"Tell me about a time you improved the quality of your 1:1s with direct reports. Walk me through a specific example of how you structured them, adapted to different people, and what impact that had on the team."
At Meta, Engineering Managers are expected to use 1:1s as a core leadership mechanism—not just for status updates, but for coaching, trust-building, surfacing risks early, and aligning people through change. Interviewers want to understand whether you treat 1:1s as a disciplined management practice that helps engineers grow and perform, especially in fast-moving environments where priorities can shift across surfaces like Facebook, Instagram, or Ads.
They are also looking for signals of judgment: how you balance consistency with personalization, how you handle underperformance or tension, and whether you create enough psychological safety for people to raise issues before they become organizational problems.
A strong answer uses one concrete example, not a philosophy lecture. It should show your operating cadence, the changes you made, how you measured effectiveness, and a clear result for both the individual and the team. The best responses also include what you learned and how you evolved your approach over time.