Your Communication Approach With Engineering Teams as an American Express PM

You are interviewing for a product manager role at American Express, and the interviewer asks how you communicate with engineers. Describe how you work with an engineering team, both day to day and when things get difficult, and support your answer with an example. ```hint Cover calm days and hard days Interviewers want both your routine (how context, priorities and decisions reach engineers) and how you behave when an estimate grows, priorities collide, or a security or compliance requirement lands late. One concrete story is worth more than a list of meetings. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Are you more interested in my regular working rhythm with engineers or in how I handle disagreements and changes of plan? - Is the engineering team co-located, remote or spread across time zones? That changes how much I rely on written versus live communication. - Does the role focus on customer-facing card member experiences or on internal and platform systems, where engineers are effectively the product's customers? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear stance: share the problem, the evidence and the constraints rather than handing engineers finished solutions, and involve them early. - Concrete mechanisms across the product lifecycle: written specs with acceptance criteria, kickoffs, planning, decision records, and a sensible split between written and live channels. - Technical fluency and translation: understanding trade-offs well enough to discuss them, turning business, security and regulatory constraints into clear requirements for engineers, and explaining engineering constraints to business stakeholders. - Handling friction: estimate changes, scope cuts, priority disagreements and capacity for technical debt, with respect for engineering judgment. - A specific STAR example with a measurable result and evidence that the team trusts the candidate. ### Follow-up Questions - Tell me about a time an engineering lead disagreed with your priorities. How was it resolved? - How do you decide how much capacity goes to technical debt versus new features? - A security finding arrives shortly before launch and adds significant work. Walk me through whom you talk to, in what order, and what you say.