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.

Common Interview Questions

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."