So, you have an onsite interview and are getting ready to wow them so that you can land your dream job. We have created a list of product manager interview questions so you can prepare for your interview and confidently ace it.
Product, Strategy, and Operations interview questions
Personal Experience
- Pick a product that you like/dislike. Why? What would you change about the product?
- Tell me a time when you had to make a decision during a lot of ambiguity.
- What experience do you have in writing product requirements and what product management methodology was used?
- How do you decide which features are the best for a product?
- Explain a process within your role that you learned or developed at your previous job which you feel is valuable enough to take with you to a future position.
More personal experience
- What is your product development process? Do you utilize experimentation?
- What specific domain experience do you have?
- How have you had to deal with customer expectations in the past?
- What are your 2 main product management principles?
- How do you engage customers in the product development process?
- Which stage of product management are you most excited to contribute to?
Operations/Strategy
- If you have a disagreement with an engineer about what should be built, how do you go about solving that?
- Currently, Pinterest helps people store ideas via pins. How do you motivate them to take action, i.e. buy?
- How do you decide which features are the best for a product?
- Show me your individual process to prioritize a product roadmap and its stories.
- What is your vision of the industry and what strategy do you suggest?
Design
- What are some of your favorite product? Why? If you were the PM on this product what would you improve and why?
- Tell me about a feature you designed. How did you come up with this feature? What metrics will you use to track the success of the feature?
- How do you see [Company’s] recent market challenge? How do you design a product to overcome that challenge?
- How would you design a platform to encourage users to use new tools or other existing tools/features that they don’t use often?
Technical
- What does cloud computing mean?
- Talk about the most technical project you’ve worked on and its successes and failures.
- What considerations would you take to develop a mobile app?
- How would you design a Sudoku game for a mobile device?
- When are Bayesian methods more appropriate than “Artificial Intelligence” techniques for predictive analytics?
More technical
- Design a method that removes every other node from a linked list.
- How would you get authentication to work across domains?
- How would you optimize an API?
- Tell me how HANA works.
- What is spaghetti code?
Metrics
- How do you measure the effectiveness of your user interface?
- How would you design a better metric for measuring seller success?
- How would you get sales professionals to post more links on LinkedIn? What metrics would you look at?
- Talk about a time you used data to make a product decision.
- How would you determine the success of a specific feature?
Market sizing/estimation
- The NBA championships are about to happen and you are the producer of merchandise showcasing the winning team–but, you don’t know which team that will be. What do you produce and how much do you produce to dress the stadium visitors with merchandise?
- How would you calculate the number of daily registrations that Facebook has?
- What will be the impact of self-driving cars?
- Choose a city and estimate how many Piano Tuners operate there.
- How would you calculate the market value of the Segway market in the United States of America?
Situational
- What are the use cases you worked on?
- What do you do when a team stops working on the product and is only working on innovations and not listening to the needs of our customers and the business?
- How would you handle a situation where a vendor is not meeting a deadline, which in turn is delaying your deadline with the customer?
- What are the variable costs associated with sending physical products to customers?
- How do you manage if you have a conflict with your team member?
Preparing for your product manager interview by knowing the questions is a great first step. Here are some interview tips to keep in mind to ace your next product manager interview.
Always start with clarifying questions
Sometimes, interviewers make a question intentionally vague. Always take about 15-30 seconds to think about clarifying questions, like “Can I wireframe this out first?” or “Can I take notes with a pen & paper?”
Keep context in the forefront
Context statements let the interviewer know that you know what you are doing. By providing reasoning before doing something, you can change how you are interpreted for the better.
Know how to get help
Most of the time, it’s ok to ask for help. But, it’s important to know that some interviewers really hate the word, “hint.” A better approach would be to say, “my assumptions are X and Y, I’m thinking of doing Z. But I’m struggling with solving [problem].” You can also ask collaborative questions like
- Do you have any thoughts about my process?
- Am I going in the right direction?
- Are my assumptions correct?
With these questions & tips in your back pocket, you should be more than prepared for your next technical onsite interview. For more steps on how to become a product manager, check out our guide.
About Pathrise
Pathrise is a career accelerator that works with students and professionals 1-on-1 so they can land their dream job in tech. Our fellows have seen their interview performance scores double with these tips and guidance.
If you want to work with any of our advisors 1-on-1 to get help with your product manager interviews or any other aspect of the job search, become a Pathrise fellow.
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Check out our other Interview Questions to prep for your next interview:
