I recently interviewed a whole string of experienced engineering managers. My interview style tends to be pretty open ended. Most of the folks I interviewed were eager to talk about specific technical achievements they and their team accomplished.

This is understandable. Conquering and deploying a specific technology is hard and feels like a real achievement. That said, I found myself being more interested in each person's specific approach for determining what work to do, quantifying that work, and tracking it to completion. I had a surprisingly difficult time leading the conversation in that direction.

Specifically, I want to know how one interacts with product managers, prioritizes features, determines architecture, distills architecture to actual tasks, and guarantees that those tasks get completed in a timely fashion.