Type of Questions Asked in Product Management Interviews

If you are planning to crack a product management interview soon, this article would surely find its place in your bookmarks.

In this article, I will talk about different kinds of questions asked in product interviews, why they are asked, popular examples, and best practices to answer them. [+ Bonus questions curated from top companies at the end ?]

Let's begin????

There are 6 major types of questions asked in product management interviews:

1. Product Design/Sense.

2. Strategy.

3. Analytical.

4. Guesstimates.

5. Behavioral, and

6. Technical.

Starting with Product Design Questions:

These questions are asked to assess your product thinking and user empathy skills. You can't effectively operate as a PM without good product-thinking skills.

Some common product design questions asked are:

- What is your favorite product and how would you improve it? (Asked in Google, Meta, and almost all the top companies)

- How would you design a product for a particular audience (refrigerator for kids, elevator for blind)?

- How would you improve X product?

To answer these questions well, make sure you are user-centric, and structured, and do not jump straight to solutions.

Here is a detailed guide on answering these questions.

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Coming to Strategy Questions:

Employers are testing your long-term thinking, problem-solving, and strategic skills.

As a PM you will be a part of many ambitious initiatives, and having a good strategic mindset is an important requirement of such a job.

Some common strategy questions are:?

- Evaluate competitor landscape for DropBox (Asked in Google)

- What would be the strategy for MailChimp to dominate in the crowded marketing tech market (Asked in Mailchimp and Intuit)

- Why is profile completion important for LinkedIn? (Asked in Linkedin)

To answer these questions, make sure you think from all the perspectives, and take into account the about the long term and the second order effects of the decisions.

Frameworks like PESTLE, SWOT, and Porter's 5 Forces are helpful in solving these questions.

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With Analytical Questions:

Employers are testing your ability to measure the outcomes of the initiatives and whether you can take data informed decisions.

Some common Analytical questions are:

- What would be the success metrics for Facebook Events (Asked in Facebook).

- Sales on few Shopify stores have gone down by 30%, what would you do as a PM at Shopify (Asked in Shopify).

- Monthly Active Users are going down on Instagram, what would be your strategy as a PM for growth? (Asked in Adobe).

To answer these questions learn to break down features into users journeys, and assign metrics for the same. For metric growth or de-growth questions doing a root cause analysis is helpful.

Here is how to do a root cause analysis.

Here is how product analytics tools work.

Here is how to find the success metrics for any product.

Now coming to Guesstimates Questions:

These questions are asked to assess your ability to solve ambiguous problems and understand if you can do basic product management tasks like market size estimation, impact of a feature etc.

Some common product design questions asked are:

- How many units of microwaves are currently being used in India? What will the growth in microwave sales next year in India? (asked in MakeMyTrip)

- Estimated number of Uber rides in Bangalore? (asked in Flipkart)

- What would be the market size of driverless cars in 2030?

To answer these questions well, make sure you understand the problem well, create an equation, find unknown and known numbers in the equation, and then put your assumptions. Doing a sanity test in the end is also essential.

Here is a detailed guide on answering guesstimate questions (with 3 examples).

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In Behavioral Questions

Employers are looking to know about your personality, ability to deal with different kind of situation and general work ethic. They are important and are common across every company.

Behavioral questions are a staple of product management interviews as they help companies understand how a candidate might handle real-world scenarios based on their past experiences

Some common behavioral questions are:

- Tell me about a time when you failed. What did you learn from that experience?

- Can you give an example of a challenging product decision you made and how you arrived at it?

- How do you manage a team in the event of changing priorities from the leadership?

To answer these questions, make sure you make yourself clear in communication, and showcase a growth mindset.

You should use STAR method to clearly articulate your answers, and read about Amazon's leadership principles to showcase a great professional mindset.

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Now comes the Technical Questions:

If you are someone coming from a non-tech background, technical questions could be a bit overwhelming for you.

However understand that if you are looking to work with a tech company, you are supposed to have at least a basic tech understanding to solve problems and better collaborate with the developers.

Common tech questions asked in product management interview are:

1. Questions about basic tech terminology like APIs, SQL, System Design, Cloud etc. (Check out our Tech for PMs program to learn all these live, from top product experts).

2. Questions about explaining tech concepts to non tech people (How would you explain an API to a 5 year old, How would you explain SQL to your grandma)?

3. Tech behavioral questions: To understand how well can you work with developers (How would you estimate the timeline for a feature, how would you manage technical debt).

4. Questions related to tech stack of the current company or your previous companies: To answer these questions make sure you read a bit about the tech stacks of the company you are interviewing with and the companies mentioned in your resume.

Now, these were the common types of questions asked in product management interviews. I hope you make the best use of this information and get your dream PM job soon!

P.S. (?? Bonus & a Request) Did you find this article helpful??

Please let me know on a scale of 1 (not helpful) to 5 (most helpful) in comments and get my personally curated list of 50+ questions askedin top product companies like Microsoft, Uber, Google, Flipkart, Adobe and more.

P.P.S. I am building HelloPM: A community where product managers thrive. Do check out https://hellopm.co if you are looking to learn practical product management from top industry leaders ?

Best of luck and never stop learning.

~ Ankit Shukla