Notion Engineering Manager Interview Questions

1.Describe a feature or project where you had to cut scope or simplify the solution after talking with users. Walk me through what you originally planned versus what you shipped.

2.Tell me about a time you had to push back on a feature request because it wasn't what users actually needed. Who was asking for it and how did that conversation go?

3.Tell me about a time user feedback fundamentally changed how you approached a project or product decision as a manager. What was the original plan and how did you pivot?

4.Walk me through a time when customer feedback made you completely rethink how your team was measuring success on a project. What metrics were you using before and what did you change to?

5.Tell me about a time you had to compress a project timeline significantly without sacrificing quality. What was the original timeline, what was the compressed timeline, and how did you make it work?

6.Describe the most significant thing you said no to in the last year as a manager. What was it, who wanted it, and how did you handle the conversation?

7.Your engineer built a database query optimization that improved page load times by 40%. When you ask them to write a design doc explaining the approach, they resist, saying the code is self-documenting. How do you handle this?

8.A junior engineer on your team consistently writes code that works but doesn't follow team conventions around error handling and TypeScript patterns. How do you help them improve?

9.Your team is building a new collaborative editing feature. Three engineers have different approaches to handling conflict resolution in our CRDT implementation. How do you help them reach a decision?

10.You notice that your team's AI feature releases are taking longer than expected because engineers are spending too much time manually testing different prompt variations. How would you address this?

11.One of your engineers proposes moving our block storage engine from our current custom solution to a managed service like DynamoDB. They argue it would reduce operational overhead. How would you evaluate this proposal?

12.You're managing a team working on Notion's full-text search infrastructure that serves millions of queries daily. An engineer wants to experiment with a new vector database approach but it would require significant refactoring. How do you decide whether to approve this work?

13.Design a real-time collaboration system for Notion's block-based editor where 50 users can simultaneously edit a document with 10,000 blocks. Walk me through how you'd handle concurrent edits without conflicts.

14.You're tasked with designing a new database view type for Notion that can handle 1 million rows while maintaining real-time collaborative editing. How would you architect this?

15.Design the backend architecture for Notion AI's workspace search feature. It needs to search across 100 million blocks in real-time while understanding context from databases, docs, and calendar events.

16.Design Notion's notification system that needs to handle workspace activity across docs, databases, and calendar events. It should work across web, mobile, and email while respecting complex permission hierarchies.

17.Design the sync architecture for Notion's offline-first mobile app. Users should be able to edit docs, create database entries, and use AI features without internet, then sync seamlessly when reconnected.

18.Design the architecture for Notion Calendar's smart scheduling assistant that needs to analyze calendar patterns, suggest meeting times, and integrate with Notion docs for agenda creation across 10 million users.

19.Tell me about a time when you had to help someone on your team get fundamentally better at their craft. What was missing in their skills, and how did you approach developing them?

20.Your team is consistently missing sprint commitments because they're spending extra time on code quality and testing. The product partner is frustrated about velocity. How do you address this tension?

21.Your team is debating whether to rewrite a legacy component in React or incrementally improve it. The senior engineer wants the rewrite, the product manager wants the incremental approach, and both have good points. How do you help them reach the right decision?

22.Describe a time when you influenced a peer team or senior stakeholder to change their approach on something that mattered to your team's success. What was the situation and how did you make it happen?

23.You discover that engineers across multiple teams are solving similar problems differently - some using our internal tooling, others building custom solutions, others using third-party tools. How would you approach standardizing this without stifling innovation?

24.Tell me about a time you had to make a significant technical bet or architectural decision that would affect multiple teams. Walk me through your decision-making process and what happened.

25.Notion's block storage system needs to scale from 100 million to 1 billion blocks over the next 18 months. Estimate what this means for our infrastructure costs, assuming our current monthly cloud bill is around $2 million.

26.A competitor launches a feature that lets users export Notion workspaces and import them seamlessly into their platform. Estimate how this could impact our user base and what our response should be worth investing in.

27.We're seeing a 15% drop in daily active teams using Notion databases over the past month, but our overall workspace creation is steady. Walk me through how you'd investigate this as an engineering manager.

28.Estimate how many person-hours Notion engineers spend annually on customer support escalations related to data sync conflicts. What would reducing this by 50% be worth to the company?

29.You're planning Notion's infrastructure capacity for Black Friday weekend, when we typically see 3x normal traffic and 5x database write volume. Walk me through your analysis of what could go wrong and how you'd prepare.

30.Notion is considering offering a new enterprise tier with advanced compliance features. Estimate the engineering investment required and whether the business case makes sense based on our current customer base.