Technical

What steps do you take to keep the project team on track and moving forward?

Engineering Manager

C3.ai

Zuora

Pipeliner

Boston Scientific

DiDi Chuxing

Prezi

Did you come across this question in an interview?

Answers

Anonymous

4Strong
For any project to succeed the team needs to have the clear understanding of the goals and expectations. I make sure the team understand the business requirements, customer scenarios as well as roadmap and milestones. I involve the team in the planning process to define the intermediate milestones and roadmap to completion. I use Agile sprint to track the process and use weekly meetings to track process. The daily standup is setup to highlight the process as well as any blockers or potential risks faced by the team. We also use the teams and other communication channels for cross team collaboration and high light dependencies. For any milestone the team achieve I make sure celebrate by acknowledging the effort, so that they feel appreciated and motivated.
Expert Answer

Anonymous

4.6Exceptional
To keep the project on track, I believe having clear deliverables and holding people and teams accountable is important.
In a recent project, we worked with one of the product teams to develop a voicemail feature for their product. My team had to integrate with a 3rd party solution, integrate with the product team's backend, and set up monitoring and alerting. Our product team also had to implement new UIs and make backend changes to communicate with our backend.
I worked with my team to break down the project into multiple deliverable milestones with a set expected delivery date. I focused on different phases of work where the team can work independently from our stakeholders or when the team has to work with them. We’ve set our milestones to 1) Integrate with the 3rd party APIs 2) Integrate with the product team's backend 3) Test & Setup monitoring and alerting. Since the product team depends on our progress, I shared our deliverable milestones with our stakeholders and made suggestions on how they can line up their development timing respected to our milestones so we can efficiently work together. We also made sure to reserve some time to handle any unexpected problems which became handy later when we discovered an undocumented limitation on the 3rd party API. To make sure both teams are making progress and there are no unexpected issues/delays, we utilized Jira tickets to keep track of the progress, and set up a weekly sync for continuous check-in to discuss any challenges or blockers.
After we delivered the project, we reviewed the success metrics together and confirmed we increased the retention rate by 5%. After the project was completed, we did a project retro and discussed things that went well, didn't go well, and what could have been done better.

Anonymous

4.6Exceptional
I keep my team focused on five main areas: design reviews, tracking development progress, ensuring release efficiency, managing risks and dependencies, and overseeing timelines.
For example, in our RAG system for conversational AI, I led design updates that introduced components to decide when retrieval was necessary and refine queries with context to improve relevance. This required additional expertise, so I added two more applied scientists to the project. I also participate in code reviews with my team, ensuring code quality and maintainability and aiming to keep code inventory age minimal before production. By doing so, I maintain high release efficiency and reduce technical debt.
I play a bridging role between scientists and engineers to ensure smooth collaboration and production deployment, especially on complex projects like the RAG system. Through weekly reviews with stakeholders, senior team members, and our TPM, I proactively identify and address risks and dependencies.
For instance, in our smart voice CX project, the original design included two main components to orchestrate multi-turn voice interactions. One was an end-to-end, paralinguistic-aware speech-to-speech system for simple chit-chat, while the other was an LLM-based reasoning engine for handling more complex conversations. We initially introduced an arbitration component—a smaller, fine-tuned LLM—to direct each interaction to the appropriate component. However, I identified a critical risk: due to the stochastic nature of this arbitration, it could result in inconsistent customer experiences for similar scenarios. Additionally, this setup increased system complexity and impacted latency management.
To address these risks, I proposed a streamlined approach, suggesting that the LLM-based reasoning engine should handle 100% of the reasoning tasks. This eliminated the need for complex arbitration, reduced integration complexity, and improved response times. I presented this proposal to stakeholders, including principal engineers and product managers, and successfully influenced them to adopt this approach, which resulted in a more consistent and efficient conversational experience.
Overall, I focus on guiding the team through structured processes, proactively identifying potential issues, and simplifying complex technical challenges to deliver consistent, high-quality results across our projects.

Anonymous

3.8Strong
At Octane, I had the following three steps. One is, I had a Confluent page wherein I would have the project up-to-date status on the stories, the features we are working and the state of each of the stories along with detailed explanation of where we are at, the risks the project carries, and also any test cases which have been passed. The second point of communication was via weekly status report wherein I would have a detailed status of where the project is trending, what are the risks associated, and identify the stories which was done in the previous week. The third part was, we had a bi-weekly communication wherein I would present the project status to all the stakeholders, including the leadership, to help them understand where the product is at, and are there any risks associated, and if so, how I'm trying to address it, and with whom I'm collaborating to get the risks addressed. By following these three steps and also being open to communicate on Slack, I had all the different channels open for communication with my stakeholders and leadership.

Anonymous

3.6Strong
Every Sprint I update the status of the project to express a clear summary whether project is moving forward as expected, delayed or blocked /in dire state
Additionally monthly I send out an executive summary of most important projects, including a mapping from the known milestones to where we are currently in execution
  • What steps do you take to keep the project team on track and moving forward?
  • Can you share your approach to managing delays in a project and ensuring the team stays on track?
  • How do you communicate project status and progress to stakeholders?
  • Can you describe a time when a project faced a significant delay and how you approached the situation?
  • How do you handle situations when a team member is not meeting their project commitments?
  • What is your process for updating project plans and schedules when circumstances change?
  • How do you handle situations when a project stakeholder wants to make changes to the project scope?
  • How do you motivate the project team to maintain focus and stay engaged during long or complex projects?
  • Can you describe a time when you had to make a difficult trade-off between project timeline and quality?
  • How do you measure the success of a project once it has been completed?
  • How do you ensure that lessons learned from a project are incorporated into future projects?
Try Our AI Interviewer

Prepare for success with realistic, role-specific interview simulations.

Try AI Interview Now

Interview question asked to Engineering Managers interviewing at Veracode, Telegram Messenger, Festicket and others: What steps do you take to keep the project team on track and moving forward?.