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.
Structured Problem Solving and Frameworks
Assessment of a candidate's ability to apply repeatable, logical frameworks to break ambiguous problems into manageable components, identify root causes, weigh options, and recommend a defensible solution with an implementation plan. Topics include defining the problem and success criteria, gathering context and constraints, decomposing the problem using mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive thinking, generating alternatives, evaluating trade offs by impact and effort, and sequencing execution. Interviewers will look for clear narration of the thinking process, use of data and evidence, awareness of assumptions, and the ability to adapt a framework to different domains such as product, operations, or analytics. This canonical topic also covers systematic analysis techniques, methodological rigor, and presentation of conclusions so others can follow and act on them.
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.
Spotify Business and Technical Knowledge
Demonstrate familiarity with Spotify product offerings and platform characteristics, including music and podcast streaming, catalog management, personalization and recommendation systems, real time data processing, and the advertising platform. Understand common technical challenges for streaming businesses at scale and how organizational structure and recent technology initiatives shape delivery. Explain how technical program management work connects to Spotify business goals and strategic initiatives.
Ownership and Project Delivery
This topic assesses a candidate's ability to take ownership of problems and projects and to drive them through end to end delivery to measurable impact. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete examples in which they defined goals and success metrics, scoped and decomposed work, prioritized features and trade offs, made timely decisions with incomplete information, and executed through implementation, launch, monitoring, and iteration. It covers bias for action and initiative such as identifying opportunities, removing blockers, escalating appropriately, and operating with autonomy or limited oversight. It also includes technical ownership and execution where candidates explain technical problem solving, architecture and implementation choices, incident response and remediation, and collaboration with engineering and product partners. Interviewers evaluate stakeholder management and cross functional coordination, risk identification and mitigation, timeline and resource management, progress tracking and reporting, metrics and impact measurement, accountability, and lessons learned when outcomes were imperfect. Examples may span documentation or process improvements, operational projects, medium sized feature work, and complex or embedded technical efforts.
Estimation and Timeline Management
Skills and practices for producing realistic estimates and managing timelines on technical projects. This includes collaborating with engineering teams to decompose work into phases and tasks, selecting and applying estimation techniques such as bottom up and top down estimation, and using spikes or proof of concept work to reduce uncertainty. Candidates should show how they identify critical path and dependencies, account for vendor and cross team work, quantify and communicate assumptions and risks, and build appropriate buffers or contingency plans for technical unknowns, data migrations, testing cycles, and deployment activities. Also covered are approaches for communicating estimates and confidence levels to stakeholders, negotiating scope or schedule trade offs, tracking progress, reforecasting when new information emerges, and choosing mitigation strategies such as parallelization, timeboxing, or scope sequencing to protect delivery dates.
Understanding Technical Program Management
Awareness of the technical program manager role and the expectations at large technology organizations. Topics include bridging engineering and product, managing complex cross team programs, driving execution and delivery against schedules and milestones, influencing without formal authority, owning dependencies and risk mitigation, and measuring program impact. Candidates should understand the scope of TPM work including stakeholder partnerships and operational responsibilities.
Prioritization and Trade Off Reasoning
Frameworks and reasoning used to choose between competing initiatives and to make trade offs under constraints. Topics include weighing business impact technical feasibility team capacity and strategic alignment when prioritizing and reasoning about quality scope and schedule trade offs. Candidates should be able to explain their rationale and how they communicate and defend prioritization decisions to stakeholders.
Leadership and Team Dynamics
Articulate leadership philosophy and practical approaches for building and sustaining high performing teams. Topics include creating psychological safety, fostering healthy team dynamics, handling disagreement constructively, mentoring and developing engineers, setting norms and expectations, aligning teams around goals, and maintaining morale and focus during pressure.