Program Manager jobs are disappearing and are replaced by "Technical" Program Manager jobs in companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn Facebook and startup companies. This training course contains, carefully curated tried and tested set of questions and sample answers, everything you ever need to clear you next TPM (Technical Program Manager) interview comfortably. The questions span from program management, behavioural to technical, with loads of worksheets, and mock interviews. Get ready for the next big Paycheck from your dream company!

TPM Interview Crash Course - Technical Program Manager Interview

# How do you plan without the tech team's support?

You don’t have the tech team participating in planning meetings as they are very busy with old releases escalations and are in a war mode, how do you still do the planning?

## Sample Answer

### Assumption: Planning for a New Program / Major Feature

### Options Available 
1. Try extending the planning Phase until the team is available to participate
if this is not possible
2. Finish the planning with minimal involvement of SMEs, (Subject Matter Experts) and deeper participation of TPMs, and put a 15-20% buffer to accommodate the lack of engineering team's presence.

### Explanation of Option #2 

In these situations where the engineering team is super busy to go through elaborate planning, it’s the job of a TPM to dig deep into requirements and…

* Come up with as much clarity as possible on requirements & assumptions along with Product managers
* Identify the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) required to quantify work.
* Come up with specific limited questions to be addressed by these SMEs.
* If the planning requires a POC/HLD (High-Level Design) for confidence, think out of the box and get the help of an external tech lead/team to help you create an HLD, so my team only needs to do a review.
* Create a plan and have a short meeting with the tech lead to ensure nothing drastic is missed.
* Add realistic buffer (15%-20%) as it was not reviewed by entire engineering.

How do you Plan Without Tech Team's support?

How do you