Good manager interview question : what are things that you think could go wrong that you would find out if you were to join the team ?

Question

What are things that you think could go wrong that you would find out if you
were to join the team ?

This is a question I often ask while interviewing managers. I like it because it is open ended. Often times tenure as manager is treated as a proxy for gaining management skills. The regular hypothesis is that you become better as a manager with years. I believe this is only a part of it. What also matters is what you put in those years. This question helps to dissect that. There is no one good answer for this question, but gives the interviewee an opportunity to showcase how seasoned they are as managers.

Premise of the question

A perfectly good team may end up in a state of dysfunction if not invested properly. Given that we are hiring for a manager for this team, it means we have underinvested/invested slower than needed in the past or there is a regime shift(past manager leaving), which means there will probably be things that are broken/need to be built and need love.

Framework

There are various answers mostly structured around projects, people, product, customers, technology, culture, prioritization, scale, reliability, operational efficiency, strategy. All these factors could be changing too fast/too slow than normal which is typical in hypergrowth tech companies that would stretch the team beyond the comfort zone. If overdone on any of the axis, it could tip the team into a state of disfunction. Also answers will vary based on the managers past experience on product, infra, platform, ML, etc

Signals from the interview

• A sign of a good manager is someone who can take a chaotic state and turn it to a stable state. This also gives the interviewee an opportunity to show me how good are they in their ability to identify patterns of dysfunction in a team and how much change they have dealt with in the past. 

• A key quality of successful managers is anticipation. Assuming that they have already engaged in the hiring process with recruiter, hiring manager, product manager, etc, it also tells me how engaged they have been in the process and how much they have realistically thought about the position. 

Followup question

Given the landscape what will be your strategy to fix some of these.

Always be closing

Finally, this also gives me an opportunity to close. In a way, they will also surface their biggest concerns
about the role from all the information they have collected about the team.
Some of this may be perception and some of it may be reality. It gives me an opportunity
to close the gap and get one step closer to closing the awesome candidate.