Just finished the Target EM loop for a senior engineering manager role on their digital commerce team. Took about six weeks start to finish. Writing this up because I couldn't find much detail online before I went in.
Recruiter screen (30 min): Standard. What's your team size, what's your management philosophy, why Target. Nothing surprising. They mentioned the role was hybrid, Minneapolis HQ, 3 days in office minimum.
Hiring manager screen (45 min): This one was more substantive than I expected. My future skip-level essentially. She asked about a time I had to restructure a team during an organizational shift, how I handled a senior IC who wasn't meeting expectations, and how I think about technical depth vs. people leadership over time. There was a lot of back-and-forth, not a structured Q&A, more like a real conversation. I left feeling like she actually wanted to understand how I think.
Onsite (4 hours, virtual): Four blocks back to back. Behavioral/leadership deep dive with two EMs: about 90 minutes, heavy on conflict resolution, prioritization when your team is overcommitted, and how you build culture in a hybrid setup. STAR format expected and they nudge you if you drift into generalities. Technical judgment round: not coding, but system design framing. How would you architect a fulfillment routing system for same-day delivery. They cared less about the exact answer and more about how you walked through tradeoffs with incomplete requirements. I made the mistake of jumping to solutions before restating constraints and they called it out gently. Cross-functional panel with a PM and a DS lead: mostly "describe how you've aligned with a non-eng partner" scenarios. Target's retail-tech integration is a big deal to them, they kept probing whether I understood that supply chain decisions have physical-world consequences. Team fit / values: two ICs from the hypothetical team. I think this was partially a reverse-interview but also genuinely evaluative. They wanted to know if I'd be approachable.
Offer decision: About 10 days after onsite. They came back with a verbal, then written offer three days later.
What mattered most, from what I can tell: Specificity in behavioral answers, showing you understand operational complexity in retail tech (not just typical startup scaling), and genuine curiosity about their problems vs. lecturing about your accomplishments. The panel was not particularly difficult but they're good at sniffing out vague answers.
Happy to answer questions on anything specific.