Capital One Technical Program Manager Interview Guide

Capital One was the first (big) US bank to go all in on the cloud and they set a high technical and operational bar for their TPMs. 

Matthew DiRenzo, a VP & TPM leader at Capital One, discusses what TPMs do on Capital One’s blog: "We need a few different groups of skills to succeed. There's the technical depth and knowledge for solving problems focused on the product. There's also program management, which is the day-to-day execution and problem solving. Then there's leadership qualities, which is how we bring people together across the company."

Every stage of the TPM interview process tests technical credibility plus ability to influence and execute across the organization. The majority of the interview process focuses on your past work.

TL;DR the Capital One TPM interview loop looks like:

Step 1: Virtual job tryout (online assessment)

Step 2: Recruiter screen

Step 3: Hiring manager screen (for some candidates)

Step 4: Power Day - three to five rounds depending on the team & role

• 4.1 Job fit interviews: Role fit, Program execution, Stakeholder management and communication
• 4.2 Behavioral rounds
• 4.3 Technical/program deep dive (role-dependent)
• 4.4 Program case / quantitative exercise and/or mini case interview (common for most roles)

There can be 3 initial screenings before the virtual onsite which Capital One calls the ‘Power Day’. You have the standard recruiter and HM screen, and also an online assessment. 

The Power Day will have roughly three to five rounds. Contrary to the name, the Power Day can be split across multiple days as well. Most of these rounds will be job-fit and behavioral assessments.

You will likely receive a ‘Virtual Job Tryout’ which is an online assessment that tests customer focused thinking, leadership ability, problem-solving and communication skills.

This job tryout assessment can have multiple sections within it such as verbal, quant, work history, situational judgment, and more. You will have around 20 to 45 mins to answer. 

The questions can be given as business scenarios and reasoning, or a case study with multiple follow-ups, or questions based on your past work experiences. 

Most, if not all, questions will have multiple choices. The assessment is scored automatically and some questions might not have right answers. You’re primarily being scored on how consistently you answer and whether your responses indicate you’re the type of person who’d excel at Capital One.

The Capital One automated assessment can include questions like:

• You have a group project due. On the day of your deadline, your colleagues inform you that the report you created hasn’t been done to a high level. What do you do?
• If you made a mistake while doing a favor for a coworker, you would expect to be held accountable. (agree/disagree)
• Take a look at the accompanying table and assuming the manufacturing lines are running for 9 hours a day 7 days a week, which model brings in the highest revenue?

Recruiter screens at Capital One can feature both the standard questions as well as behavioral or domain-specific questions.

Capital One TPM candidates have recently reported these questions:

• What processes or skills did you learn at your last job that would be useful at Capital One?
• How are you the most qualified candidate for this role?
• What made you consider joining Capital One?

For the “Why Capital One” question, we recommend you answer with something specific that implicitly touches on why the company, why the TPM role, and why the team as well.

After the recruiter screen you will have a 30-min long conversation with the hiring manager. They’ll ask you about your background and explain the job and role to you.

HMs will also be figuring out level fit.

TPM candidates could be asked these questions:

• What tech stack do you have experience working with?
• What did you learn from your most complex project as a TPM that you would apply at Capital One?
• What was your biggest win on a project?

Capital One’s mission is ‘Change Banking for Good’. They have two official values which are ‘Excellence’ and ‘Do the Right Thing’. Try to bring up a crisp story that can demonstrate how you’ve upheld one of these values in the HM round.

We suggest you give your interviewer a short rundown (include role, visibility, duration, impact) before you go into details. For example, “This project was a part of our broader xyz initiative and it was quite important for leadership. It took us eight months to complete. In my role as a TPM I did this, that and this and so on. The final outcome was XYZ. This project also made me understand and improve my XYZ so I’m quite proud of it”.

Most of your onsite rounds will be job fit or behavioral interviews. Interviews will be around an hour long.

Capital One interviewers can expect candidates to drive the conversation forward and the conversation might not seem very interactive. So while the discussion could stay high-level on their end, it’s your job to bring in the necessary details.

While your answers are expected to be in STAR format, we also suggest you bring in these details when appropriate: (1) program scope & goal - customers, businesses, teams, yours, (2) your exact role, (3) program scale, (4) technical details, (5) hardest components, (6) risks and dependencies, (7) conflicts or failure, (8) your personal contributions & decisions made, (9) execution and team alignment, (10) result, (11) reflection.

“Job fit” interviews at Capital One assess if you have a suitable skillset and would fit in for the specific role, the team, and in the overall company culture.

You’ll have at least one job fit interview, and senior candidates should expect two rounds. Usually the Power Day kicks off with a job fit interview as it’s also a way for Capital One to calibrate your level. You could have multiple interviewers from different roles and parts of the org.

The questions could be technical, domain-focused, behavioral, strategic, etc.

Expect a lot of questions that focus on a specific problem within a program. They will also deal with the human and operational aspects of TPM work. Interviewers want to see things like how you’d motivate the team and budget resources.

Can leaders hand off programs to you and trust you to handle everything? By handling everything, interviewers are looking for someone who understands how and when to bring up problems to leadership and when not to.

If you’re interviewing for a senior role, you will also be asked how you improved processes for the team or organization as a whole.

TPM candidates at Capital One have been asked ‘job-fit’ questions in these 3 core areas:

1. Role fit and basics

• What’s one thing in the job description that stood out to you?
• What are the key responsibilities you’ve held previously that make you a good fit for the role of TPM at Capital One?
• What do you think is most difficult about being a technical program manager?
• Walk me through your work experience in the past year.

1. Program execution

• If you have to start a program from inception to execution can you explain the flow which you would follow?
• How do you properly define/document and control the goals for each program that you execute?
• Can you give an example of how you manage multiple programs at the same time?
• How would you measure the success of a program?

3. Stakeholder management and communication

• What is your experience in stakeholder management?
• Have you ever had to manage a disagreement between the project team and top-level stakeholders?
• Tell me about the most impactful project you’re proud of.
• Can you tell me a story where you had to influence senior leadership to change their mind?

You will likely have a separate behavioral interview and you could also be asked behavioral questions in job fit or technical rounds as well. The behavioral questions will mostly be in the ‘tell me about a time’ format.

Interviewers could also ask questions related to Capital One’s mission and values.

Other candidates have reported these questions at Capital One:

• Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult team member or customer.
• Tell me about a time when you were managing a program that was falling behind schedule. What would you do differently now, if given the chance?
• Describe how you handled a difficult schedule.
• How do you earn your team’s trust?

Not all candidates will have a distinct technical round, but nearly all TPM candidates at Capital One will be asked in-depth technical questions either in this distinct round or the job fit round.

The questions will mostly center on your technical experience and judgment. Interviewers will also ask questions related to metrics, KPIs, OKRs, tradeoffs, and how the requirements are related to one another.

You could be asked a system design question as well, but the conversation will be high-level and Capital One interviewers will expect you to drive the conversation.

Generally system design for TPM candidates will feature systems you’ve worked on in the past. You will have to draw out the design on a virtual whiteboard and are expected to know all components inside out.

If the req is highly technical, it’s possible you might be asked to design a payments or banking system of some kind. Be sure to ask your recruiter about the expectations and whether this could be asked of you.

These questions have been reported by Capital One TPM candidates:

• What systems have you worked on?
• What is the most technically challenging problem you solved? 
• What technology and tools do you find are necessary to be successful in your role?
• Share an example of a time you solved a technical problem using your technical knowledge.

Since interviewers won’t go into the system weeds themselves, we suggest you start off higher-level and ask your interviewer at every major step if they’d like you to go into the details. If there’s an aspect where you had a particularly big contribution, be sure to bring it up and explain the context as well.

Capital One runs on AWS, so we suggest you bring in AWS components in your system designs or point out specific terms/items you might have worked on in the past. So, for example instead of calling it an in-memory cache, just call it Amazon ElastiCache.

For senior candidates, we suggest you take extra time talking about alternatives and tradeoffs and why you picked one over the other as it shows more depth in your work.

A Prepfully TPM coach with nearly 20 years of experience advised a senior TPM candidate at Capital One on the technical details to add in their answers:

Many TPM candidates will also have a separate case interview.

There are two possibilities here: (A) you will be given a hypothetical scenario or quantitative exercise to walk through, (B) you’ll be expected to walk through a program you were responsible for.

If it's (A) a hypothetical case, it will be either a full or mini-case. Mini-case interviews will be 30-min long while the full case interview will probably take up the entire interview.

You could be asked to present a case with these prompts:

• What is the break-even in this business case?
• Develop a rough timeline to implement the recommended solution, along with metrics that make sense.

We suggest you offer multiple possible solutions and rank them based on important factors and the data available. Be sure to narrate the calculations you made as well, and be prepared for interviewers to ask you to change one aspect and make quick changes and calculations on the spot.

Candidate reports suggest the complete process can take several weeks and sometimes around two months, but there is no reliable TPM-specific decision deadline.

Total comp figures for Capital One TPMs do not have a lot of data points.

From the few numbers available, Senior TPMs take in $201K (base $175K) and Master TPMs can take in $398K (base $275K). The bonus can form a large component of the final take-home ranging from 5% to 20% of the total comp. These numbers have been sourced from levels.fyi.