Mark Eriksson of Mind the Product defined product management as being at the intersection of UX, Tech and Business. Josh Elman of Greylock Partners defined a product manager as someone who helps their team and their company ship the right product to users.
This mix of hard and soft skills, heavily focused on product sense and design, strategy, business acumen, ability to estimate and size impact, and the skills to prioritise, communicate and execute is what product management interviews seek to test for. You may be asked questions as far ranging as ‘Tell me about a time you managed a difficult stakeholder’ and ‘Imagine you’re Google’s CEO. What’s your plan for the next 10 years?’.
In this article we’ll take you through how you can approach answering common product manager interview questions, from how to approach any question to how to structure and effectively answer all manner of product manager interview question types.
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How to answer any question
“The worst thing that you can do is panic when you have a question that you’re not anticipating, followed by when you’re not really sure how to answer, go into an answer and start waffling. Even worse than that is when someone just continues on and on and on and on and repeats themselves and then the answer is left on a cliffhanger at the end or the interviewer has to interrupt to bring it to a close.”
– Caroline Clark at Caroline Clark Coaching
We’ve all had that terrifying moment where we’ve just been asked a question in interview, and we realise that either we didn’t hear all the question because it made us so nervous, or it’s one to which we have no idea how to answer …
DON’T PANIC.
You can still look good here and present your best self. A good interview will stretch you, so this shouldn’t come as a shock. The following tactics will help you respond in the best way when you feel stretched :
- Listen intently and pause before answering
- Don’t be afraid to say what you don’t know
- Practice in advance to get comfortable
Let’s run through each of these in more detail
Listen intently and pause before answering
Whilst the interviewer is speaking: pay attention! Not just to what they are saying, but how they say it and what their body language is. Some people like to take notes as well, as this keeps them focused and calm. Once questions come to a conclusion, get comfortable with silence. Take a moment to think. Don’t be afraid to ask clarifying questions about the initial question. Jot down key details and your thoughts.
“Take your time to collect your thoughts about it. It’s okay if there’s a pause. If there’s a silence, you can prime that by saying, ‘I just need a few minutes to think about how I’m going to respond to this’ in order to manage the interviewer and the moment of silence. Write down some notes to try and be structured. Then engage with the question.”
– Caroline Clark at Caroline Clark Coaching
Similarly you may receive feedback during the interview that you’re off track, or new information may come to light. Don’t be afraid to iterate.
Check in with the interviewer routinely to ensure you’re going in the right direction. Conclude your answer with a summary to make it clear you’re reached the end and remind them what you have said.
Using an interview framework can help keep structure and ensure you don’t miss key details
Don’t be afraid to say what you don’t know
If you’re asked a question about something you know nothing about, it’s absolutely fine (and preferable) to demonstrate ignorance. However you should be always trying to keep the conversation moving and demonstrate you are prepared to tackle the question, rather than ending in a roadblock.
“Let’s say you are asked to improve the product TaskRabbit. And let’s say you have never used TaskRabbit. Be willing to admit that, be willing to say, hey, I’ve never used TaskRabbit. I’ll not be able to talk about what they have done in the past, or what they’re currently doing, however, I do know that it is a marketplace for gig workers, and so if you wish, I can approach this question from a first principles’ perspective about how I might build a marketplace for gig workers if I was to build one today…”
– Shipra Malhotra, ex YouTube (Webinar: Unwritten Norms in PM Interviews)
Practise in advance to get comfortable
Getting match fit is key, and it can only be done via exercising your interview muscles. You can apply for a bunch of jobs and exercise them in public in interviews, or you can practise.
Some people practise by interviewing a lot, all the time – which can be a great approach to networking and staying on top of the market. However if you are in application processes you’re keen to win and you haven’t been interviewing all year, then the next best thing is to:
- Tap your PM network and arrange a partnership whereby a fellow PM does mock interviews with you. Build in feedback time, and self critique if you can by recording the session and watching yourself back. Google meets provides this for free, including a transcript functionality.
- Source interview partners in community groups, if you don’t have willing peers in the PM community, such as Product School and Women in Product. There’s additionally interview focused groups at Exponent, PMExercises, IGotAnOffer, and Lewis C. Lin’s Interview Community.
- Figure out the benchmark and what the experience might be like via watching mock interviews online: Product Alliance, RocketBlocks, Exponent and Diego Granados all have great examples. Pause the video and have a shot at answering the question.
- For behavioural interviews anyone willing in your network can help you prepare – so spend the time with the PM friend on the specific PM questions and spend time with someone else (flatmate, partner, friend, colleague) on behavioural questions.
Seven types of question come up commonly in product management interviews:
- Career narrative – questions about your CV, previous roles and future aspirations
- Product sense – questions about what you would build and why
- Product strategy – questions to test your commercial understanding
- Metrics – questions that test your analytical fluency
- Favourite products – questions that test your industry awareness and intuition
- Behavioural questions – questions about times when you’ve shown certain behaviour
- Prepared case studies – when you have a take-home task you need to prepare
Career narrative
“..the first thing that I think about when I think about acing interviews is making sure someone has got their personal historical narrative down. Most interviews start the same way with an informal introduction at the beginning. It doesn’t have to be anything groundbreaking or particularly long. But usually, those icebreakers are a very good way to say, Hey, this is me. Just a very quick overview and just having that down and practised, is a great way to help settle the nerves. That introduction is always going to happen and you don’t want it to be too long: max a couple of minutes. Any longer people are going to be dropping off and not interested.”
– Miles Cunliffe, Founder of Fresh
People ask you about your past career for a few reasons
- Get a feel for you as a person: how you describe your experiences gives them an insight into your personality
- Information: having read your resume or CV they’ll have questions about your past experiences, company choices or gaps on your CV. Additionally talking through past experiences is a chance to uncover information about their roles which doesn’t sing from the CV, and often when people talk about themselves, the big ‘so what’ or big learning from each job is narrated in a clearer and more compelling manner than is achievable within the CV format.
- Matching: do you match the role and job description and does that come across in your narrative.
How you describe yourself can convince an interviewer that you’re perfect for the role or see off any obvious questions they might have about you at the onset, so that no time is wasted on them in the interview. Performing a role mapping exercise can assist you to do that well and has the added benefit of mirroring their needs.
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When you’re talking through your career, you want to be able to describe specific jobs in detail, as well as place the role you’re applying for within your overall career trajectory. We’d recommend practising a ‘teaser’ version which presents your career highlights, and then being ready to dive into the details.
Your teaser needs to be short (under 2 minutes), and it should really be no more than a few bullets which distil you down into a swift summary which feels relevant to the role. It’s always tempting to want to tell the interviewer absolutely everything about you and what makes you great, but much like your CV – here you’re just trying to get their interest. The interviewer will ask follow up questions if they want to.
A good structure for your career teaser is:
- Arc: Your overall career shape and trajectory
- Pitch: What you uniquely bring to the table; the one professional thing they should remember
- Match: Why you are a great fit for the role you are interviewing for, and how it fits into your career arc
Example
PM interviewing for a Senior Growth PM role at a sustainable fashion e-commerce business
Arc: I have 5 years experience in product management – I started as an APM in 2018 after 4 years in marketing. I’ve been a product manager at [my current company] since 2020 and am now looking to move into Snr PM role at a business with sustainability at its heart.
Pitch: I’ve worked across revenue, conversion and organic growth teams for [Company A], which is a marketplace business selling household products from over 10k suppliers. My past experience in marketing means that I’m very analytical, and work well with marketing on cross-functional growth initiatives.
Match: I’m really interested in moving into [Your Green Product ecommerce business] due to the mission while thinking my growth experience is highly relevant because of the similarities between B2C marketplace and e-commerce growth strategies. I’ve been working as a Senior PM for the past 6 months and am expecting to have that recognised in the next promotion next cycle, so stepping into a Snr PM role feels like a natural move for me.
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Tips
Get the basics right
Remember to be comfortable with the dates you started and ended jobs, and be able to explain what the companies did, how many people worked there when you worked there, and how the teams were structured. Saying things like ‘I think it was 2017….’ doesn’t come across as professional.
Make it clear and include salient details
You shouldn’t assume that everyone has heard of the companies you’ve worked for or that they have had more than a quick glance at your CV. Say it again. Explain what the company did.
Example:
“I worked at Company A from 2017 to 2019 as an APM, before being promoted to Product Manager in March 2019. As an APM I was supporting a senior product manager on the Revenue Team, but as PM I stepped up onto my own team, which was the CVR team.
Company A was a SaaS company doing about $50m in ARR selling licences to designers for design software. We were headquartered in the Netherlands, about 8 years old and had a total headcount of 110 .“
Prepare for any obvious questions
Maybe you’ve been unfortunate enough to have 2 roles which were under 1 year because the company ran out of funding or the founder decided on a radical restructure. Maybe you took some time off for a sabbatical or to care for family members. As long as you’ve got a clear explanation, this shouldn’t matter at all. Explain why, keeping it brief and factual. Most importantly avoid negative remarks, and make sure you come across as “running towards” the role you’re applying for, rather than “running away” from a bad situation.
Variants
Career narrative questions can be phrased in different ways, and whilst you always want to listen and answer the question actually asked, this sort of approach can be useful when answering the following questions:
- “Why don’t you give me a run down of your CV.”
- “Why did you leave your last job?”
- “Why are you here [applying for this job]?”
Product Sense
Product sense questions aim to understand how you think about products, and what you understand the product management role involves. They might come as theoretical case studies, questions about your favourite product or what you’ve done in the past on real products. Interviewers here are trying to understand how you will perform day-to-day as a product manager at their company.
It’s tempting to prep for these sorts of questions with a specific framework in mind. This can be helpful to make sure you don’t forget anything under pressure, and cover all the main bases – we’ll go through a framework we think is helpful below – just be careful not to turn into a framework robot. There are no substitutes for doing the thinking and connecting with the interviewer.
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Variants
Common formats for this question include:
- What’s your favourite product? How would you improve it?
- How would you improve [product you’re applying to work on]?
- Tell me about a time you delivered impact in your current role?
- How would you improve [customer journey]?
- You’re CEO of Netflix, what’s your strategy for the next 10 years?
- How would you revolutionise [X industry]?
How to answer
Each of these questions is effectively another way of getting you to run through the product development cycle:
What they are looking for is your ability to navigate uncertainty and explain:
- The business value you want to create
- The user problem you need to solve
- The solution you think is best
We recommend the following framework to help you answer these sorts of questions:
- Foundation
- Needs
- Solution
- Conclusion
Get our interview prep flash cards here 1. Foundation
This is where you check that you’ve understood the question correctly, and define the outcome you’re looking for. There are two halves to it: Context and Definition of Success.
Context
Before you start answering the question, you need to make sure that you’ve completely understood what you are being asked. Think about:
- Clarify – Are there any ambiguous terms you’re unsure of? Do you know what success looks like?
- Constraints – Do you have one engineer? Do you have infinite money? Do you have only 1 month?
- Context – Do you understand the product / feature / journey. Ask any questions you need to now. You’ll quickly come unstuck if you bluff.
Definition of success
Once you’ve asked any clarifying questions, you’ll want to restate the question in your own words to confirm that you’ve understood the task correctly. Ideally you do this by stating:
- Vision – a qualitative and inspiring definition of success
- Metric – a quantitative measure that will tell you if you’ve been successful
Example:
Vision: So I think our vision here is to transform the travel industry.
Metric: We’ll know if we’ve done that by tracking the number of nights booked.
2. Needs
This is where you work out which problem you are focusing on. Again, it makes sense to tackle this in two steps: audience and prioritization.
Audience
Here you want to identify the key persona you are solving for. Usually the best why to do this is to list out their wants and needs. Don’t worry about adding demographic or other information. Just get a list of 4-6 statements starting:
Example
So we’re focusing on families who are travelling here, and I think their key needs are going to be:
* I want low costs
* I want a stress-free holiday
* I want to feel safe
* I want entertainment for different ages
Prioritize
Once you’ve generated a list of needs that you could solve, you need to focus on ONE need in particular to focus on. As you select one, bear in mind:
- How it relates to your definition of success
- How severe the need is for your audience
- How common the need is for your audience
- Your ability to solve it in a unique and compelling way
As you can see, if you haven’t generated multiple different needs that could potentially be solved, you won’t be able to prioritize one here, and you’ll miss a key step in your reasoning.
3. Solution
Now that you’ve decided on one need that you’re going to focus on, you need to decide on the solution that you’ll build. Again, break this down into two steps, generating options, and then prioritizing one of them.
Brainstorm
Here you want to come up with 4-6 ideas for solutions that could solve the problem you’ve decided to focus on. Don’t be afraid to take some time to think in silence before you list them out. Again, you’ll want to list multiple solutions so that you can prioritise between them. Beyond that, listing several options will expand your thinking and create a better conversation with the interviewer.
Prioritize
Mirroring the section on selecting a single user need, you’ll now want to select a single solution to focus on. Think about the criteria that you’ll use to assess your list of options, such as:
- How compelling and innovative a solution it is
- How much effort it will take to build
- What proportion of users will benefit from it
- How confident you are that it’s a good idea
Once you’ve identified your prioritization criteria, make your recommendation of which is the best solution you’ve thought of. This should be the solution that maximises the impact and progress you’ll make towards your definition of success, given the constraints you’ve been given.
4. Conclusion
You’ve now selected a single solution to achieve the business objective you started with. Make you recommendation and summarise the decisions you made along the way (prioritising needs and solutions) that got you here.
See how the interviewer reacts, and if they provide feedback, be ready to adapt your answer in light of this.
Product Strategy
These are designed to test if you can set out a logical and credible vision and if you have business sense alongside product sense.
Big picture examples of these types of questions would be:
- Imagine you’re the CEO of Netflix [or company X]. What is your strategy for the next ten years?
- How would you revolutionise or solve [industry or space or problem]?
In order to answer a strategy question effectively, it’s key to break down and structure your question well. You can take many of the learnings from the product sense framework into this exercise as well. Having clarified the purpose, constraints and gathered any necessary context around the question, we recommend the following structure, which you can find in more detail here:
However some questions will be more granular and drill into specific GTM or growth strategies, such as growth, market entry questions, monetisation or pricing questions. Examples include:
- How can Airbnb increase their bookings?
- What’s the best GTM (go-to-market) strategy for Amazon grocery stores?
For these it can be useful for use the below framework from Lenny to structure your response, loosely based on the Minto Pyramid principle:
- What is the current situation?
- What is the complication?
- What is the solution?
- How do we achieve this solution?
Here’s an example of how it might look in practice:
‘Improve the monetisation rate of Hustle Badger.’
- What is the current situation? Hustle Badger currently monetises via paid for email subscriptions, i.e. the Substack model. The business would like to double the monetisation rate with the aim of doubling revenue per user.
- What is the complication? Hustle Badger currently monetises at the benchmark for paid email subscriptions, i.e. it monetises well for the business model, so there are limited gains to be made via optimising the existing product.
- What is the solution? Hustle Badger could add additional products which increase the value of the service to the user.
- How do we achieve the solution? We can explore user needs to understand which additional products or features that might change the fundamental monetisation rate might be appealing to them. Additionally we could explore whether improving the monetisation rate of Hustle Badger is the right growth question, and whether strategies aimed at increasing traffic to site or designing viral growth loops would result in the same outcome (2x increase in revenue).
Metrics
The third category of questions you’ll likely come across in PM interviews are product metrics questions. These typically ask you for one of two things:
- Estimate the size of an opportunity
- Pick a key metric to measure success
Both of these questions not only test your analytical understanding, but they also give interviewers a good read on how you tackle problems, how you think logically, and how good you are at explaining your thinking to others.
Let’s run through ways to approach both these questions.
Estimating opportunity size
This is a classic interview question that lots of interviewers like. A typical example might go look something like “How many traffic lights are there in the US?”.
You’re not being judged on whether your answer is correct. You’re being judged on whether you can break down the problem into manageable chunks, deal with it in a logical way, and explain what you are doing.
We’d suggest approaching the problem like this:
- Clarify the question: Make sure you understand what’s being asked. If you need to, ask follow up questions to get more context.
- Define your assumptions: State your assumptions clearly. For instance, if you are estimating the average number of traffic lights per intersection, or the average number of intersections in a city then state very clearly these are assumptions.
- Break down the problem: Segment the problem into smaller, more manageable parts. For the traffic light question, you might consider different types of areas (urban, suburban, rural) and estimate separately for each.
- Use known benchmarks: If you know any relevant data points (e.g., the number of intersections in a specific city), use these as benchmarks to extrapolate. If you don’t have any benchmarks to use, try to estimate these numbers to the nearest order of magnitude (e.g. is it 1k / 10k / 100k)
- Do the math: Having estimated the inputs for each of chunks you’ve broken the problem into, run the maths to calculate what the total is for each segment and the answer overall. Show your work step-by-step, and don’t be afraid to write stuff down if it helps.
- Sense check things: At this point, it’s a good idea to reflect on whether your final number seems reasonable. In the back of your mind think what would be a unreasonably high number (e.g. 3 trillion) or unreasonably low number (e.g. 10,000) and check you’re within these limits.
- Present your answer: Now you can explain your answer to the interviewer, walking them through your thought process, assumptions, and calculations if you didn’t do this as you went along.
- Show flexibility: Be open to feedback and ready to adjust your approach if the interviewer provides new information or suggests a different angle.
You can practice these sorts of question with a friend until you’re comfortable with the overall flow.
Picking a success metric
The second type of metrics question that’s common is when you’re asked what a good metric would be to measure the success of something. For example:
- What would you set as a Northstar metric for this team?
- How would you tell if your feature was successful?
- What metrics should the team have on it’s dashboard?
In this case, we’d recommend thinking through the following steps:
1. Objective
What is the overall objective you’re trying to measure? How do you define success? Are you trying to measure revenue or user satisfaction? Often it’s easier to describe the outcome you want qualitatively before you try to define it quantitatively.
2. Actions
What decisions will you make based on this metric? Why is it important? Is this something that team success will be judged on? Is it a dashboard you’ll be checking regularly? Think of the metric as a tool to help you make decisions and take action. By working out the types of actions you might take, you’ll get an idea of the sort of information you’ll want to make those decisions.
3. Level
Do you want a leading or lagging metric? What are the high and lower order metrics you could choose? Generally higher order metrics (e.g. revenue, new users) are valued more by the business, but are less responsive than the lower order metrics (e.g. number of searches a user makes, number of notifications they get) that drive them. Which are you more interested in? Being responsive, or being correlated to impact? You’ll probably need to make a (reasoned) trade off here.
4. Timeframe
Now that you’ve chosen a metric, what period will you measure it over? Do you want a daily figure or a weekly average? Longer time frames will smooth out daily fluctuations, but be less responsive. Again you’ll need to make a trade off here.
Example
Question: “What should the northstar metric for the Growth team be?”
Answer: “OK, so we’ve talked about how in this case the Growth team will be responsible for driving new user numbers as that drives future revenue, so really what we want is a metric that measures that. [Objective]
Now you said this was a northstar metric, so I’m assuming the team will be using this to prioritise different items on the backlog, and maybe assess whether features have been successful longer term. [Actions].
I think on that basis that we’ll want something fairly high level, a close driver of revenue. So maybe something like activation rate rather than just number of new users. If we used number of new users then we’d be open to problems where we got loads of poor quality users in. So let’s take activation rate, which we previously discussed might be defined as users making 3 searches. [Level]
And I imagine that as this is a Growth team, we’re planning on running lots of experiments, so we’ll want something fairly responsive. Perhaps we could measure activation rate on a weekly basis, so we can see movement quickly, but remove any variation we see between weekdays and weekends, etc. [Timeframe]
Overall, I’d recommend using Weekly Activation Rate as the northstar, defined as the absolute number of new users joining the platform and making 3 searches in the past 7 days.
As you work through this process, you might want to think about the following factors:
- What are the alternatives further up or further down the funnel?
- Do you want a relative or absolute measure? (e.g. 90% or 90k)
- What is an appropriate time period to choose?
- What are the limitations of this metric?
- What health metrics might you choose?
It’s a good idea to think these through out loud, so that the interviewer can understand all the different angles you are thinking about this from.
AARRR metrics
Generally you won’t need to know industry specific metrics, but if you’re struggling to think through the main metrics and alternatives that you might consider, then “pirate” AARRR metrics are a good place to start, and describe in general terms how users become more engaged as they move down the funnel towards purchase:
- Acquisition – New people coming to your product
- Activation – People interacting meaningfully with your product once
- Retention – People interacting meaningfully with your product on a regular basis
- Revenue – People paying for your product
- Referral – People bringing in other new users
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Favourite product and trends questions
As a product manager you’re expected to be enthusiastic about product of all sorts and be on top of industry trends.
Be prepared to be asked ‘What is your favourite product?’ and ‘How would you improve your favourite product?’. It’s better to have thought these through in advance and have jotted down some thoughts than it is to work through them on the fly.
Finally you might occasionally get some questions about landscape trends and how the industry might change in the next ten years. Remember the mobile platform shift? Remember AI? Remember blockchain? This is the really big idea stuff. You can find clues to what’s likely to happen by reading TechCrunch, the Verge, or checking out what the FAANG CEOs are talking about. Jot down some crazy ideas. Have a decent blue sky think and do it in advance of interviewing as answering this one on the fly can go particularly poorly. The point is not whether you’re right but to demonstrate that you’re engaged with the industry and can reason coherently.
Behavioural questions
Behavioural interviewing is an interviewing technique where candidates are asked to describe a professional experience or example from the past in order to reveal to the interviewer how they approach certain types of situations, with the logic of revealing how they might approach similar questions in future.
Examples of common behavioural interview questions for product managers include:
- Tell me about a time where you managed a difficult stakeholder. What happened? What would you have done differently?
- Tell me about a time where you used data to influence a decision.
- Tell me about the most successful / least successful product you ever managed? What made it successful / fail?
- Tell me about the last feature you shipped. Why did you decide to build it? What was the outcome?
- Tell me about a time when you were wrong.
There are an endless number of possible behavioural interview questions (our Amazon interview guide has 92) but the most common ones test:
- Failure – How you have responded to challenges, and learned from your mistakes. Whether you are self-conscious and humble.
- Collaboration – How you’ve persuaded people around you with data and story telling. When you’ve disagreed and committed to things that needed to happen.
- Strategy – How you break down complex problems, investigate possible courses of action and manage risk.
- Impact – How you drive business results, and think in commercial terms.
- Execution – How you approach getting things done. What processes and behaviours you use to act yourself and coordinate others.
Thinking through moments in your career where you can demonstrate behaviours which align to those 5 themes should cover you in the majority of cases.
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STAR Framework
Having got your examples ready, the next step is to ensure your answer is well structured, clear, and comprehensible to your interviewer.
The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a great framework for this purpose.
- Situation – You give some context for the story you are about to tell. Which company you were at, the team structure, other key people involved and constraints you had to work within
- Task – What you were trying to achieve. The objective you had been set.
- Action – What you did to achieve your goal. This could include obstacles that you had to overcome and how your plans evolved over time.
- Result – The outcome that your actions had. How you achieved your goal (or not!). If you can back this up with quantified results (e.g. we increase conversion rate 10%) then this is particularly persuasive.
Example:
Question:Tell me about a time when you resolved a conflict
Situation: In my previous role as PM at [company], my team was working very closely with the marketing team. When I inherited the team there was a lot of tension between them, because the engineers in my team wanted to focus on quality and scalability, while marketing was pushing for features they could include in marketing campaigns.
Task: I knew that there were targets we had to hit on platform reliability, but I also knew that the marketing team was struggling to hit its revenue numbers, and I thought there was a way we could help.
Action: I organized a joint meeting between the two teams as we started the next quarter’s planning cycle. I began by acknowledging each team’s concerns and emphasizing our shared goal of creating a successful product. Then, I facilitated a brainstorming session where everyone could propose the features that they felt were most important. We then scored the ideas together based on technical feasibility, revenue impact and the confidence we had in them.
Result: The result of this joint planning session was that everyone was bought into the backlog for the next quarter. There were technical things we wouldn’t do because there was no commercial benefit, and marketing ideas that were too complex technically to deliver on. But there were also plenty of ideas that would increase our platform robustness and deliver business impact. We not only reduced our downtime by 30% that quarter but we also increased revenue 10%.
Don’t make your answer longer than about 3-5 minutes – the interviewer will ask follow up questions where they are interested in more detail.
You can also prepare for these questions by doing a behavioural mapping exercise, whereby you map your experiences to this format.
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Prepared Case Studies
The final category of question that you’re likely to come across in PM interviews are case studies or workshops where you need to prepare something in advance. These will typically come later in the interview process, as they require significant amounts of time to prepare well for.
Again, the idea behind them is to understand how you’ll perform in role, and having you talk through a prepared document can give everyone a much clearer idea of how you work than a purely verbal interview.
Typical questions would include:
- How can we improve [X part of our product]?
- How would you think about a product strategy for [team you’ll be joining]?
- Talk us through a case study of a time you’ve delivered impact in the past.
When answering these questions, bear in mind:
- Don’t half-ass it – This is probably the final or penultimate stage, and your chance of getting the job by this point is likely 1 in 3 or better. The hiring manager wants you to succeed by this point; they want to fill they role they are hiring for. This is the time to do your best work to seal an offer, not to do things by halves.
- Test your enthusiasm – Putting in the work to prepare a presentation is a great test of how enthusiastic you are about the role. If you’re excited, then it shouldn’t be a problem to put in a day’s work. If you’re struggling to find the motivation to do this, then that’s a good indicator that maybe the role isn’t for you.
- Make it personal – It’s hard to beat authentic enthusiasm for a job, so if this is your dream job then go the extra mile. Find some real customers to speak to. Go through the purchase flow and buy something. Hirers know that if you’re dead keen for a role that will carry you through a lot of other obstacles.
- Showcase your work – Interpret whatever is set as a question broadly. You need to answer it, of course, but the purpose of the interview is to showcase your experience and capabilities, so if necessary bend the task to cover the areas you want to talk about.
- Make it T-shaped – It’s likely that you won’t have time to go into as much detail as you’d like to in every area that your presentation covers. Here a good approach is to cover everything to some degree, and then go really deep in one or two areas. This allows you to show that you’re both broad and deep. Be explicit if you’re taking this approach, so the interviewers appreciate you could go deep everywhere if you wanted to.
- Prep in prior interviews – If you know there’s a case study at the end of the interview process, then use the meetings before that to gather more context. This will allow you to make better assumptions and address concerns and hot topics that you know people who will be assessing you have.
- Fit the presentation time, not the prep time – You might be given a time limit for completing the assignment, but again, it’s worth going the extra mile and doing more work than that to get the job if you need to. Use the amount of time you’ve got to present your work as a guide on how much content you need. If you’ve only got 20 mins then 10-12 slides is probably enough (or equivalent in Notion / Miro / Word… format won’t matter). If you’re presenting for an hour then you’ll need a lot more content.
- Treat it as day 1 – The best candidates don’t treat case studies as a hoop that needs jumping through, but day 1 of them on the job. When you think of the meeting in this way, it makes for a much more natural conversation, as well as setting up your relationships with the other people in the room – people who will no doubt be key stakeholders if you get the job.
These principles hold true whether you are interviewing for a PM role or a CPO role. But if you are interviewing for a leadership position then it’s worth emphasising some of the points:
- There’s no “right” answer for these sorts of product management case studies – the ‘JTBD’ (job to be done) here is to demonstrate to CEOs that you can take some mental load off them. The problem that CEOs want solved is that they want to see a return on their investment in technology, so you need to lay out step-by-step how you can do that by showing you’re a strategic, practical thinker.
- Take whatever is set as a product management case study as a suggestion, rather than as a strict question that you can only answer within the guidelines. You are positioning yourself as the most experienced, capable person in the company at product – a great outcome is if you can teach people in the room something new (be careful not to patronise them though!). So if the task doesn’t let you demonstrate the experience and capabilities you bring to the table, adapt it to cover the areas you need it to.
- Treat the slides and the learning points that you put together for product management case studies as opportunities for discussion, and not a presentation. Encourage questions throughout product management case studies, and get their minds going. The more that the interviewers talk and engage, the better impression they’ll have of you walking away.
- In the discussion you are role playing a colleague. It can be useful to (diplomatically) challenge the existing team to see how they respond. You’ll often pick up a lot about how they interact from who answers the question, and how. Product management case studies should be seen as a two-way street: it’s not only their opportunity to learn about you, it’s also your best opportunity to learn about them.
You can get even more advice on how to nail your job interview presentation in The Product Experience episode with Ed Biden (Hustle Badger founder) and find examples of leadership case studies here.
Asking questions
“I think you can have a bad interview and in the last 15 minutes of Q&A, save the whole thing. If you ask smart questions, that really puts the interviewer in a different place, giving them a completely different perspective and view on you versus the other 10 candidates who interview.” – Zach Nicholson at Wave Talent
Interviewers will usually give you some time to ask them questions at the end of the interview – it is of course a two way process. Whilst you shouldn’t ask questions for the sake of asking questions – interviewers will sense this and may get annoyed that you’re wasting their time – it would be strange if you were really engaged in the process and didn’t have genuine questions about the company, product or role.
If you’ve done the job mapping exercise, this will likely throw up a lot of questions that you want to ask. And if you know there’s a presentation in the final stages of the process, you’ll want to use this time to get as much context as possible.
But with all that said, here are a few example questions to get you going:
Team
- What are the team working on right now?
- What are the biggest problems the team are struggling with right now?
- If i joined, what would I be working on in the first quarter?
Company
- What competitor threats are you facing?
- What is top of mind for the founders / C-suite at the moment?
- How do you see the business scaling in the next year?
Culture
- What’s the biggest thing which is holding you back right now?
- What do you like about working here?
- What do you think needs to be changed to succeed?
Other suggestions:
- Tailor your questions to the audience: ask design questions to the design lead, and so on
- Reflect on your own ambitions: what your values are and what matters to you and try to dig into those areas
- Ask more questions if you need to: if you are offered a job you can always “reverse interview” the company and ask to speak to more people there to understand what it’s like. They will be keen to close you.
Get the Hustle Badger Interview Question Framework Flashcards: Google Slides
Create a FREE account to access our Interview Question Framework Flashcards (Google Slides)
Summary
Knowing how to deploy techniques like clarifying questions and being able to structure your responses in a format which matches the question type can assist in acing interviews. It’s important to get comfortable with interviewing as a technique, actively listen to questions and pause and structure your responses.
Frameworks can help you work through cases or questions effectively, but remember not to deploy them robotically – get comfortable with them through practice and it will come naturally in the moment. If it doesn’t pause, ask the interviewer for a moment and jot down your ideas before you talk. Simply practising and preparing for interviews will improve your performance. Good luck.
With thanks to Zach Nicholson at Wave Talent, Miles Cunliffe at Fresh, Caroline Clark at Caroline Clark Coaching for their insights
Hustle Badger Resources
Articles
Templates
Create a FREE account to access the following templates:
* Interview cheatsheet; job mapping; behavioural interview experience template
* Common Product Manager Interview Questions Framework Flashcards
Other Resources
FAQs
How to answer interview questions?
In figuring out how to answer interview questions there’s a technique that you can apply in almost every scenario. While the interviewer is asking the question, actively listen, and write down what they are saying. Playback the question to the interviewer. They will likely rephrase it which will make it clearer it for you and give you more context.
Then ask clarifying questions about the question. The interviewer is primarily interested in how you think, and secondarily interested in answers, so don’t feel like you can’t do this. Equally well take the signal if they’d like you to move into answering. Pause for a moment and structure your thoughts. A pad and paper can hugely assist here. Start walking through your answer, checking in with the interviewer if you’re on the right track. Finally summarise your answer and remind the interviewer what you’ve discussed.
What questions to ask in interview?
If you complete a role mapping exercise, you’ll find that the detailed exercise of going through the role description, skills and responsibilities will throw up many questions. However other great general questions to ask are: ‘What are the greatest challenges the team are facing right now?’, ‘If I joined, what would I be working on for the first 3 months?’ and ‘What do you like about working here, and conversely, what do you think needs to be changed?’.
How to send a thank you note after interview?
Interviews are a great way to meet people for the long term as well as a way to get a job. Connect with your interviewer on Linkedin. It’s less intrusive than an email to their inbox, but just as effective and also a better long term strategy. Add a simple note to the connection request, something along the lines of ‘Thank you for your time today, it was a pleasure to meet you. I enjoyed our conversation. All the best [YOUR NAME].’ This is unthreatening, undemanding and polite. If possible when scheduling your interviews, try to make sure you have some time after the interview to complete tasks like this.
