❓Ask your interviewer Qs

Luck favors the prepared.

I've broken down three types of questions you can ask your interview panel. YMMV on the question relevance depending on your role, but here are questions I've asked which has helped me understand the following:

• my potential manager's working style (managerial)
• how the organization and team values align with mine (cultural)
• a high-level understanding of the Salesforce implementation (technical)

Keep in mind these merely question ideas. You will uncover follow-up questions to ask them based on their responses to these.

Managerial questions

If I asked one of your direct reports about a time you helped unblock them on a critical task, what story would they tell me?

Why: Has my prospective manager worked in a high-stakes situation before? If it went well, why did it go well? If they don't have an answer, I get concerned. They might not have the influence necessary to help you when times get tough.

What would you say your direct reports wish you did more of? Less of?

Why: Can this person give feedback about themselves, specifically from the POV of their employees? What does their self-awareness look like? Do I want to calibrate my working style to match what this manager wants?

How would you describe yourself as a leader?

Why: Is this person comfortable with speaking about themselves?

What are some risks you've taken?

Why: How do they evaluate risk-reward? Ex: Did they advocate for delaying a project release in exchange for developing a feature correctly?

How are the teams split up?

Why: Is the current makeup of the team well equipped for long-term success?

Cultural questions

What does the path for growth look like for this role?

Why: Is there a well-defined path for career advancement? Does this company grow from within or make external hires often?

How do you set boundaries?

Why: This is an open-ended question, but the main idea is to see if boundary-setting is something they respect or try to test often. For the latter, it'll still fall on you to hold firm to the boundaries you set.

What's the difference between someone who wouldn't be successful at the company vs. someone who will?

Why: Do they tie success to the company's defined values? What kinds of behaviors are rewarded vs. penalized, and how do those behaviors align with my own?

Technical questions

How many users are on the org?

Why: How many internal cases are there? Guesstimate how many pings your CRM team members might get. What do enhancement requests, defects look like?

What are the challenges facing the company's implementation today?

Why: Do these challenges interest me, or do they sound boring?

How do you see the implementation evolving to meet the business demand in the next 30 days? 6 months? Year?

Why: How could the Salesforce org be a bottleneck in meeting the business needs? With my skill set, what could I do to help?

What's the most technically complex feature the team has developed on the org?

Why: This is usually the first thing I'll look at when joining a new company. Is there documentation for it? Is the most technically complex feature also the most business-critical? (Sometimes, it's not).

What is the plan for identifying and paying down technical debt?

Why: I want to see how much of a problem technical debt is for the company's Salesforce implementation. The bigger the debt, the harder it is to be productive.

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P.S. What questions do you like to ask your interviewers? Any interviewing horror stories you'd like to share?

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