Management Essentials Flashcards
Describe a situation where you anticipated customer needs.
Kickstarter - repeated setup process, inability to upgrade and maintain
BigQuery - cost savings, limit, preview
Ss - Caching
Walk me through a project you managed? What were the obstacles you faced and how you tackled them?
Talk about BigQuery Obstacles - Time constrained. - Needed coordination across all departments and 50+ people. - Holiday season.
- I created a release plan early and shared it with all stakeholders as soon as I started to plan.
- To make it easy for migration, I had to add some extra features.
- I worked with marketing and product to deprioritize tool migration as much as I could. In some places, I agreed to bring those tools back up post-release.
- Due to the holiday season, half of my team was planning a vacation or WFH. I moved our scrum to later in the day and actually used it to my advantage to split the team in a way that we are migrating data 24x7.
How do you handle conflicting priorities from another team?
eg: Data Infra logging project.
PX tool- did not prioritize.

Being a platfrom team, this is some thing we have to deal with. When such a request comes the first thing that I try to understand is whether the project is aligned with our team goals, audition statement and also if this is some thing high priority for the company.
Next thing would be to compare it with our current priorities and stack rank them. If it’s a higher priority, then talk to the product anthem leads, and figure out how we can slot them in.
Describe a situation where you helped the business save money / eliminate wastes.
Liveops tool
- Reduced ops team. Reduced engineering work.
BQ Migration
- Redshift was growing 80-90k YoY.
- Stabilized the exponential growth.
- I negotiated with Google for discounted storage pricing.
- Reduced the current cost by 50%.
WD cost reduction project
- Created dashboard with finance and Ds
- Identified areas like datastore reduction
- Contract negotiation
- API benchmarking —> json change
- feature optimization —> atlas api
How do you ensure your team is updated with the latest trends?
Normally, we buffer enough time for research before a project starts at this time can be used by the engineer to research alternatives work on best practices and get their designs reviewed by their peers.
Another thing that I do with all my teams is to set up a biweekly Engineering sync meetings. This meeting is purely focused on technical learnings and people can share any any sort of technical stuff you’re a starting from from the engineering to research materials or some new language LTS releases.
In addition, I also encourage my engineers to come up with new and innovative solutions to our problems, and encourage them to explore alternatives .
How do you onboard an engineer?
- I first assign a direct mentor for the engineer.
- I have created an onboarding guide that specifies day by day todo for a mentor and expectations from the new engineer.
- I have also created a codelab with the help of my team that helps them get familiar with our system w/o impacting production.
- I set up 1x1 from their first week to go through expectations and how their career growth should look like over the next 2 quarters.
- After that, I create their career development goals.
How did you manage multiple teams?
- I had jr managers/leads in different teams. Each team was given OKRs to hit. I would work with the leads to figure out how to achieve those OKRs and present their work plans in quarterly meetings.
- I also started a bi-weekly meeting for the team leads where priorities were discussed and also technical work that can be cross leveraged or mentoring opportunities.
- This way everyone was always in sync with each other and could work together for larger features, firefighting, or releases.
How do you make sure everyone in your team is in the loop?
Biweekly team meetings.
Team all hands.
Regular one on one with direct and indirect reports.
How do you ensure high quality?
Set up clear expectations with your team about the quality focus on improving the current system a well maintained system would encourage people to follow quality practices.
Designs and documents are reviewed by the whole team.
People shares best practices and learnings in biweekly engineering meeting.
Make sure people have the bandwidth to focus on quality and not just quantity.
How do you handle technical complexity especially if you aren’t a subject expert?
- Managers need to be technically competent not experts
- If feasible, review the document and online materials/blogs pre-meeting or discussions.
- As someone who has seen different situations play out, use them as data points and ask deep questions. If engineers have thought about it, they will answer and educate you; else they will know what they are missing (security, reliability, developer efficiency, etc)
Few years back when we were thinking about how to build micro service oriented architecture, we faced a challenge on how do we maintain the infrastructure for all the services?
It feels naive now, but back then we had an experience working with and Infra as code. I I had a staff engineer who proposed the idea of exploring the system.
I assigned him some time to do a POC and share with us his learnings and estimate for the project. I also asked him to build a list of study materials for us.
Once he was done with the POC, I made sure all of us went through the study materials that this engineer provided so we can make an informed decision. Eventually, we light the puzzle, and we had an understanding of how the system works. 
Tell a situation where you let the team take credits.
ETL V2
- eng all hand.
- blog post.
How would you resolve a conflict between your engineers?
- Cron job issue biru/sol vs yu
- Lr issue Yu/Steven
- Big quarry time zone issue
Describe some critical conversations you had. Why were they hard? How did you tackle it?
- Marketing SS - convince them
- Juan. Explain behavioral problems leading to him losing team
- Yu - resolving conflict while making sure I have his back.
- Sol and OOO: denied wfh request Supporting family but maintaining work responsibilities.
- Layoffs
Describe a situation where you agreed to do something instead of your opposing belief. Why did you agree?
- WD -> Chef engineers move
- LR on JS
Describe a situation where your hard work wasn’t paid off.
Todea delivering work for Chef but product fails and we went through layoff.
Recruiting international to only laid everyone after a few quarters.
Burn failed
How do you track your team’s pulse?
- Via 1x1 and team meetings.
- Culture survey for a broader level.
- Sprint retrospectives and team meetings.
- Review cycles
Describe a situation where you had conflicts with your peer.
- Marketing SS
- WD runes v2 feature
How do would you handle a totally demoralized team and bring them back?
Acknowledge the current situation.
Focus on the future prospects.
Align peoples goal to the incoming opportunities.
How do you usually ensure a project runs on schedule?
A work plan on teamweek.
Maintaining the dependency chart actively.
Continuously reprioritizing work each week.
Tell me a situation when you made a decision under constraints or w/o enough information? How did it turn out?
BQ JOIN issue - minor
LSP for Atlas - sharding v batching (better for conflict resolution or tech discussion)
BQ on demand v flat pricing system.
Outsource war dragons
In what ways do you support your team as they work on projects?
Depends on direct or indirect management
Project Management - Keep unblocking before people are blocked
Weekly meeting with leads to see what they need help immediately or for the next 2-4 weeks
Review Process - are things working and should we change something
Design Review - I do get involved depending on the severity and technical complexity.
Release planning - As project is heading delivery, directly or indirectly review release proposals and make sure everything is set
How do you grow your team?
- 1:1 to discuss their interests and continuously checking how they are progressing towards goal
- Quarterly reviewing career matrix; identify focus areas and align with company goals
- Set goals for different timescales
What is the most important part of being a manager?
- Be excited about working with people: Mentoring them, motivating them; aligning them.
- Great communicator: Need to collaborate; stakeholder management; vertical and lateral management
Imagine the design team ran into an issue and wants to run 4 prototypes in parallel. Explain how you would present this to the executives.
- I would first gather more data about what the issue is and why they need 4 prototypes to run.
- I will then determine the ROI of this work and cross-check with my manager.
- I would then do the HLD and a rough work plan for them, get it reviewed by my TPM or manager (rough so no need to involve team yet).
- I will then present to the exec the issue, solution, ROI of this, and rough estimate/plan for the work.
- If I need to de-prioritize some other work or request more resources, this is the time to do so.
Describe a situation where you managed peers to get things done.
Runes V2
Todea team not doing application work for glamsquad
Marketing superset
How do you do portfolio planning?
- Annual planning
- Quarterly identify what needs to be done based on company/team goals
- Prioritize tasks with product fn and eng leads
- Understand the dependencies and ensure those will not be a blocker.
- Finalize the plan by doing some capacity planning and present to the leadership upwards
How would you handle fitting in the first 90 days?
- Meet with my manager and understand her expectations.
- I will meet with teammates and start building personal relationships.
- I will try to understand the team dynamics and internal working over the next couple of weeks. Try to understand the team vision if any or the untold one.
- Once I am onboarded and have met with everyone a couple of times, I will do a SWOT analysis with the team.
- After aligning everyone, I will identify low effort, high ROI work I can invest in.
- I will then get it reviewed with my manager and other leads in the team and build the work plans.
- The next couple of months would be me continuing to build up personal relationships and delivering on some of the initiatives I identified.
How did you handle the situation when priorities were changed mid-project? What lessons did you learn to avoid them in the future?
Todea chef ended
- Don’t bs but transparent communication to engineers
- Make a plan how quickly we can reach an okay state and stop working on the project
- motivate people with Discussing future opportunities and align engineer’s goals to new roadmap.
Lesson Learned: Always focus on small deliverables. Too big a reveal risks no one ever seeing the project or hard to stop working on it.
Describe conflicting priorities you managed with other teams/functions.
- Todea x-team priority
- SS functional asks for features and migration
You are about to launch and with 1-2 weeks remaining you realize some component is failing. What do you do and why?
First try to understand the criticality of the system and also the magnitude if it’s a non-blocker, then follow delete release and added two non-bug for future.
If it is it release blocker the next time I’ll do is try to understand how flexible are we with release timeline? Normally release dates are arbitrary, but in some cases it might be more strict. I will then work with our engineering team to understand how much time and effort we need to fix the bug, and if there is a hacky way to make it work in the short term. I also try to understand if we have the proper resource in terms of skills and manpower to fix that in time.
once I have all this information, I will summarize them and share it with the stakeholders make sure everyone is aligned in terms of any release schedule change any extra effort required on our end.
The final step would be to make sure we discuss this during our project, retrospective and learn from our mistakes .
What is your management philosophy?
It can be summarized in three categories people first, customer oriented, bias for action.
People first Dash as a manager I put a lot of time and effort to make sure my team is constantly growing.
Customer oriented - this is mostly reflected during prioritization and planning. I always tell my engineers to make a solution for the customer and not to sell our solution to the customer. What does means is if there is a conflict between technical wizardry and customer needs Customer gets the preference, unless it’s compliance or security issue.
Bias for action Dash this is reflected in our decision, making process as a team we follow democratic processes however, sometimes this can lead to decision in ability for every project, we assign a decision maker, who can break this tie. It also allows us to make a decision with uncertainty.
Did it ever happen that you wanted to work on some projects but got over prioritized?
Prioritization is a collaborative process and normal to get deprioritized.
- WD automation vs seasons project. User facing features done earlier is better.
- Todea px tool instead of analytics migration: PX tool can unblock the game and get the team off our back to focus on migration.
Describe a situation where you got constructive feedback
India office - lead irrespective of seniority
Communication issue - too direct
What to do with people that stay at the same level for too long?
Can and Will chart.
- Identify why they are stuck. If it’s an sr level and they don’t want to grow beyond due to their personal reasons, then accept that it’s okay and help them improve their craft at the current level.
- Create a work plan with short to mid-term goals for them to achieve to grow.
- Assign a mentor to them for 1-3 months.
- Evaluate their growth and decide if they have the ability to improve in the current job or not.
Describe a situation where you convinced someone that your choice was better than theirs. How did it turn out?
Kickstarter aka platform team for common systems.
Convincing DI brain trust that focusing on infra stability was long term play.
- The brain trust wanted more product improvements like AB test analysis or helping marketing. I proposed that we focus 1 quarter fully on infra stability.
- I presented with them the number of engineering resources we are wasting fighting fires per month and the amount of time wasted by people using those tools.
- With those data, I was able to convince them the need for improving our system and they even agreed to spend more time building out test system for our engineering.
- 4-5 months total, our system uptime was stabilized to be 99.9%+ consistently. We freed up our engineering resources significantly. We had a test environment on IAC that we were using to build features fast. And the next 6 months we delivered data migration, new product line for R&D, helped data science and marketing with several projects.. huge improvement in productivity.
Describe a time when you found it difficult to focus and stay productive due to uncontrollable external factors.
The week after I came to know that we are doing a layoff was quite hard. This is the first time in companies history, and in my life I was supposed to help plan the layoff list.
Honestly, I’d love to say that I did some thing and magically. I solved the problem, but that was not the case.
I was lucky to have a sympathetic wife. I just listened to my blabbering. Eventually, I calmed down when I realized it wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one could have seen it coming. Hindsight bias is pretty powerful. However, I realized everyone was doing what they thought was best at that particular time.
Describe when you realized you can’t deliver on time.
Todea - Chat
Assigned 2 engineers - 1 left; adjusted staffing based on prioritization but still was impacted.
Notified client teams and negotiated down certain features.
Temple Raid Event
- I got the product spec and created the work plan and timeline.
- Towards the latter half of the project, during playtest, designers kept making significant changes to the gameplay.
- As I kept constantly prioritizing, I started realizing we won’t be able to deliver everything if we kept getting so much extra work.
- I then set up a meeting with some stakeholders and products to help prioritize. Turns out the designer wasn’t at all comfortable with these changes.
- I then deprioritized another project which wasn’t part of team OKR and moved those engineers to the new project. I got the designer to agree to do an extensive playtest and lock their feedback for this version within the next 3 days.
- I worked with the QA manager to get extra resources and let the customer support know of the new changes.
Moving forward, I started the system to do a paper playtest before the product sends such iteration heavy features our way.
How do you deal with conflicts?
- Identify the cause of conflicts by meeting the individuals separately.
- Work out by proposing my solution.
- Chenyu v DI pull request. Weixiao v Jianchu.
How do you motivate people?
- People are motivated when they feel that work is aligned to their personal goal.
- Career management People are motivated when they have clear set of expectations and goals
- Culture - feels respected, trusted and involved
I don’t bullshit people; have transparent two-way communication.
Focus on career management continuously identify an airline individuals career goals with the company and team goals
