What was the outcome?. How would you improve your favorite product? Previously Product exec @ InVision, XO Group, Udacity, this article defining the modern strategic Product Manager, Create a job blueprint covering mission, outcomes, and competencies that the hiring process and interview questions align around, Perform rigorous short screening interviews evaluating fit against the blueprint using the same questions for all candidates, Conduct detailed in person interviews by the hiring manager with a walk through of a candidates past and future evaluating fit against the blueprint using the same questions for all candidates, Conduct focused interviews with other stakeholders to evaluate specific competencies from the job blueprint using the same questions for all candidates, (Bonus) This approach discusses tips for effective references using, you guessed it, a consistent set of questions for all candidate, Use a common set of questions every time (the book suggests specific questions), Continuously evaluate responses against the job mission/outcomes/competencies blueprint. Got a hot tip for improving the PM interview process? Hiring managers want to know product metrics youve had an active part in nurturing. You cannot be a Product Manager at Google or Apple if you lack understanding of some specific technical topics. Awkward pauses are to be expected. Which means the hiring company will ask a multitude of questions to figure out if you are the one. Interviews are skewed towards off-the-cuff thinking, and often use "speaking well" as a proxy for "thinking deeply". Bad responses to this question include metrics that dont make sense for the product, vanity metrics, metrics that are too detailed and specific to individual product features, or are too qualitative or ill-defined in nature (e.g., how are users using the different features). Glassdoor has put the product manager job in their top 10 of the best jobs list in the U.S. and the U.K. for 2022. I am rather looking for some reasonable ways to impact the key drivers of success for the product. Walk me through it from beginning to end. At the intersection of it all is the product manager. Customer insights: Tell me about a time you did user research on a product/feature and that research had a big impact on the product. How would you improve feature x in our product? Unless youre applying to be a Technical Product Manager, or youre a few rounds in for a specific PM role which requires a higher tech skill set, technical questions will be surface-level. Time is our most valuable asset, yet the most mismanaged. Focus on their expectations for the role, basic skill questions, personality fit (e.g. Hiring managers want to know how you will actively handle competing priorities, blockers, and unavoidable tech pitfalls. 50 Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers | ClickUp e.g % of users on app vs desktop, Offer good suggestions to test intellectual honesty: Find multiple improvements to their solution. A Product Manager (PM) has to be resilient, strategic and insightful. So dont neglect to prepare your answers for the more run-of-the-mill questions. The best responses are the ones that cover a variety of ideas for testing in different stages, including user research, prototype testing, looking at existing data, and only then potentially A/B testing. R0 is all about clearly articulating what your company has to offer, and understanding why the candidate is considering you. How to Interview Product Managers | Pivotal Tracker Blog 11 Revealing Product Manager Interview Questions Thats a good thing for your team, the candidate, your organization, and ultimately your user. As this book will show you, some of the most successful product transitions originated from people in music production or finance, with full-time jobs or with no prior experience. ____ metrics are down. The Product Manager Interview: 167 Actual Questions and Answers: Decode and Conquer Answers to Product Management Interviews. 1x email per week - max. Here are hot-off-the-presses stats his team pulled for me, based on over 75,000 recent applications acrosshigh-growth tech companies. Many of us are so confident in an ultimately bad hire when we use a weak interviewing process. Personally, I am not a big fan of the latter, since physical products would in reality be product managed quite differently than digital ones. Its okay to pause for a few moments to think. What Do Employers Look for in a Product Manager? Moreover, even this question itself already gives me some signal whether the candidate thinks like a great product manager. The conflict example either a hypothetical or historical example of encountering and managing conflict, with senior, peer, and junior stakeholders. Send me your questions and in return I'll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice. Between nervousness and excitement, the best thing you can do for your product manager interview is to show up well-prepared. How would you go about determining the root cause? Product strategy | Internet Product | InsurTech | FinTech | Innovation | All things Digital |, This is great Abhishek Madan. But make sure your answer is: Relevant. Does the role feel important and ambitious? Another signal in the response to this question is the quality of assumptions, opportunities, and solution ideas. Cultural fit is critical to a successful hire, though I find interviewers can assess cultural fit quickly, and assessing cultural fit varies by whats important to a specific culture. The best responses to this question are the ones that tie the success metrics back to the product metrics and goals identified in the very beginning, and that attempt to measure behavior change. In my chat with Harry Stebbings last week, I shared a bit of advice on this, but it was quite brief. The worst responses here are wavering and do not have any reasonable way to prioritize the ideas, or avoid prioritizing altogether. What are the primary features and use cases? From technical to behavioral interview questions, we got you covered! This is an open product management interview question so you dont want to miss the opportunity to show how youd add value to their organization! Many PMs will spike in some areas and be average in others. Here are different ways the conflict question is asked: These three questions arent all the questions to ask, theyre just the most important ones according to this set of product leaders. Takeaway: You need to talk to an average of 23 PM candidates to hire one great one. After leaving individual feedback according to specific assessment frameworks, all 4 interviewers meet . Here are some common product manager interview questions: Related: 36 Technical Product Manager Interview Questions. [VIDEO] May 2023 - [Workfront] Expert Insights - Resource Management Most importantly, you arent looking at how close they got to the right answer. Ask questions that get to the heart of the candidate's past performance on tasks and projects related to product management. A Product Manager (PM) has to be resilient, strategic and insightful. [Give this ~7-10 minutes]. Less bad, but still not great are use case descriptions that are too narrow, for example, by focusing only on the candidates personal use case. Hiring well requires asking the right Product Manager interview questions. 2023 ClickUp | Security | Your Privacy | Terms, 50 Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers. After the interview, product managers must reflect on the learnings, create notes, and share them with the product management team. This person should clearly communicate expectations and vision so all contributors are ready to get to work without confusion about whats happening. While we make X product for the general public, we also have a B2B division. Hiring managers usually ask a series of broad questions to get a better idea of your personality and interests, such as: Tell me more about yourself. Alternatively, you can use interviews to test job-related skills, rather than idly chatting or asking personal questions. In particular, if the candidate is talking about A/B testing, I watch out for any success criteria that arent A/B-testable. But dont worry, they wont be too high-level or philosophical until you reach seniority. Product Management Interview Product Experts Product Manager Intern Associate Product Manager Technical Product Manager Senior Product Manager Senior Technical Product Manager Lead Product Manager Group Product Manager Director of Product Chief Product Officer B2B Product Manager Data Product Manager Finance Product Manager My first question is what the customer or user problem the app is solving. A Google search turns up many list of Product Manager interview questions, even interview simulations, often written directly for Product Managers. Interviewing Product Managers - LinkedIn (done at home before arriving, in the office, or live), sharing what they came up with, with a group of potential colleagues, with potential colleagues, each testing for a key PM skill. Hiring manager phone screen [30 minutes]: Make sure there is a strong chance that the candidate is a fit for the role. An MVP serves as a crucial starting point for Agile projects . The worst responses are the ones that jump straight to feature ideas, often just focusing on their own use case of the product. Skill: does the person have the skill to do the job, i.e. As Gergely Orosz (ex-Uber, Microsoft, Skype engineer) confessed in a tweet, we EMs have no clue how to do these. The assignment must have 3 clear sections: Context, problem, and the solution's desired result. Describe your best practices to set up the team for success! Ping their references (and backchannel) to make sure you arent missing anything. Its the only time youll get to see the candidate tackle a chunky new problem, be able to watch them in action, and have a discussion about it. Here we have listed 20 questions to ask at the end of the Product Management interview. it is something that companies interview for. They want a person who is motivated to do the job, can work with different teams and has the ability to prioritize features that they already know users are looking for. One option is to structure interviews so that all candidates receive the same questions, a procedure that has been shown to make interviews more reliable and modestly more predictive of job success. I love this question because I get a quick snapshot of the candidates skills and her self awareness of those skills. The PM interview process is intended to better understand your overall working style. Product prioritization helps teams make decisions faster. One executive says that Feature A is more important and another executive says Feature B is more important. There are various ways to do this. A side benefit of asking candidates for the apps they use is that I might learn about interesting products I didnt know about before, which as a curious product person myself I always appreciate. Though some are hard to anticipate, some types are almost certain to show up. Reference checks: Ping their references (and backchannel) to make sure you arent missing anything. Many dont, even though the second half is more important! How do you see your career developing in the next 5 years? Get more agile interview questions and answers! Firstly, dont just pick the first app that the candidate mentions, but ask them for a few more examples. They can be a rigorous test that standardises your process, if they are set correctly. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. If remote work is a challenge for you, be honest about it, but try to maintain a positive attitude. The Product Manager Interview: 167 Actual Questions and Answers: This is the second edition of Lewis C. Lins book, a great resource for both budding and seasoned Product Managers. If youre asked about a situation you havent yet faced, instead of saying I havent done that yet, talk about how you would face it in future. What are the candidates career ambitions? So youre a product leader, and need to hire a PM. You have two options for delivering the project: Before the interview: Give them a project before the full-day interview, to work on at home in some timeboxed amount of time. Prepare 10 killer stories. 42 Interview Questions for Product Managers (With Example Answers) - Indeed Product managers deal with ambiguous and novel challenges. The assignment must give the candidate a taste of the kind of problems that they would solve, if they were given the job. A product manager has their own workload, but theyre responsible for the overall product progress. Seriously, go check it out. Product managers have a responsibility to optimize the teams performance. It's essential that you're able to demonstrate your previous experience or Product Management education. There are a variety of questions you can expect to be asked in a Product Management interview. of my weekly newsletter. 79: The product leader's guide to interviewing product managers 10 Common Interview Questions for Product Managers - Forage Remember, assignments are unpaid work. Reflection is a crucial step. Execution: Pick a project youre proud of that took 3-9 months. PM interviews are still just regular job interviews at heart, and sometimes the simplest questions are the most important. The worst answers to this questions are ones that just replay use cases or metrics without prioritization. Well start by getting to know each other briefly, then spend most of our time working through a product case study together. To run an effective interview, interviewers can't simply ask a question, sit back and expect to learn everything they need to know about the candidate from their responses. What is a major challenge our company will face in the next 12-24 months? You said no to a key stakeholder. What Is a Minimum Viable Product? | Coursera Focus on getting to know the person as a human, the role, and a couple skills or attributes that you believe to be most important to this role (more on this below). Use ClickUp to document all your resources, so youll be extra prepared for your next product manager interview! At first, you wing it; by the third time, everyone has their own, completely different setup.. The hiring manager asks this question to understand your product design and development thinking. Talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges or poor feedback. Interviewing Product Management Candidates: What to Look For Got a PM interview? So lets get much deeper. that many of us get wrong without even knowing it. Managing conflict productively is near and dear to my heart, and I recommend the book Difficult Conversations to anyone interested in the topic. Tell me about a time you had to influence someone. Like a Mario stage or a Portal puzzle, assignments can be fun and exciting. Other ways Product Leaders ask this question: Walk me through a successful major project you were heavily involved in, and tell me about your role throughout the project., If you were to change anything about the project, what would you have done differently and why?. , I shared a bit of advice on this, but it was quite brief. The assignment problem needs to be specific. How would you go about finding out the number of red cars in China? What are the competitive dynamics, and how should we position the product against competitors? Below are some of my Product Manager interview questions, as well as thoughts from other product leaders and hiring experts. Pick a project youre proud of that took 3-9 months. These responses in your back pocket will help you answer confidently and eliminate interview stress! Is the candidate aware of best practices of collaborating, getting details right, performing tests, understanding users, etc. Hired How to Get a Great Product Job: Tailored guide-to-go for PM positions in top tech companies. The candidate is expected to think deeply, and the interviewer is also expected to spend at least 15-30 minutes understanding their answers. Send me your questionsand in return Ill humbly offer actionable real-talk advice. In this round we will discuss 3 things about the company: And we need to prod the candidate into telling us: Once we establish fit we move to a quick check of competency claimed on resume. In answering this historical example/skill question, the candidates example project involved quickly building and launching an offering that was the CEOs idea and mandate. Walk me through your accomplishment to understand a candidates displayed competencies (already covered). Ace the PM Interview + Top Questions (2023 Guide) - Exponent Good responses talk about impact vs. effort, or do an ICE / RICE assessment. How have you overcome them? Don't think you can wing it. The guidance here comes from a blend of my own experience at Gusto and Ethos, where Ive interviewed over 200 PMs, and conversations with product leaders from other companies who have scaled their product teams at Stripe and Coinbase. I've been involved in interview panels for a lot of PMs, and have set up hiring processes for product managers in two different startups. What to Look for When Hiring Product Managers | Built In What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting? As you go through the questions, think back on specific experiences and achievements that have shaped your professional development. Thus we test for the latter. Get ready to nail the interview! How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door? A hiring manager looks for prospective product managers that know how to solve problems. What made it so important or impactful? Either the candidate truly doesnt use technology much (in which case, why are you a tech product manager?) Tell me about a time you used data to make a decision. This gives a little bit of extra signal in terms of structured communication, but mostly, it ties up the discussion nicely before I give the candidate the opportunity to ask me some questions. Bonus points for the company if theyve outlined this publicly on their blog or website. Its better than panicking and rushing through a terrible answer that you regret halfway through! Read more to see if a career in product management may be right for you. A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of your product that may not be fully complete, but it is functional enough for users to test and provide feedback. About 50% of candidates should make it through this step. Has she done the research to take the application seriously? What is your opinion of them? Moreover, the best responses to this question include not only meaningful metrics but also a prioritization for example, saying something like at this stage of the company, they are probably focused mostly on growth, so the most important metric would be X. One of the critical components of the interview loop should be what I call the Product Sense interview, in which the candidates hard product management skills are evaluated: the ability to assess products, identify improvement opportunities, and reason about them and their tradeoffs. I recommend creating a single document containing both that can be easily shared with panelists, and copied for each new candidate. Would it have been as impactful without you, and why? Questions about product are possibly the most common in PM interviews, which shouldnt come as a surprise! The worst response to these questions is if candidates cant up with any apps that they use. I generally prefer examples to hypotheticals, but I will often ask a candidate to brainstorm a problem related to the role. One of the critical components of the interview loop should be what I call the "Product Sense" interview, in which the candidate's . What challenges have you faced when working remotely? Because product management teams include members from different backgrounds such as engineering, design, and data design, product managers must have strong . Judging can be seniority based. What is a product you currently use every day, why and how would you improve it? While the product is a pot, it's more than "just a pot.". This skill evaluation question lets the interviewer deep dive into the example about the candidates displayed competencies, e.g. Interviewing product managers: a playbook for PM leaders - RocketBlocks General product management questions. Strategy: Pick a product you worked on in the past yeartalk me through your strategy for it. Here are hot-off-the-presses stats his team pulled for me, based on over 75,000 recent applications acrosshigh-growth tech companies. My current focus is on our employer experience -- making it really easy for companies to offer Mikes Bikes as a commuter option to employees. Walk me through it from beginning to end. I generally start with these two will and skill questions, then walk through other standardized questions that cover key role competencies that we havent covered yet. Our charter is to make biking the default way to commute in every major city, and take polluting cars off the road. So keep your expectations in line. Very, very, rarely will you be asked any overly technical questions in a Product Manager interview. How do we define success, and what metrics can we use to track the product? Im always looking to iterate on this. These two separate notions are also known as will and skill. Because of this, the career has quickly become a highly sought-after position, especially by MBA graduates. Interview best practices are generally anecdotal, so definitely do your own research. How do you integrate them into the overall product vision? Would it have been as impactful without you, and why? Tell me about how you interact with customers/users? Communicating what you will bring to the team culture and product role will show your potential employer the positive impact youll make on the company. The worst responses are the ones in which the candidate immediately jumps to building and A/B testing the feature, or something similar. JPMorgan developing ChatGPT-like A.I. investment advisor - CNBC The metrics question is followed up by asking for what the candidate thinks the product goals might be. Does the candidate remember to answer the second part of the question? It tests not only the candidates understanding of the product and its strategic context, but also their tolerance for ambiguity (which is critical for product managers as well). What is one of the best ideas youve ever had? What do you need from your manager to be successful? Can you see how and why the candidate will want to thrive in this role? It's multi-functional, giving the user options in the kitchen. The focus of this post is firmly on the interview components of the hiring process. Our engineering teams are pretty used to employing X methodologies. This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. What is the best way to work with customers and users? There are different telltale signs for this: the candidate might tell you about some new products they have recently discovered. Courses Product Management Software Engineering System Design Engineering Management Technical Program Management UX / Product Design Data Science During the product manager hiring process, its important to demonstrate your critical thinking skills, technical skills, and communication skills. Apr 30, 2022. Now the floor is yours. Its important not to dwell on the mistake. Evaluators especially look for collaboration skills and use of user data and insights to work through conflicts. Often considered the "CEO" of their product area, product managers oversee the strategy, production, and implementation of a particular product. A Typical Product Manager Salary Guide for 2023 - University of Minnesota Its purpose is to determine if there is a market for your idea and if it effectively solves a problem for your customers. How do you decide what and what not to build? Product managers are a rare breed of technology professionals who focuses on the vision for a product or service. So a strong product management candidate knows their KPIs and metrics, collaborates with cross-functional teams, and develops product strategy to serve the companys customers and product vision. The most important thing is to ask good questions that lead to concrete answers. Often the discussion afterward is even more valuable than the prompt itself. What is one of the worst ideas youve ever had? 5 Product Manager Interview Questions (With Sample Responses) Choose relevant examples to illustrate your process and draw from the role requirements under the job listing. This has a couple of advantages in my eyes: firstly, the candidate is guaranteed to be discussing a product that they are familiar with which means that they dont have to start from zero. I also call out that neither of us knows the product and has all the context, and that they can make assumptions. But to make sure you hit on the main points every interview should cover, these eleven product manager interview questions are the best for you to reveal your candidate's values and intentions: but never once mentioned bringing users into the product discovery, development, and release process. If its not an easy yes, its an easy no: If you find yourself agonizing between scoring a candidate as a 2 or 3, go with 2. Once they are done, they share what theyve come up with. Give them a project at the beginning of the interview day, with a timeboxed amount of time for them to work on it (e.g. What is your experience with juggling both markets? And different candidates have different capacities for unpaid work. To pass this question, the user needs to answer both sections and sell me on how this role positions her to take over the world. In Yale Professor Jason Danas recent New York Times article The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews, Professor Dana recaps research showing that loosely run interviews are often useless, if not misdirecting, for evaluating a candidate. How have you kept communication from breaking down in a remote setting? not a manager), you can whittle it down to these six: Interestingly, product sense isnt ever on PM career ladders, but it is something that companies interview for, so Ive included it in the list above. I prefer not to ask for assignments in any specific format. First, a little context on my perspective: Ill walk you through each step, using concrete examples: An obvious-in-hindsight mistake many product teams make is not testing candidates on attributes they value post-hire. Sendbird, the conversations platform for mobile apps. Customize the ClickUp Interview Process Template to organize your thoughts and responses while you read through this guide! " Decode and Conquer is a great resource for product management candidates to see real responses to actual PM case questions." -- John Kim, Senior Vice President, Global Products, EXPEDIA "Lewis blends his deep product experience with the art, science and psychology of PM interviews in . To benchmark a typical hiring funnel, I asked Benji Encz, CEO of the recruiting platform Ashby, to share stats he had on conversion rates at each step, and wow, did he deliver. What metrics would you use to measure its success? I lead our Product and Design teams at Mikes Bikes. Below, Ill share suggestions for: How to structure an interview project (plus a bunch of real-life examples). Answering this product manager interview question requires research and preparation. or, more likely, they dont pay a lot of attention to their own behavior and the products they use. First, give the hiring manager context to the metric about why it matters. Why is this the case and what would you do within the product to change that? Is this the type of person you want on your team now and in the future?