What is a Project Manager at Akido?

As a Project Manager at Akido, you are the operational bridge between product vision and engineering execution. Akido operates at the intersection of healthcare, public health, and civic technology, building solutions that impact vulnerable populations. In this role, you will drive critical initiatives—ranging from Enhanced Care Management (ECM) platforms to specialized Women's Health programs—ensuring that complex, multi-stakeholder projects are delivered on time and with high impact.

Your work directly influences how products are built and scaled. You will collaborate daily with engineering teams, product managers, and executive leadership to translate high-level roadmaps into actionable deliverables. Because Akido tackles systemic challenges in healthcare and public services, the scale and complexity of your projects will require both rigorous organizational skills and a deep empathy for the end user.

This role is not just about moving tickets on a board; it is about strategic influence. You will be expected to navigate ambiguity, make educated assumptions about team capacity, and align cross-functional teams around a unified goal. Expect a fast-paced environment where your ability to balance technical constraints with product requirements is essential to the company's success.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Thorough preparation requires understanding exactly what the Akido hiring team values. Your interviewers are looking for candidates who can seamlessly blend project management fundamentals with product intuition and technical empathy. Focus your preparation on the following key evaluation criteria:

Roadmap & Capacity Planning – You must demonstrate the ability to build realistic, data-driven roadmaps. Interviewers will evaluate how you handle missing information, how you estimate team capacity, and how you prioritize deliverables when resources are constrained.

Cross-Functional Leadership – This role requires influencing without direct authority. You will be assessed on how effectively you communicate with both engineering managers and product executives, and how you resolve conflicts or misalignments between these groups.

Problem-Solving & Ambiguity – Akido operates in a dynamic, rapidly evolving sector. You can show strength here by explaining how you break down complex, ambiguous goals into structured project phases, and how you pivot when assumptions are proven wrong.

Domain & Technical Empathy – While you are not expected to write code, you must understand the software development lifecycle. Interviewers will look for your ability to speak the language of engineers, understand technical blockers, and grasp the nuances of healthcare IT or civic tech products.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Project Manager at Akido is rigorous, deeply collaborative, and designed to mirror the actual day-to-day work. It typically begins with an initial phone screen with a recruiter to align on your background, salary expectations, and overall culture fit. If successful, you will move into the core stages of the evaluation, which heavily emphasize practical application over theoretical knowledge.

A defining feature of the Akido process is the take-home exercise. You will be given a few days to complete a prompt that requires building out a product roadmap based on specific assumptions regarding team capacity and deliverables. This is not a simple scheduling task; it is a test of your strategic thinking and resource management.

Following the exercise, you will participate in an intensive onsite or virtual panel. Expect to present your roadmap and defend your assumptions to a highly cross-functional group, typically including the Head of Product, an Engineering Manager, several engineers, and the Chief Product Officer. Akido values candidates who can hold their ground under questioning while remaining receptive to new data and collaborative problem-solving.

The visual timeline above outlines the progression from your initial recruiter screen through the take-home assignment and the final cross-functional panel. Use this structure to pace your preparation, reserving your deepest strategic focus for the roadmap presentation and the subsequent deep-dive interviews with product and engineering leadership.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Your interviews will test your ability to handle the specific challenges faced by Akido delivery teams. Below is a breakdown of the core areas you will be evaluated on, supported by insights from past candidates.

Roadmap Development & Capacity Planning

This is the most critical evaluation area, heavily featured in your take-home exercise and panel presentation. Akido leadership needs to know that you can turn a high-level goal into a realistic timeline while accounting for the realities of software engineering. Strong performance here means clearly separating known facts from assumptions and building buffers for technical debt or unexpected blockers.

Be ready to go over:

• Resource allocation – How you distribute tasks among backend, frontend, and QA engineers.
• Assumption tracking – How you document and validate the guesses you make about velocity.
• Milestone definition – Breaking a multi-month initiative into measurable two-week deliverables.
• Advanced concepts – Scenario planning (e.g., what happens if a key engineer is out sick for two weeks), critical path analysis, and handling shifting executive priorities.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk us through the assumptions you made regarding team capacity in your roadmap exercise."
• "If the engineering team tells you that a core feature will take twice as long as estimated, how do you adjust the roadmap and communicate this to the Chief Product Officer?"
• "How do you balance delivering new product features with necessary technical debt and infrastructure work?"

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

Because you will interface with everyone from individual contributor engineers to the Chief Product Officer, your communication skills will be scrutinized. Interviewers want to see that you can tailor your message to your audience. A strong candidate demonstrates empathy for engineering constraints while fiercely advocating for product goals and user needs.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict resolution – Navigating disagreements between product vision and engineering reality.
• Status reporting – How you keep executives informed without overwhelming them with technical minutiae.
• Meeting facilitation – Running effective stand-ups, sprint planning, and post-mortems.
• Advanced concepts – Managing external stakeholders (e.g., healthcare partners or civic entities) and shielding the engineering team from scope creep.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to push back on a product leader because the engineering team was over capacity."
• "How do you ensure that remote or distributed engineering teams stay aligned with the broader product vision?"
• "Describe a situation where a project was failing. How did you communicate this to stakeholders, and what steps did you take to recover?"

Technical Empathy & Process Optimization

While you are a Project Manager, you are managing software delivery. Akido expects you to understand agile methodologies deeply and know when to adapt them. Strong candidates do not just enforce a rigid framework; they observe how the team works and optimize the process to reduce friction and increase velocity.

Be ready to go over:

• Agile/Scrum methodologies – Practical application over textbook definitions.
• Workflow tools – Advanced usage of Jira, Asana, or similar tracking systems to visualize work.
• Release management – Coordinating complex deployments across multiple environments.
• Advanced concepts – CI/CD pipeline dependencies, testing phases in healthcare compliance (HIPAA), and managing data-migration projects.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "What metrics do you use to measure the health and velocity of an engineering team?"
• "Our current sprint process is feeling sluggish and engineers are complaining about too many meetings. How would you diagnose and fix this?"
• "Explain how you track dependencies between a frontend web team and a backend data engineering team."

Key Responsibilities

As a Project Manager at Akido, your day-to-day work revolves around creating clarity out of chaos. You will be responsible for defining project scopes, creating detailed work plans, and managing the execution of complex software initiatives. Whether you are leading a new deployment for an Enhanced Care Management system or driving an internal IT infrastructure upgrade, you are the ultimate owner of the project timeline.

You will collaborate heavily with the product team to understand the "why" and "what," and then work with engineering managers to determine the "how" and "when." This involves running agile ceremonies, managing sprint boards, and unblocking engineers by chasing down requirements or third-party dependencies. You will also be responsible for risk management—identifying potential bottlenecks weeks before they impact the delivery schedule.

Beyond execution, you will serve as the primary communication hub. You will generate weekly status reports, lead cross-functional syncs, and provide executive summaries to the C-suite. Your role is to ensure that everyone, from the lead developer to the Chief Product Officer, shares a unified understanding of project health, risks, and upcoming milestones.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for the Project Manager role at Akido, you need a blend of structured organizational skills and adaptable soft skills. The hiring team looks for candidates who have proven experience shipping complex software products, particularly in regulated or high-stakes environments like healthcare.

• Must-have skills – Deep expertise in agile project management methodologies, strong proficiency with workflow management tools (Jira, Confluence), and a track record of building and defending complex product roadmaps. You must possess exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience level – Typically 4 to 7+ years of project or program management experience in a software development environment. Experience working directly with engineering and product leadership is essential.
• Soft skills – High emotional intelligence, the ability to influence without authority, strong conflict resolution capabilities, and a high tolerance for ambiguity.
• Nice-to-have skills – Prior experience in healthcare tech, public health, or civic tech. Familiarity with HIPAA compliance, data integration projects, or specific domain knowledge in Women's Health or ECM programs will make you a standout candidate.

Common Interview Questions

The questions you face will span behavioral scenarios, deep-dives into your past experience, and specific defenses of your take-home exercise. The following examples represent the patterns of inquiry you should expect, rather than a definitive list to memorize.

Roadmap & Take-Home Defense

These questions test your strategic planning and your ability to justify your decisions under pressure from technical leadership.

• Walk us through the step-by-step process you used to build this roadmap.
• You estimated that Phase 2 would take three weeks. What happens to your timeline if the backend API integration takes twice as long?
• How did you determine the capacity of the engineering team in this scenario, given the limited information provided?
• Which deliverables in this roadmap are you most confident in, and which carry the highest risk?
• If the Chief Product Officer told you we need to cut the timeline by 20%, what scope would you recommend cutting and why?

Cross-Functional Leadership & Behavioral

These questions evaluate your soft skills, stakeholder management, and cultural alignment with Akido.

• Tell me about a time you had to align an engineering manager and a product manager who had completely different priorities.
• Describe a project that failed to meet its deadline. What went wrong, and what did you learn?
• How do you handle a situation where an executive stakeholder frequently requests out-of-scope changes mid-sprint?
• Give an example of a time you had to manage a project with highly ambiguous requirements. How did you create clarity for the team?
• How do you build trust with an engineering team as a non-technical project manager?

Process & Execution

These questions assess your tactical knowledge of software delivery and agile methodologies.

• What is your approach to identifying and managing project risks before they become blockers?
• How do you run an effective retrospective, and how do you ensure the action items are actually implemented?
• Walk me through how you set up and manage a Jira board for a newly formed cross-functional team.
• How do you balance the need for rigorous process and documentation with the need for speed and agility?

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the interview process for this role? The process is considered challenging, primarily due to the take-home roadmap exercise and the cross-functional panel. You will be interviewed by high-level stakeholders, including the CPO and Head of Product, who expect highly structured, data-driven answers. Thorough preparation and practicing your presentation out loud are essential.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one? Successful candidates do not just present a timeline; they present a strategy. They clearly articulate their assumptions, show empathy for engineering constraints, and demonstrate how they would handle inevitable project delays. They act like owners, not just task-trackers.

Q: Are these roles remote, hybrid, or in-office? Akido hires for this role across different locations, including Los Angeles and Bakersfield, CA. Depending on the specific team and local health guidelines, the role may have hybrid expectations. Clarify the specific location requirements with your recruiter during the initial screen.

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? From the initial recruiter screen to the final offer, the process generally takes three to four weeks. The take-home exercise usually requires a few days of dedicated work, followed by scheduling the final panel, which can take a week to coordinate given the seniority of the interviewers.

Q: Do I need a background in healthcare to be hired? While a background in healthcare, ECM, or Women's Health is a strong "nice-to-have" and will help you understand the product context faster, it is not strictly required. Strong software project management fundamentals and the ability to learn complex domains quickly are the primary requirements.

Other General Tips

• Own Your Assumptions: During your panel presentation, do not hide the guesses you made in your take-home exercise. Highlight them. Explain that because you lacked certain data, you assumed X, and if X proves false, your mitigation strategy is Y. This shows maturity and strategic foresight.
• Speak to Both Product and Engineering: Your panel will have both product leaders and engineers. When answering a question, ensure you address the business value (for product) and the technical feasibility or process impact (for engineering).
• Structure Your Behavioral Answers: Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) rigorously. Akido interviewers appreciate concise, structured storytelling that highlights your specific impact and the measurable outcomes of your actions.

• Ask Insightful Questions: The questions you ask at the end of the interview are evaluated just as heavily as your answers. Ask about how Akido currently handles technical debt, how product priorities are decided, or what the biggest operational bottleneck is for the engineering team right now.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing a Project Manager role at Akido is an opportunity to drive meaningful technology initiatives that impact public health and civic infrastructure. The role demands a unique blend of strategic roadmap planning, rigorous capacity management, and the emotional intelligence to lead cross-functional teams through complex, ambiguous challenges.

Your success in this interview process will hinge on your ability to treat the take-home exercise not as a hypothetical test, but as a real piece of work. Prepare to defend your decisions confidently, embrace feedback from the panel, and demonstrate your deep understanding of the software development lifecycle. Remember that the hiring team wants to see a collaborative leader who can balance the competing demands of product vision and engineering reality.

The compensation data above reflects the variance based on location (e.g., Bakersfield vs. Los Angeles) and seniority level (e.g., Program Manager vs. Senior IT Project Manager). Use this information to anchor your salary expectations appropriately during your initial recruiter screen.

You have the skills and the experience to excel in this process. Take the time to refine your presentation, practice your behavioral narratives, and review additional insights on Dataford to ensure you walk into your panel fully prepared. Good luck!