you improve how product designers, sales engineers, and even early customers work with engineers, and vice-versa? Will you make sure infrastructure & operations are represented in engineering discussions?
-- Domain understanding: For engineers who lack experience with aspects of enterprise software and our customers' needs (security teams), will you help fill the gap? Will your visibility be a boon to the company?
-- Engineering management: Will you facilitate hiring? In what ways will you help engineers thrive & grow? Can you help with the ups & downs of rollercoaster startup life? Will you grow the company culture -- improve diversity, the daily environment, ...?
-- Junior developers: Will you help them integrate & grow?
-- Outside face: As a leader in a small company, can you assist with random customer-facing tasks like sales engineering and customer success? Recruit? Give tech talks?
-- Growth: As we go through the next doublings, how will you grow with us?
We look for awareness on most dimensions, and strong experience & interest on several. However, the form those take can be pretty varied.
... And if any of these sounds like you, please ping build@graphistry w/ a CV :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going into details, the product was started 10 years ago by one of the programmers whom I suspect wanted to be a game developer, so the product is filled with gamedev patterns and due to a tech choice it's not possible to migrate to a modern architecture without rewriting the whole thing.
Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your success is entirely in your team's hands. This isn't true. A lot of a manager's job is doing the little things that are necessary to get done. This may involve scrum master, project management, and even product management. Find the gaps and fill them!
I agree that a lot of a manager's job may be tasks that are necessary to get things done, but I still don't see how your success isn't tied to your direct's/team's success? I understand that as a manager you may be given a stacked deck team wise, but even then I would imagine that you were put into that situation to be a change agent. If you weren't, well, that's someone sandbagging you and a different problem!
Agree that your success is tied to your team's success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be funny to see, say, an enterprise software filled with gamedev patterns. Would you care to elaborate on any of it? What kind of patterns were specifically glaring/out of place?
you're right, that does sound pretty funny. "the database backend was actually on the GPU - it was all in openGL, just in case. We were Mobile first, too - got 1 GFLops on iOS. Unfortunately we sold irrigation controllers for large farms."
Buy and read Jim Whitehurst book The Open Organization before your interview and actualize the information in that book. Recall times you put into practice the things that are mentioned in the book (good and bad).
Never use the word "manager" again. Instead, prefer "leader". If you are somewhere where the team needs to be managed then there are better jobs out there. Buy and read Jim Whitehurst book The Open Organization before your interview and actualize the information in that book. Recall times you put into practice the things that are mentioned in the book (good and bad).
Two things that I always advise new managers when I promote them or hire them. First, (for new managers) managing people is a completely different skill set from engineering, expect to suck at it when you start and let go of your hard won pride that you developed becoming an awesome software engineer. One of the "failure" modes of new managers is that they are so uncomfortable doing these new things, and so comfortab…
Remember also that while your job isn't to write code and that success is in your team's hands, it is your role to help that team be capable in order to achieve that success. I'm going to give you a lesson I learned in my first management role that I hope you'll take with you -
Deal with underperformance head-on, and do not avoid the tough conversations. I made the mistake of "seeing how things go" and giving wishy-washy performance feedback because I really wanted my team to like and enjoy working for me. In hindsight, you are doing no one any favors by not giving direct feedback on performance early and often. Don't just leave it on the negative, though, give them something to work toward and steps to take to improve, and then be hands-on in helping them with that development (without doing their work for them). Do not avoid this.
There are already some great suggestions on here, but I love this topic so here are mine. For the interview, come up with an answer to this: Tell me about a time you leveraged your experience and knowledge to multiply the efforts of your team. A lot of what you will be doing is spending your time helping your team do good work on the right things, so any experience you have where you have done that as a senior or lea…
In the startup world finding a mentor may be hard, and if you are in that situation you may want to look outside for a mentor. But if you are at a large organization, there is often a support network or mentor program already available. Take advantage of it! If you can, ask your current manager to write a SWOT and use it to pair you up within a mentor to make strengthen your weaknesses. Try to find a mentor outside o…
Think about how to express when and how you would prioritize the needs of the business over the needs of the engineers. Demonstrate your grasp of cost optimization.