The following questions are representative of what candidates face during the American Family Insurance - Colorado interview process. While you should not memorize answers, use these to understand the patterns and themes our interviewers focus on.

Past Projects & Experience

This category directly targets your resume. Interviewers want to verify the depth of your experience and your specific contributions to past successes.

• Walk me through your resume and highlight the most complex project you have managed.
• Tell me about a time a project you led failed. What did you learn?
• How do you determine the critical path of a project when timelines are tight?
• Describe a situation where you had to take over a project that was already in distress.
• How do you measure the success of your projects post-launch?

Problem-Solving & Product Sense

These questions test your ability to think structurally when faced with ambiguity. We want to see your creativity and logic in real-time.

• Redesign a parking meter. Walk me through your thought process.
• How would you improve the user experience of buying auto insurance online?
• If you were given a goal to reduce customer service call volumes by 20%, how would you approach the project?
• Estimate the number of traffic lights in Denver.
• Walk me through how you would prioritize a backlog if every stakeholder claims their feature is the highest priority.

Behavioral & Leadership

These questions assess your cultural fit, emotional intelligence, and ability to lead through influence.

• Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a manager or senior stakeholder. How was it resolved?
• How do you handle team members who are unmotivated or underperforming?
• Describe a time you had to deliver bad news to a client or executive team.
• How do you build trust with a new team of engineers who have never worked with you before?
• Tell me about a time you had to adapt your communication style to get a point across.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you need to understand exactly what our interviewers are looking for during your conversations. Below is a breakdown of the core evaluation areas for this role.

Past Experience and Execution

Your historical performance is the strongest predictor of your future success. Interviewers will spend significant time unpacking the projects listed on your resume to understand your actual contribution versus the team's overall effort. Strong performance in this area means providing specific, data-backed examples of how you managed scope, schedule, and resources.

Be ready to go over:

• End-to-end project lifecycles – How you initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close projects.
• Risk mitigation – Identifying potential roadblocks early and implementing effective contingency plans.
• Agile and Waterfall methodologies – Knowing when to apply different frameworks based on project needs.
• Advanced concepts (less common) –
  • Managing vendor relationships and third-party integrations.
  • Navigating strict regulatory compliance requirements within project scopes.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a complex project you managed from inception to delivery. What was your specific role?"
• "Tell me about a time a project was at risk of failing. How did you identify the risk and pivot?"
• "Describe a situation where you had to change your project methodology mid-flight."

Product Sense and Ambiguous Problem-Solving

While you are interviewing for a Project Manager role, we expect our leaders to possess strong product sense and design thinking. You may be thrown a curveball question to test your ability to structure a completely unfamiliar problem. Strong candidates will not panic; instead, they will ask clarifying questions, identify the core user, and build a logical framework to arrive at a solution.

Be ready to go over:

• User-centric design – Understanding who you are solving a problem for and what their pain points are.
• Framework application – Using structured thinking to break down an abstract prompt.
• Trade-off analysis – Weighing the pros and cons of different solutions or features.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you redesign a parking meter?"
• "If you were tasked with improving the claims-filing experience for our mobile app, where would you start?"
• "Walk me through how you would launch a new product in a completely new market."

Stakeholder Management and Leadership

At American Family Insurance, project managers rarely have direct authority over the engineers, designers, or analysts executing the work. This area evaluates your soft skills. A strong performance demonstrates empathy, active listening, and the ability to align conflicting priorities among strong personalities.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict resolution – How you handle disagreements between technical teams and business stakeholders.
• Executive communication – Distilling complex project statuses into clear, actionable updates for leadership.
• Team motivation – Keeping morale high during stressful sprints or looming deadlines.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to push back on a stakeholder who requested a massive scope change late in the project."
• "How do you handle a situation where a key engineering peer is consistently missing their deadlines?"
• "Describe a time you had to align two departments that had completely opposite goals for a project."