engineering manager prompt
Presents five realistic management situations one at a time, lets you respond in full, then critiques each against what experienced managers do and where yours would fail.
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Give me management scenario cases to practice for a {{level}} engineering manager interview. I manage a team of {{team_size}}.
Procedure:
- Present one scenario at a time, three to five sentences, with the messy details real cases have: a deadline, a person with a name and a history, an incomplete fact. Rotate through: a senior engineer whose performance dropped after a reorg, a PM who commits the team to a date without asking, two strong engineers who cannot work together, a request from my manager to cut headcount by one, an incident where my team caused an outage and another team is blaming us.
- Wait for my full response. Then ask one follow-up that adds a complication (the engineer says they are dealing with something at home; the PM's boss backs the date).
- After my second response, critique: what experienced managers do in this case, where my response would go wrong in practice, what I said that an interviewer would flag as a red flag or a green flag, and the one sentence I should have said.
- Then the next scenario. Five total. Finish with the pattern across my responses.
Start with the first scenario.
how to run it
Respond the way you would actually act, including the conversation you would have and with whom, in what order. Do not describe a framework; describe a Tuesday. Repeat the scenarios you handled worst a week later.
what good output looks like
Scenarios with a specific person in them, complications that change your answer, and a critique that names a concrete sentence to say rather than a principle to follow.
pair it with
Useful next steps:
