Cisco Technical Program Manager Interview Guide
This guide covers the interview loop for Technical Program Manager (TPM) candidates interviewing at Cisco. It incorporates comments from 2 senior TPMs who’ve worked at Cisco, recent reports from Cisco TPM candidates, and insight from 25 transcripts (with approval from candidates and coaches, of course). We’ve covered the core structure for each round (including changes made to the loop in 2026), and made sure to include interview questions from as recently as last month.
TL;DR the interview loop for a Cisco TPM looks like:
Step 1: Recruiter screen
Step 2: Hiring manager round
Step 3: Team rounds - 2 to 4 interviews which cover:
- 3.1 Program execution
- 3.2 Technical judgment
- 3.3 Cross-functional influence
Step 4: Final fit round
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins spoke on CNBC in May 2026 and said they’re seeing a “networking super cycle”. Cisco is spending big on AI and currently they’re looking for people who have experience working with AI infra.
What does the Cisco TPM interview process look like?
Round | What is Cisco looking for? |
|---|---|
Recruiter Screen · Phone · 30 mins | Do you have the relevant work experience for this job? Recruiters also want to know what your motivations are. |
Hiring Manager · Video · 30–45 mins | Does your past work align with the level and scope of the role? Do you have the technical/domain experience required for the role? Can you show you’re motivated about the work you’ll be doing at Cisco? Can managers hand off tasks to you and stop thinking about them? |
Team Rounds (x2–4) · 1-on-1 or panel · 30 mins each | How you do under pressure and when things don't go right. Your strengths in terms of "softer" skills. Do you have the skills to engage with customers and manage stakeholders? Can you speak to a variety of audiences at the appropriate level? You need to be able to talk to technical people and translate that into something that non-technical stakeholders and users can understand, and vice versa. Would this person make my job easier or harder? |
Final Fit · 1-on-1 · 30 mins | Will you be stimulated by the work we do here and are you someone we can see staying with the company for a long time? Does your working style fit in at Cisco? |
The recruiter screen
The first screen for Cisco is a short recruiter call and they’ll cover the standard stuff like “why Cisco”, your background, programs you’ve worked on, and what you’re looking for.
Cisco recruiters have asked these questions in the past:
- Why do you want to work at Cisco?
- What about this role interests you?
- Give me a rundown of your past work experience.
Roughly speaking, the recruiter's job is to figure out if your skillset and experience is close enough to what the team wants so they’ll be ticking some boxes off in their head. To increase the chances of you ticking off all those boxes, be sure to go through the exact terms used in the JD and bring those into the discussion with the recruiter wherever you think appropriate.
Cisco recruiters tend to be transparent so ask them about the interview process and the team in detail; the more pointed your questions, the better. Some TPM candidates at Cisco have even gotten round-by-round previews from their recruiters.
The hiring manager round
Hiring managers at Cisco will have a conversation around who you are and what you’ve worked on.
Cisco HMs will ask some practical questions but overall expect more questions designed to understand your career and know you as a person. They also want to understand your motivations and how enthusiastic you are about working at Cisco.
HMs at Cisco have asked TPM candidates these questions:
- What size of programs have you handled? Explain the program design process you adopted and tailored for these?
- What do you consider your greatest strengths? Describe them based on the experiences listed on your CV.
- Why are you looking for a change? Why would you like to work for Cisco?
- Hardest part of your past role?
- Can you take on stressful projects?
A large part of the TPM job is that managers get to hand over something to you and not worry about it. That’s basically what Cisco HMs want to know. Can I hand off my problems to this person and trust that they’ll handle everything right? To do that they’re looking at 3 things:
- Scale - can you handle the scale at which Cisco operates?
- Self-awareness - do you understand what you’re good at and where you might need help? Can you own up if you make a mistake and fix things?
- Durability - can you make progress and see things through even when the road is bumpy? Basically, can you handle delays and conflict?
If you want to make the case for a certain level, this round is where to do it. When discussing past programs, open with the business context and next bring in the complexity (like technical challenges or organizing across sales and marketing). Then you need to provide details and proof through stories that demonstrate how you can scale, and why you’re a self-aware and durable person.
Failure is important at Cisco
Cisco interviewers regularly ask about how you failed and what you did next. Cisco HMs have asked TPM candidates these questions:
- Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge at work.
- Tell me about a time something didn’t go as planned.
- Tell me about a time a critical project missed a deadline. How did you handle the escalation and remediation?
Make sure you have a couple of stories prepared that you can use to answer in a jiffy. We also suggest you prepare them the way Cisco TPMs present their cases. To hone your stories for Cisco you can book a 1-to-1 mock interview on Prepfully.
Cisco TPM team rounds
Most if not all interviews for the following loop rounds will be discussion-based where you share your experiences and help steer the conversation by connecting your history with the work Cisco does. Your interviewers will likely come from the various teams Cisco TPMs have to work with. This Cisco program manager candidate on Glassdoor noted their experiences and focus areas for the interview process.
Cisco candidate on Glassdoor noted their experiences for the program manager interview, recorded 2021.
Basically they’re simulating how TPM conversations and meetings would go at work. Your team interviewers could be other TPMs, ICs, product managers, engineering leads, engineering managers, and more. In general, think about what the person interviewing you does, and how TPMs can help them do their job better and make their life easier. And when answering, focus on those aspects even more.
A Cisco TPM Coach says:
Any hypothetical questions, the first thing you do is do not answer because they're too vague. Imagine you are already in the job... you're going to ask 3, 5, 7, whatever many questions if you were on the job... that to me as an interviewer, that is my expectation. Then you get a problem that is impossibly big and you make it small. Half of the time when people come with urgencies towards the team, you ask two or three questions and they realize it's not that urgent anyways.
Use working vocabulary such as steering committees, burndown charts, PMOs, and comms plans to show you can think and talk like a Cisco technical program manager. Back up those high-level discussions with concrete details and numbers.
You will have 2 to 4 onsite interview rounds. We’ve combined them into 3 broad buckets of topics you will be asked about.
Program execution
There are 3 things they’re looking at here.
- How do you prioritize; can you strategize and see things through?
- Can you notice trouble brewing down the road and spot risks and dependencies? How do you communicate those risks to leadership? Can you mitigate those risks on your own?
- If in fact a fire needs to be put out, how do you do it? Can you juggle people, time, money, and scope and pull the right strings instead of defaulting to asking for more resources?
Cisco TPM candidates have been asked these questions recently:
- What metrics do you track to measure the health and velocity of a software development program?
- Describe all gateways of an SDLC.
- A critical vendor is not delivering and your additional procurement budget was not approved. What’s your action?
- Can you tell us about the situation when you had a lot of priorities at the same time, and how did you manage to work through them?
For Cisco, you can roughly group the success of a program into 3 tiers: customer and business metrics, engineering metrics, and operational metrics. Along with your North Star and guardrails, we suggest you bring in at least a couple of metrics from each tier and discuss the decisions you can make based on what the metrics are showing. For more Cisco & program manager execution questions, check out our free Cisco TPM interview question bank right here.
Technical judgment
You probably won’t face any direct technical rounds, but interviewers will still want to know about your technical background.
Since this round, like the others, is more of a conversation with engineering teams, what they want to know is the level of technical detail at which you can hold a conversation and provide valuable input.
Even if you haven’t personally designed certain tools or items, you should be able to discuss in detail the systems you've worked on.
TPM candidates at Cisco have been asked these questions:
- Can you tell me about your coding experience?
- How do you make technical trade-offs?
- Can you explain a complex technical problem you had to deal with recently?
Be sure to prepare technical depth in accordance with the JD. If you’re interviewing for the customer experience org, focus on SDLC and workflows. If you’re targeting Cisco’s silicon roles you need to understand hardware and chip design workflows.
Prepfully TPM coaches who work at Cisco can help you present your experience to emphasize exactly what Cisco is looking for from their TPMs.
Cross-functional influence
Cross-functional questions are the most common type of questions Cisco interviewers ask. Expect a lot of them, and in basically all your interviews.
How do you ask for things? Do you rely on relationships you’ve built up, or do you frame goals in mutual terms, or do you escalate based on data?
If a stakeholder is being difficult because their priorities are completely different from yours, how do you handle the situation?
Some questions that have been reported by Cisco TPM candidates are:
- What would you do in a situation in which team or program managers are not delivering on what they need to do?
- How do you manage competing priorities when multiple engineering teams are dependent on your program’s output?
- What is your strategy for working cross-functionally?
- How do you get buy-in from stakeholders?
- How would you deal with a difficult situation and or people?
A simple structure you can start off with is:
First, figure out the stakeholders.
Second, reframe your task around a shared goal.
Third, escalate using the right data.
Fourth, talk about how you would rebuild and amend the relationship if needed.
The final fit round, and after the loop
The final round will be a skip-level meeting with a senior leader or another round with the hiring manager.
The focus will be primarily cultural and value fit.
The 3 major Cisco guiding principles are ‘Think really big’, ‘Play to win’, and ‘Drive durable growth’.
TPM candidates have been asked these questions:
- What are your favorite hobbies?
- What kind of manager do you prefer working with?
- What three words would you use to describe yourself?
Another aspect Cisco values is learning, so it’d be great if you could connect and discuss how exactly you’re incorporating AI workflows and learning. Overall, ask a lot of questions about the team and the role to show you’re enthusiastic and have done your homework.
What is the compensation for Cisco TPMs?
Total comp for Cisco TPMs ranges from $140K (base $118K) at Grade 6 to $410K (base $250K) at Grade 13. Cisco RSUs vest equally on a three-year (33% split) or four-year (25% split) period.
All Cisco TPM compensation has been sourced from Levels.fyi.