Describe an operational efficiency a team you led as a program manager was responsible for.
Operational efficiencies free capital and other resources for investment in other areas of a business. Coinbase strives to work as efficiently as possible to allow as much of its resources to be focused on its company mission as possible. Interviewers ask this question to ensure the candidate they select has experience identifying and implementing these value-add opportunities.
Remember to clearly describe the problem state, what specifically you did to resolve the problem, and the operational impact your solution had. The STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) model works well for this question.
"I supported a business stakeholder group that worked in a 24x7 mission-critical operations environment in my last program manager role. Our company began adopting ITIL standards to streamline a number of workflows, and I asked to be included in the certification process. I felt I would be able to better serve our clients if we implemented higher-quality application support procedures. My team was currently resolving incidents that should have been easily addressed by the customer themselves, or by our tier one support group. The engineers and analysts on my teams were frustrated because our time was better served developing new solutions to drive sales and business operations.
We implemented ServiceNow for incident management and I led our team's efforts to define our queues, develop our knowledgebase documentation, and define the experience for end-users who wanted to report their own incidents. Our previous self-service incident management tool was difficult for our users to understand, and tickets often went to the wrong queues resulting in delays and frustration.
I coordinated with our business stakeholders to offer them training on the new system and taught them how to properly report incidents. We developed online training tools that could be used whenever new employees were onboarded. They loved the new design and were thrilled when their tickets were resolved twenty-three percent faster on average after a six-month rollout period. We also saw a thirty-two percent reduction in the overall number of incidents logged due to the quality of the knowledge base and training materials they had easy access to. These changes resulted in a 78,000 reduction in operating expenses within the first year alone."
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