Project & Process Management Topics
Project management methodologies, process optimization, and operational excellence. Includes agile practices, workflow design, and efficiency.
Cross Team Coordination and Dependencies
Covers strategies and practices for planning, executing, and governing work that spans multiple teams and external stakeholders. Key skills include dependency mapping and critical path analysis to determine what work blocks other work and what can be parallelized; release planning and sequencing across teams; integration testing and deployment coordination; and risk identification and mitigation for teams that are on the critical path. Candidates should be able to describe communication and governance rituals such as cross team standups, scrum of scrums, program increment planning, weekly dependency reviews, and escalation protocols. Practical tooling and artifacts include dependency trackers, shared issue boards, visibility dashboards, RACI matrices or clear owner commitments, and cross team milestone plans. At larger scale candidates should show judgement about scaling frameworks such as the scaled agile framework and Large Scale Scrum and when to adopt them versus lightweight coordination. Interviewers will probe trade off conversations and stakeholder facilitation, how to resolve conflicting release priorities, how to remove cross team blockers, and how to measure and improve cross team flow and delivery predictability.
Impediment Identification and Removal
Covers how to recognize, categorize, and remove blockers that prevent a team from delivering value. Candidates should be able to define what constitutes an impediment across categories such as team level, technical, interpersonal, external dependency, environmental, and organizational or systemic issues. Explain methods for detecting impediments proactively and reactively, including daily standups, retrospectives, backlog refinement, stakeholder conversations, metrics and telemetry, and direct observation. Describe concrete resolution approaches: remove directly when within the team leader or Scrum Master remit, coach the team to self resolve, facilitate cross functional discussions, negotiate with stakeholders, escalate through formal pathways, and build coalitions to change organizational impediments. Discuss escalation practices and follow up: when to escalate, how to document and track escalations, whom to engage, expected timelines, and techniques for ensuring closure. Cover problem solving tools and frameworks used to analyze root causes such as five whys, fishbone diagrams, or flow analysis, and how to turn fixes into systemic prevention measures and process improvements. Include examples you could talk about in an interview, such as blocked deployments, unclear requirements, inter team dependencies, tooling failures, hiring or resourcing constraints, and recurring process blockers, and explain different actions for junior versus senior facilitator responsibilities. Finally, address prevention and continuous improvement: how to identify recurring impediments, create remedial actions, measure impact, and institutionalize changes to reduce future blockers.
Sprint Health and Agile Metrics
Use sprint health indicators and agile metrics to detect risks early and guide corrective action. Describe how to apply metrics such as velocity, burndown and burnup charts, cycle time, throughput and defect rates, how to interpret trends and leading indicators, how to build dashboards for stakeholders, and how to avoid misuse of metrics while driving data informed improvements.
Sprint Planning and Backlog Management
Facilitating effective sprint planning and maintaining a healthy backlog in iterative development. Includes the structure and goals of sprint planning ceremonies, role of the facilitator, preparation steps, writing clear user stories and acceptance criteria, estimation techniques and story points, velocity and commitment, backlog refinement practices, prioritization approaches, definition of ready and done, and continuous improvement through retrospectives. Emphasizes collaboration with product owners and teams to ensure realistic commitments and predictable delivery.
Ceremony Design and Facilitation
Design and facilitation of agile ceremonies and team meetings at scale to maximize alignment and minimize waste. Covers structuring and timeboxing standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, reviews, and cross team syncs; adapting ceremonies for distributed and hybrid teams; scaling rituals across multiple squads and programs; stakeholder coordination and escalation paths; measurable outcomes and follow up mechanisms; tooling and agendas that keep meetings focused and effective; and continuous iteration to improve meeting effectiveness.
Outcomes and Progress Tracking
Mindset and practices for defining success and tracking progress across projects programs and roles. Covers how to define measurable success criteria align work to objectives and key results and key performance indicators set baselines targets and guardrail metrics and choose appropriate review cadences. Includes team and agile measures such as velocity burndown cycle time sprint completion rates and capacity planning as well as program and product measures such as adoption usage business impact and technical health. Also addresses how to visualize progress with dashboards run regular tracking processes communicate status to different audiences and avoid misuse of metrics for punitive evaluation.
Scrum Framework and Theory
Core knowledge of the Scrum framework and underlying agile principles. Candidates should be able to explain Scrum roles, ceremonies, and artifacts, describe how empirical process control drives iteration, and contrast Scrum with related approaches such as Kanban, the Scaled Agile Framework, and Lean. This topic covers when and why to apply Scrum versus other agile practices and how theory translates into day to day team behavior.
Experimentation and Evidence Based Improvement
Your approach to testing process improvements before full rollout. How do you design experiments? What's your hypothesis-testing approach? Discuss successful experiments that led to process changes and experiments that didn't work as expected. Include how you socialize experimental results and drive adoption.
Impediment Identification and Resolution
Covers techniques for identifying prioritizing tracking and removing impediments. Candidates should describe proactive approaches to uncover hidden blockers, categorize impediments by impact and urgency, coordinate or own removal actions, negotiate resources, escalate when necessary, and implement systemic changes to prevent recurrence. Include methods for tracking impediment trends and communicating status to the team and leadership.