7 Tehnical deep dive
Senior+ PDS roles often involve a technical deep dive interview session where the interviewer tries to poke into your prior experience. The goal of this session is for the interviewer to understand whether you have the necessary experience to do your job at the level you are targeting.
This session is by far the most challenging session when you are trying to break into a role at a senior level. For instance, this session will be particularly tricky for a Software Engineer transitioning to MLE, or for someone without a DS background who wants to transition to PDS. I experienced this firsthand twice, once when I was transitioning from academia to DS/Applied Science and a second time when transitioning from DS to MLE. The reason should be obvious: if you haven’t had experience working as an [put your role here] before, you won’t have the appropriate, deep impactful projects to talk about in a persuasive way. That’s why it is fairly common for people who transition across roles to end up getting down-leveled. Regardless, I hope the following set of questions helps you prepare as best as you can.
7.1 Choose a project
Question: The deep dive interview session typically starts with you presenting a project you have worked on. What kind of project should you choose?
Answer: Make sure you choose a project that:
- You had a leadership role (i.e., you came up with the idea, you persuaded (aligned with) managers and directors that it was worth perusing, and then you led a team to implement it).
- It had a significant impact that ideally can be measured in $ (e.g., revenue increase, cost decrease, etc.)
- For Staff+ roles, the project needs to have significant XFN involvement. One of the characteristics that interviewers are looking for is your ability to align diverse stakeholders on projects that affect multiple teams and functions.
Without lying, make sure you emphasize that you led the team, you aligned with XFNs, you came up with ideas, etc. You can be humble in every other interview session but this and the behavioral interview session.
7.2 Questions worksheet (deep dive)
Question: After you choose a project, what kind of question should you anticipate and prepare for? (see solution for relevant worksheet)
Answer: Considering preparing answers for the following questions (when appropriate given your project of course):
Personally, I find it easier to do this in a spreadsheet, so check out my google sheet template if you are interested in feeling in your responses.
- Who are the stakeholders?
- What was the scope of the project?
- What was the evaluation metric and why was it relevant to business objectives?
- What was the project’s roadmap? Did you come up with it? What software did you use (if any)?
- Did you drive the alignment process and convince key decision-makers?
- What would you have done differently?
- What did you learn?
- What are some things that did not work and you had to adjust?
- What was the business impact?
- What other approaches did you consider? Why did you settle on this one?
- Who disagreed with the strategy of approach? How was that resolved?
- What was the biggest challenge in the project? What did you do to help the team overcome it?
- What trade-offs did you have to make to achieve this? (quality, cost, time)
- How would you implement this in our company?
- What happens if gazzilion of data? (i.e., does your solution scale?)