1. What is a Project Manager at Betterup?

As a Project Manager at Betterup, you are at the operational heart of a company dedicated to human transformation. Betterup combines world-class coaching, AI technology, and behavioral science to improve mental fitness and leadership performance. In this role, you do not just manage timelines; you build the infrastructure that allows our product, engineering, and coaching operations teams to deliver life-changing experiences at scale.

The impact of this position is immense. You will drive complex, cross-functional initiatives that directly affect how our users interact with the platform and how our global network of coaches delivers care. Because our mission is deeply human but our delivery is highly technical, this role requires a rare blend of rigorous analytical thinking and profound empathy. You will be navigating ambiguity, aligning diverse stakeholders, and ensuring that our strategic vision translates into flawless execution.

Expect to work on initiatives that span across community building, product launches, and operational scaling. Betterup looks for individuals who can seamlessly pivot from deep-diving into project data to facilitating a nuanced, emotionally intelligent conversation with a struggling project team. You are expected to be the glue that holds these diverse functional areas together, ensuring that every project advances our mission of unlocking greater potential in people.

2. Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation is the key to successfully navigating the Betterup interview process. We evaluate candidates through a dual lens: your ability to drive hard, quantifiable results and your capacity to foster a supportive, collaborative environment.

Here are the key evaluation criteria you will be measured against:

• Quantitative and Data Fluency – You must demonstrate extreme comfort with data. Interviewers will look for your ability to define metrics, analyze project health, and use quantitative insights to unblock teams and drive strategic decisions.
• Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Community Building – This is what sets Betterup PMs apart. You will be evaluated on your empathy, self-awareness, and ability to build trust across diverse teams. We want to see how you handle conflict, motivate others, and foster a healthy team culture.
• Structured Problem-Solving – You need to show how you break down massive, ambiguous challenges into actionable project plans. Interviewers will assess your frameworks for risk mitigation, resource allocation, and prioritization.
• Cross-Functional Leadership – You will be tested on your ability to influence without direct authority. Strong candidates demonstrate how they align engineering, product, and operations teams around a unified goal while managing competing priorities.

3. Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Project Manager at Betterup is thorough and designed to test both your technical project management skills and your cultural alignment. You will typically begin with a recruiter screen to assess baseline qualifications and alignment with our core values. If successful, you will move to a phone or video interview with the hiring manager. This conversation dives deeper into your past experiences, focusing on how you balance data-driven execution with stakeholder management.

A defining feature of our process is the take-home assignment. This exercise is comprehensive and designed to simulate a real-world project scenario at Betterup. You will be asked to outline project strategies, define key metrics, and explain how you would handle specific stakeholder challenges. Following the successful completion of the assignment, you will be invited to a final round of interviews.

The final stage usually consists of a virtual onsite loop with up to five different stakeholders, including peers, cross-functional partners, and leadership. These interviews may take the form of panel discussions or back-to-back 1:1 sessions. The conversations are friendly but rigorous, and you will notice that interviewers are highly focused and professional.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression of your interview stages from the initial screen to the final loop. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate significant time to strategize for the take-home assignment, as it serves as the gateway to the final interviews. Note that while the flow is standardized, the exact composition of your final panel may vary slightly depending on the specific team you are joining.

4. Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed, you must understand exactly how Betterup assesses your capabilities during the interviews and the take-home assignment. Our evaluation areas reflect the unique demands of our product and culture.

Quantitative and Data Skills

At Betterup, project managers cannot rely solely on qualitative updates; you must be deeply analytical. Interviewers want to see that you can define success metrics, track project velocity, and use data to predict and mitigate risks before they materialize. Strong performance here means you naturally default to data when explaining how you measure progress or solve operational bottlenecks.

Be ready to go over:

• Defining KPIs – How you select the right metrics to track project health and business impact.
• Data-Driven Decision Making – Instances where you used data to pivot a project strategy or convince a resistant stakeholder.
• Resource and Capacity Planning – How you quantitatively assess team bandwidth and allocate resources.
• Advanced concepts – Familiarity with SQL, Tableau, or advanced spreadsheet modeling to pull and analyze your own project data.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a time when project metrics indicated you were going to miss a deadline. How did you use that data to course-correct?"
• "How do you measure the success of a project beyond just delivering it on time and under budget?"
• "Describe a situation where you had to push back on a stakeholder's request using data."

Emotional Intelligence and Stakeholder Management

Because our product centers on human well-being, our internal culture highly values emotional intelligence. You will be evaluated on your ability to read the room, adapt your communication style, and build a sense of community among your project teams. A strong candidate demonstrates vulnerability, active listening, and a track record of turning adversarial relationships into collaborative partnerships.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict Resolution – Your approach to de-escalating tension between cross-functional teams.
• Influencing Without Authority – How you motivate engineers or product managers who do not report to you.
• Community Building – Strategies you use to maintain team morale and psychological safety during high-pressure launches.
• Advanced concepts – Frameworks for managing change fatigue within an organization.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to align two leaders who had fundamentally different visions for a project."
• "How do you build trust with a team that is historically resistant to project management processes?"
• "Describe a project that failed. How did you handle the fallout with your team emotionally and professionally?"

Project Lifecycle and Execution

This area evaluates your core competency as a Project Manager. Interviewers will look at how you structure chaos, manage scope creep, and deliver results. During your take-home assignment and final loop, you will be expected to produce crisp, logical project plans. Strong candidates provide clear frameworks for how they initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close projects.

Be ready to go over:

• Agile and Waterfall Methodologies – Knowing when to apply different frameworks based on the project's needs.
• Risk Management – How you identify, log, and mitigate project risks early.
• Scope Management – Your process for handling feature requests and scope creep without derailing the timeline.
• Advanced concepts – Scaling project management practices across a rapidly growing organization.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would set up a project plan for a completely ambiguous, open-ended initiative."
• "How do you handle scope creep when the request comes from a senior executive?"
• "Explain your framework for running an effective post-mortem."

5. Key Responsibilities

As a Project Manager at Betterup, your day-to-day work is highly dynamic, requiring you to constantly shift between strategic planning and tactical execution. You will be responsible for driving the end-to-end lifecycle of critical initiatives, ensuring that deliverables are met on time, within scope, and to the highest quality standards. This involves creating detailed project roadmaps, establishing communication cadences, and maintaining a single source of truth for project statuses.

A major part of your role involves deep collaboration with adjacent teams. You will frequently partner with Product Managers to understand the roadmap, Engineering Leads to manage sprint capacities, and Operations teams to ensure that new features are smoothly rolled out to our coaching network. You are the central node of communication, responsible for translating technical constraints to business stakeholders and business priorities to technical teams.

You will also spend a significant portion of your time analyzing project metrics and fostering team health. Whether you are leading a complex product integration or a community operations scale-up, you will be expected to monitor data dashboards to catch bottlenecks early. Simultaneously, you will host retrospectives and team-building touchpoints, ensuring that the human element of your project team remains healthy, motivated, and aligned with Betterup's overarching mission.

6. Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be highly competitive for the Project Manager role at Betterup, your background must reflect a proven track record of managing complex projects while demonstrating exceptional interpersonal skills. We look for candidates who can seamlessly blend technical acumen with high emotional intelligence.

• Must-have skills – You need deep expertise in project management methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban) and tools (Jira, Asana, Confluence). Exceptional stakeholder management, conflict resolution, and written/verbal communication skills are non-negotiable. You must also possess strong quantitative abilities to analyze project data and define success metrics.
• Experience level – Typically, successful candidates have 4+ years of dedicated project or program management experience, often within tech, SaaS, or highly operational environments. Experience leading cross-functional teams without direct authority is required.
• Nice-to-have skills – A background in health-tech, coaching, or psychology is a strong plus, as it aligns with our core product. Additionally, advanced data visualization skills (like Tableau) or SQL proficiency will significantly differentiate you, proving your ability to act as the "unicorn" we often seek.

7. Common Interview Questions

The questions below are representative of what you will face during your interviews. While you should not memorize answers, you should use these to practice structuring your thoughts. Focus on using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and remember to highlight both the data-driven and human-centric aspects of your solutions.

Behavioral and Emotional Intelligence

These questions test your self-awareness, empathy, and ability to navigate complex team dynamics. Interviewers want to see how you build community and handle stress.

• Tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult feedback to a senior stakeholder.
• How do you adapt your communication style when working with highly technical engineers versus non-technical business partners?
• Describe a situation where team morale was low during a project. What specific steps did you take to rebuild it?
• Tell me about a time you made a mistake that impacted a project's timeline. How did you handle it?
• How do you build psychological safety within a newly formed project team?

Project Management and Execution

These questions evaluate your tactical ability to organize work, manage risks, and deliver results in ambiguous environments.

• Walk me through your process for taking a vague idea from leadership and turning it into an actionable project plan.
• Tell me about a time you had to manage significant scope creep. How did you negotiate the boundaries?
• Describe a project that was at risk of failing. How did you identify the risk, and what was your mitigation strategy?
• How do you decide which project management methodology (e.g., Agile vs. Waterfall) to apply to a new initiative?
• Walk me through how you run a project kickoff meeting.

Quantitative and Analytical

These questions assess your "quant" skills. We want to know that you can leverage data to make objective decisions and measure success.

• Tell me about a time you used data to resolve a disagreement between two stakeholders.
• How do you define and track the health of a project beyond standard timeline and budget metrics?
• Describe a time when the data contradicted your initial assumption about a project. What did you do?
• How do you forecast resource capacity for a cross-functional team with competing priorities?
• Walk me through a complex dataset you had to analyze to unblock a project phase.

8. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long does the take-home assignment usually take? The take-home assignment is comprehensive and is a critical part of the evaluation. Candidates typically spend between 4 to 8 hours on it, depending on their familiarity with the prompt. It is designed to test both your strategic thinking and your attention to detail, so allocate your time accordingly.

Q: The interviewers seem to ask overlapping questions. Is this intentional? Yes. Candidates often report that interviews in the final loop overlap in content. Each interviewer is assessing you from a slightly different functional perspective (e.g., engineering vs. operations). Have a deep reservoir of varied stories so you do not have to repeat the same example for every interviewer.

Q: What does Betterup mean when they say they are looking for a "unicorn"? Leadership often uses this term to describe the rare combination of highly analytical, data-driven execution skills paired with exceptional emotional intelligence and community-building capabilities. You must prove you are comfortable in a spreadsheet and equally comfortable navigating sensitive human emotions.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the first screen to an offer? The process usually moves swiftly if schedules align. From the initial recruiter screen to the final panel, the process generally takes about 3 to 5 weeks. The take-home assignment phase is usually given a strict deadline of a few days to a week.

Q: What is the culture like for PMs at Betterup? The culture is highly mission-driven, collaborative, and fast-paced. Because the company focuses on mental fitness, there is a strong emphasis on continuous learning, feedback, and psychological safety. However, expectations for operational excellence and data-backed results remain extremely high.

9. Other General Tips

• Build a robust story matrix: Because you will face up to five interviewers in the final loop who may ask similar behavioral questions, map out at least 8-10 distinct career stories. Ensure each story can be adapted to highlight either data skills, conflict resolution, or project execution.
• Treat the take-home as a real Betterup project: When completing the assignment, format it professionally. Include an executive summary, clearly define your assumptions, and explicitly state your communication and stakeholder management plans. Show them exactly what it would be like to receive a deliverable from you on the job.
• Do not hide behind frameworks: While knowing Agile or Scrum is important, Betterup interviewers care more about why and how you apply these frameworks to solve human problems. Focus on the outcomes and the team dynamics rather than just reciting textbook methodologies.
• Showcase your empathy explicitly: In your behavioral answers, take time to explain how you considered the feelings, workloads, and perspectives of your teammates. Highlighting your emotional intelligence is just as critical as highlighting your project delivery.

10. Summary & Next Steps

Interviewing for a Project Manager role at Betterup is a demanding but highly rewarding experience. This role offers the unique opportunity to build operational excellence at a company that is fundamentally changing how people grow and develop. By deeply understanding the intersection of data-driven project management and high-EQ leadership, you can position yourself as the exact type of candidate the hiring team is looking for.

This compensation data provides a baseline expectation for the role. Keep in mind that total compensation at Betterup often includes equity and comprehensive wellness benefits, reflecting the company's commitment to employee health. Use this information to understand the market rate and to set realistic expectations for the offer stage.

As you prepare, focus heavily on balancing your narrative. Practice articulating your analytical rigor while simultaneously demonstrating your capacity to build trust and community within your teams. Remember to allocate sufficient time and energy for the take-home assignment, as it is a pivotal moment in the process. You have the skills and the drive to succeed—approach these interviews with confidence, authenticity, and a clear vision of the impact you want to make.