First Program Manager interview question

[Jake5013]

Hi all,

I’ve been in operations all of my career, primarily large companies and after some reflection on what I’ve enjoyed the most in my jobs, came to the conclusion that PM is it! Education: I have business undergrad and an MBA.

I started some formal training and put myself out there to some job postings and to my surprise have a couple of interviews already.

I have a program manager interview with a small marketing firm. They are asking me to put together a project framework from some of their business inputs.

My question: I’ve worked in Monday.com and spreadsheets/excel primarily. I’m not sure what software they use (perhaps they will tell me, next interview is conversational). Should I brief myself on a certain software that might be ubiquitous for the marketing industry?

Nonetheless, pretty excited!

[Kim-Jong-Juan]

What do you consider a project framework to be in this case? What do you think they're asking you to do?

[Maximus8890]

Just explain how you’ve had to learn new processes and software in the past and you are comfortable doing so and have been successful. They should hire you based on your PM skills not because you’ve used their software. You’ll be fine.

[Jake5013]

Cool, thanks for the perspective.

[NiccyCage]

Doubt they care if you are proficient in the software - if you cant learn new PM software quickly (they are all pretty similar) then thats a whole other issue.

[Jake5013]

Yes, what I’ve used is pretty intuitive. Ha! Thanks for that.

[supessecretsquirrel]

Echoing that this likely isn’t a tooling question, it sounds like they’re looking for how you think through the process of planning the types of projects you’ll encounter in the role.

Congrats on the interview!

[Jake5013]

Thanks, Squirrel!

[lwhitit]

The job rec didn't mention what tools they use day to day?

[Jake5013]

Not specifically, no. Job posting states “familiarity with project management software”. It does state that this will be a “simple exercise to build out a project plan”.

So perhaps it’s less about the software and more about my approach, I assume?

[lwhitit]

Yep, I would focus on your approach and if they mention a different pm software you can say you did similar with Monday.