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Behavioral

Tech leads would still need skills around overcoming blockers. So the interview is going to focus on your ability to work through ambiguity, critical thinking around partnerships and ownership mindset, and leadership/mentorship capabilities. This will be more situational and behavioral questions like "Tell me about a time..." or "Say you're in this situation..."

All things you can do before when you anticipate issues:

  • Get stakeholders' buy-in before even beginning the project, especially from a high-level exec.
  • Discovery conversations to uncover shared goals
  • Regular check-ins with stakeholders and email updates reporting progress on KPIs and current blockers
  • On your team, assign an owner to each external dependency

About issues that pop up mid project:

Tips

For each example, choose the example with the biggest scope. The more senior the role, the bigger the scope had better be.

Critical thinking about partnerships

  • Choose an example of working with a partner and achieving a positive outcome
  • Give examples in which you successfully delivered something
  • Format: go to partner team, give info on business impact, and align on a shared goal. If can't get buy-in, escalate quickly

Ambiguity

  • Times in which you did not know the path forward. What'd you do and how'd you arrive at the solution?
  • Making judgment calls
  • Talk to different people and try to get dissenting opinions: What is wrong with this?

Ownership

  • Identify a problem, your role in it, and also highlight your ability to divvy up work amongst others and get people to work well
  • Go into the alarms/checks you built to be alerted of issues
  • How you ensured what you put in place works in the long-term
  • How did you verify success?
  • Why was this problem hard? How did you ensure success? What were your learnings? If you were put in the same situation again, would you have done the same thing?

Examples

Helped my team learn how to do spikes properly, how to prioritize high-risk tasks first, how to think of 90/10 solutions (clever ways to get the same thing done in 10% of the time), distributed systems, security, how to take feedback ("feedback is a gift"), how finding product-market fit works, how to do user interviews, how to assess trade-offs, ...

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