Google New Grad R1 Behavioral: Team Leadership, Deadlines, and Scrum

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Passed R1
Report time: December 2025

Behavioral interview

The interview covered three broad areas.

Project experience

The candidate discussed one project and answered traditional questions about conflict and feedback.

Team leadership scenarios

The harder questions were hypothetical:

• If you lead a team and someone repeatedly misses a deadline, what do you do?
• How would you assign roles across the team?
• What do you do when the team faces a new problem that nobody understands?

The candidate had not formally led a team but used prior experience with Scrum to structure the answers: support self-management and cross-functional work, remove blockers, keep work focused on valuable increments, and make retrospectives address process causes rather than only the current incident.

Conflict and feedback

The interviewer also asked about handling conflict and giving or receiving feedback.

The candidate felt the leadership scenarios were closer to product or project-management questions than ordinary New Grad behavioral prompts, but their previous exposure to Scrum made them manageable. No technical question was reported.