Best interview questions for your hiring process
Product Manager Interview questions
Product Managers are responsible for the roadmap and strategy of a product as a whole and work towards developing new features that align with the users needs. They work across many different departments and teams, especially researchers, developers and designers.
The main difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner is that managers deal with external stakeholders, and owners only deal with stakeholders inside the organisation.
Some skills to look out for when interviewing product managers:
- Great time management, organisation and communication skills.
- A confident personality, product managers will be presenting new ideas often so they should be comfortable presenting in front of large groups.
Are you searching for an excellent Product Manager? Before conducting your interviews, take a look at our complete product manager interview questions guide to make sure that you’re asking the right questions to attract the best talent.
Please note: Our interview questions are suggestions for the earlier stages of the application process and for candidates with average work experience. They are therefore a little more general.
Interviews naturally breed nerves, so the first part of your interview should aim to make the candidate feel comfortable speaking with you, you’ll get much more information out of them and a better sense of the person they are if they feel like they can trust the environment they are in.
To do this you can ask some fun and interesting questions linked to the role, they should be open-ended and encourage conversation.
For the interview
A positive opener to start
What has your journey been so far?
Why did you decide to go into product management?
Behavioral Questions
What are some of your favourite existing products that inspire you?
In your opinion, what makes a good product design?
Again, there’s no right answer to this one. It should give you an indication of style and knowledge about UX/UI design.
What would you change about our current product?
Some research on your product with some opinions about its current state will display how prepared they are for the interview and what they might do first if they were to join the team.
Soft Skills
Would you feel comfortable presenting new feature ideas to large groups of people?
Will be a common part of the role, a product manager should feel comfortable presenting and have good communication skills.
How do you usually prioritse your work and keep organised when working on several different projects?
Should be able to organise themselves and recognise which project should take priority based on user needs and capacity.
What has been a mistake you’ve made as a product manager and what did you do to solve it?
Gives you an indication of their problem solving skills and the lessoned they have learnt from their past positions.
How do you communicate and keep up to date with external stakeholders?
Product managers will be working with external stakeholders to identify product feature gaps and any requests they might have. It’s important they stay in the loop and are kept up to date.
Hard Skills
When launching a new product or feature, what processes and strategies do you use?
They should have tested processes that work for them, they should talk about working with other teams to coordinate launches.
What technical skills do you have in product that you excel in?
As with all of us, a product manager will be particularly skilled in one or two areas of their role. Either data, research, design, coding, or analytics. Overall they should be well balanced but recognise how their strengths have helped them in the past.
How do you usually determine which features you should add to your product?
Should mention research and analytics, using frameworks to determine users needs, and have a clear strategy for applying feedback and data to create new features.
How do you know if users are satisfied with your product?
A good product manager should be looking for feedback with every feature release and have a process to find out how their users feel about their product with the aim of improving.
Operational / Situational Questions
How would you describe our product to a customer that wanted to use our product, but at a lower price?
This will give you a good understanding of the candidates communication skills, they should be able to speak about the product with a clear amount of research conducted. They should be able to speak about the cost benefit overview.
Can you talk to me about a time where you’ve come up with an experiment around a product metric and tested it?
A good candidate will have used data and research in the past to experiment with different product designs or features.
If you were responsible for creating a dashboard for one of our features, which metrics would you choose to display? (you can pick one of your features for this question).
Should have a good understanding of the common metrics to track and they know the importance of tracking different metrics for different features.
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There’s no right or wrong answer to this one, it should display to you that they have a passion for the role and have a good understanding of the current market.