Audience: This is helpful to anyone who is conducting or appearing in an interview on the product management.
I used questions from this website and other websites, to collection questions. Answers are mine. These answers are not verified by anyone to be correct. These are based on my knowledge on the subject.
What do you see as a Product Manager’s main role within product development?
A product manager’s role is to plan and execute a product from start to end. Different responsibilities include:
- Requirements gathering
- Defining product vision
- Working with design, engineering, and marketing
As a product manager, how do you stay user-focused?
A product should be user focused, to ensure users are getting what they need. To stay user focused, a product manager should view the product from user’s point of view understand personas, and use cases.
What main changes would you make to a product?
Depending on the situation, I’d like to review the approach. In my situation, I found out that the older system was not working as expected. We found out issues and changed the processes of the product.
How do you see your career developing in the next 5 years?
In five years from now, I see myself taking more leadership responsibilities to contribute in a company.
Tell us about a time you used data to influence an important stakeholder.
There was a migration project on a system. Engineering team was not in favor of implementing a change in a way my team was interested. I reached out to engineering lead with the data of last ten years. That data pattern helped him to learn why the request of the change is in a way. I empathized with him for the approach he suggested and at the same time, convinced him for a change. Finally, data patterns helped to make a right decision.
Tell us about a time you faced failure and how you bounced back.
It was about a beginning of my career as a developer. I had a task to complete. I had serious a bug in that utility. I prepared a utility to search all database functions in a project. My utility didn’t count all tasks correctly. It was a failure of writing the utility correctly. I failed to write it well. I learned that I must have thought about all corner cases and must have tested it with good data set. I fixed the approach by adding all corner cases. That fixed the issue.
How would you improve your favorite product?
I am always looking for ways to improve the current product. I’d continually monitor customer expectations, product analysis/monitoring trends, and the future growth. So, a continuous forward looking 360 degree process is important to improve any product.
What’s your approach to prioritizing tasks?
To prioritize tasks, I assess the business impact and the efforts to complete a task. I answered it here in my post of engineering manager interview questions.
Why do you want to work at [our company]?
I am really impressed with your services offerings. This is an area of my interest. I believe, I can contribute in this company because <fill in as per the company’s offerings and the candidates’ interest>.
Why do you want to be/what do you love about being a Product Manager?
I love the role of a Product Manager because a product manager has the ownership on the product. This allows me to think of past, present, and future roadmap of a product or its offerings. It is the area where I can apply my diversified experience and interest on engineering, design, and marketing.
How would you prioritize resources when you have two important things to do but can’t do them both?
I use a prioritization exercise to understand the business impact and the efforts on completing a task. I’ll prefer a one that has higher business impact and needs low efforts. If both tasks need same efforts, I will pick the task that has higher business impact.
Describe a scenario which required you to say no to an idea or project.
Saying no is important for a product manager. There was a situation when two stakeholder groups reached out for some new features. The product was in a migration stage. I already published the schedule of a freeze on both new and legacy products. I had to say no to both the new ideas.
How do you decide what and what not to build?
This is based on the prioritization exercise. I use a prioritization exercise to understand the business impact and the efforts on completing a task.
What is a product you currently use every day, why and how would you improve it?
Everyday, I use my online notebook, to take notes. I really love the way it is built. It solves many problems to me because by writing my problems and analyzing solutions to it, I feel in the control of the situation. I like this notebook because it is available everywhere as long as I find the internet. One big limitation on it is that it does not really support handwriting in a way I’d prefer. If I can, I’d like to enable handwriting on it.
There is a data point that indicates that there are more Uber drop-offs at the airport than pick-ups from the airport. Why is this the case and what would you do within the product to change that?
I’d like to understand the data points: how many customers are requesting for a drop-off, what are their pick and drop-off points, what are the charges, etc. For the pick-up, I’d like to understand what are the difficulties for the customers. Is it the location of the pick-up, are charges high for the pick-ups, and other related difficulties. If possible to send the surveys to the pick-up customers, it would be very helpful to understand their survey data about their feedback with the ride. Depending on the survey and non-survey analysis, I’d suggest changes into the product. After the changes, I’d monitor the pick-up counts, to assess the next steps.
How would you improve the functionality 10x of what it is now?
First, understand the as-is situation. Then, understand what does to-be scenario of 10X functionality means. To move from as-is to to-be, plan the steps, resources needs, and draft the timeline. After the plan is finalized, move into the execution.
How would you increase adoption of Google’s Fiber to the Home product?
First, we need to understand the current situation of the adoption. Google Fiber will need to compete with Comcast or similar internet providers. It will be helpful to find out unique features of Good Fibers that are not include in the competitors. We should plan for marketing of it, including special offers to the customers.
What is the key to a good user interface?
The key to a good user interface is simplicity. Other important features are:
- Consistent UI behavior
- Strategic use of colors and layouts
- Use appropriate typography
Reference: https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-interface-design.html
While we make X product for the general public, we also have a B2B division. What is your experience with juggling both markets?
In both the markets, main thing is to solve the problems of the customers. Personas may also be similar. Marketing strategies for both will be different.
Reference: https://www.productplan.com/learn/b2b-versus-b2c-product-management/
How do you know if a product is well designed?
Dieter Rams has created principles for a good design. refer to this page. As per Rams, these are principles of a good design is: innovative, makes product useful, aesthetic, makes a product understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long lasting, thorough down to last detail, environmentally friendly, and minimal.
How would you redesign a product?
To redesign a product, find out the pain points, as-is, and to-be scenario. Start documenting the as-is situation and to-be situation. Do not take anything for granted. Understand the pain points in the current product and the needs to revamp it to a new product. After understand the details, plan for a to-be scenario and its roadmap.
What is one improvement you would implement for our product in the next 6 months?
This depends on the product’s situation. If I am a new join, I’d first spend time in learning details about the product. If there is any feature that I found missing or good to be added, I’d like to request for the assessment of it. If I am already in the team, I’d like to assess the situation as Perth roadmap of the product, to decide what should be added in the next six months.
What is a major challenge our company will face in the next 12-24 months?
yet to answer it
How would you describe our product to someone?
I will begin with a problem that someone can related to the product. Then, I will describe how the product solves the problem.
Suggest a new feature for Amazon. What metrics would you use to measure its success?
I will suggest adding a book library feature to Amazon. It would be different than kindle as it would not be for audio only. To measure the success, I will prepare a roadmap of a launch model and a revenue model. I will track key metrics about revenue /profit tracking. For example, how many users are members, how many members are expected for the profitable model, and related metrics. I will also ensure we track the quality, uptime, and other similar metrics. Some key metrics to measure should be: daily active users, monthly active users, traffic, bounce rate, and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score.
TECHNICAL QUESTIONS:
Our engineering teams are pretty used to employing x methodologies. What is your opinion of them? Have you used them in the past?
I am familiar with agile, waterfall, and kanban methodologies. Depending on the situation, these all methodologies make sense. For example, for any operational continuous kind of an activity, using kanban would make sense. For the rapid releases, agile methodologies will be a good solution. If we know the roadmap of a larger product needs more time to build, waterfall methodology may be used.
What is the importance of engineers and technical teams as stakeholders? How do you integrate them into the overall product vision?
Engineering team is an integral part of the product vision. I prefer engaging them at the time of ideation. Sometimes, engineering team may have a great insight of a feature’s implementation and the alternate solutions to it. If there is a plan to build a product, it’s not possible to come up with a roadmap without involving engineering into it. So, engineering stakeholders are the integral part of the product vision.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT QUESTIONS
What aspects of Product Management do you find the most exciting?
The most exciting part to me is convincing stakeholders towards a common goal. There are many cross-functional stakeholder teams like business, engineering, design, project management, security, compliance, and other teams. To plan and agree to deliver a product with a common goal to serve the customers is exciting and everyone generally is motivated to meet the needs of the customers.
Tell me about a time when you had to build or motivate a team.
There was a situation when I had build a cost-effective and a highly available team at offshore. To build the team at offshore, I inquired the options at multiple countries. It took time to figure out the right place and a right vendor. After that, the next challenge was to train the team on the expected deliverables. It took time to build the team, train the team, and helping team to perform per KPIs. At the end, we built a highly available and a cost-effective team at offshore.
What do you think a day to day would be like for a Product Manager?
Depending on the stage of the product roadmap, there would be different activities. On a daily basis, I typically start my day by monitoring metrics of the customers activities, driving the product roadmap, and strategy discussions for any upcoming changes.
How do you think Product Managers interact with engineers?
I have noticed that Product Managers and engineers discuss the features, changes, issues on a functionality level. A common interaction includes discussions about the priorities of changes, level of efforts on the changes, and clarifying requirements, as needed. I generally have noticed a deep respect between a product manager and a team of engineers.
How would you explain Product Management to a 6-year-old?
I’d describe the process of publishing a book. I’d say image I am ensuring a book is published that kids would like. I’d explain the process of publishing a book, starting from ideation, planned steps (like writing, taking pictures of the book, book editing, printing the book, pricing the book, selling the book, and delivering the book from store to the kid’s hand).
What aspects of product management do you find the least interesting?
I like the activities that are well planned. Working on left over low priority changes are least interesting to me. To manage these left over low priority changes well, I like releasing these in a planned release, instead of an adhoc plan.
Tell me about your role on your team, who else you work with, and how you work with them.
My role in the team is to manage the existing infrastructure of business applications/products. I work with business partners, legal, compliance, security, engineering, design, production support, capital planning teams, data analysts, and other related teams.
Tell me about how you interact with customers/users?
Reference:
Interview questions from https://productschool.com/blog/product-management-2/the-ultimate-list-product-manager-interview-questions/
https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/business/15-key-product-management-metrics-and-kpis/
One Point Ahead 