Digital Manufacturing Program Manager
Posted Sep 13, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026
Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
Behavioral
Walk me through a manufacturing technology program you led from business case through production deployment. What was the scope and what did you personally own versus delegate?
whether they've actually run programs of this scale end-to-end or only participated in pieces
Tell me about a time an AI or digital manufacturing pilot looked great in proof of concept but stalled or failed when you tried to scale it into production. What actually went wrong?
realistic understanding of the POC-to-production gap that trips up most industrial AI initiatives
Tell me about a time you had to manage a team of specialists you didn't have deep technical expertise in yourself, like controls engineers or AI application engineers. How did you earn their trust and hold them accountable?
credibility and management style with technical specialists across disciplines
Tell me about a program where adoption by frontline plant workers was the real risk, not the technology itself. How did you drive change management and get people to actually use the new system?
experience with operational readiness and adoption, which the posting flags as a distinct responsibility
Technical
How would you build a prioritization framework to decide which of a dozen competing MES, traceability, and AI use cases across multiple plants get funded and staffed first?
ability to design governance and prioritization logic rather than just execute a fixed roadmap
Say a plant is running a legacy SCADA and controls setup and you need to integrate it with a new industrial data platform without stopping production. How do you approach that OT/IT integration?
working knowledge of the technical and operational risk of touching live OT systems
Describe how you would build an ROI model for a computer vision quality inspection project, and how you'd track whether the promised business value actually showed up after go-live.
financial rigor and follow-through on benefit realization, not just project delivery
What's your experience with MES platforms specifically, and how would you evaluate whether an MES enhancement project is ready to move forward versus needs more groundwork?
depth of hands-on familiarity with the core system this role revolves around versus surface-level knowledge
How do you structure a portfolio of manufacturing technology projects across multiple sites so you can track budget, risk, and resource allocation without losing visibility into any one project?
organizational rigor for managing a multi-site, multi-workstream portfolio
What project management methodology do you default to for a program mixing traditional capital projects with agile AI development, and when do you deviate from it?
flexibility applying both agile and traditional methods rather than forcing one framework onto everything
Situational
A plant floor supervisor and a corporate IT director disagree on how a new traceability system should be configured, and it's holding up the rollout. How do you resolve that?
skill mediating between operations and IT priorities, which this role sits directly between
If you had to give an executive steering committee a project status update on an initiative that is behind schedule and over budget, how would you frame that conversation?
comfort delivering unwelcome news upward with credibility intact
Suppose a generative AI use case for a digital worker application gets strong executive sponsorship but the plant teams are skeptical it will actually help them. How do you handle that tension?
judgment balancing top-down strategic push against ground-level operational buy-in
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