What budgetary activities are you responsible for in your current role?
Managing capital and operating budgets for human resources, software purchases, hardware purchases, professional services, and maintenance agreements are all responsibilities that may fall within the scope of a technical program manager's role. Interviewers ask this question to gain insight into a candidate's level of experience managing these various budgets.
Remember to describe the various types of budgets and the work your teams contribute to even if you are not personally responsible for their management. For example, you may not directly manage the equipment budget for the servers your team uses, or for the cloud services your team utilizes, but you may have to provide planning and usage information on a regular basis for the purposes of forecasting and accounting.
"In my current role as a program manager, I oversee the budgets of three cross-functional development teams responsible for a portfolio of twelve solutions. Our project managers manage the individual project budgets and approval of time for their projects, and I monitor the overall capital and operating spending. I am responsible for hardware purchases, software purchases, and SaaS solution budgets. I also monitor the money spent by the resources that support our solutions and provide other shared services such as database management, cloud services, and release management.
I meet annually with senior leaders within the business units who own the solutions we develop to determine the budget needed for the upcoming projects. I also work with my senior leaders to ensure we plan for training, team-building, and other overhead-related activities that are not always charged back to our customers. I provide these same leaders with monthly and quarterly updates."
