Functional Interview Question Bank
A single reference for all functional interviews. Use this as a checklist. Go deeper where signal is strong.
A. Role & Decision Context
| Question |
|---|
| What is your role and what are you accountable for? |
| What decisions do you personally own vs influence? |
| Which decisions have the biggest financial or operational impact? |
| What decisions are hardest to make confidently today? |
B. Where Time Goes
| Question |
|---|
| What takes up the most time in a typical week? |
| What work feels repetitive or mechanical? |
| What work exists mainly because systems don't talk to each other? |
| What do you wish you didn't have to do manually? |
C. Pain Points & Friction
| Question |
|---|
| What's most frustrating about how work gets done today? |
| Where do processes slow down or break under pressure? |
| Where do handoffs between teams cause issues? |
| What breaks first when volume spikes? |
D. Systems & Data
| Question |
|---|
| What systems do you use daily? |
| Which system is the source of truth for your function? |
| Where does data get stuck or require manual movement? |
| Where do you not trust the data? |
| How do you know when data is wrong? |
E. Reporting & Decisions
| Question |
|---|
| How are reports built today? |
| How fresh is the data when you use it? |
| Where do numbers not match across reports? |
| What would change if you had real-time visibility? |
F. Constraints & Guardrails
| Question |
|---|
| What data cannot leave your systems or be shared externally? |
| Are there policies that block automation today? |
| What risks are absolutely unacceptable? |
| Where must human judgment be preserved? |
G. The "Better" Test
| Question |
|---|
| If everything worked perfectly, what would be different? |
| What decisions would get faster or easier? |
| What would you stop doing entirely? |
| What would you finally have time to do? |
H. Maturity Check (1–5 Rating)
| Dimension | Prompt |
|---|
| Data integration | How connected are your systems today? |
| Data quality | How much do you trust your data? |
| Automation | How automated is your function today? |
| Security posture | How locked down is your data environment? |
| Reporting maturity | How self-serve is reporting today? |
I. Wrap-Up
| Question |
|---|
| Who else should we talk to? |
| Any documents or artifacts we should review? |
| Anything we didn't ask that matters? |