Cracking the Prioritization Interview Question (Product Management)
An essential part of being product manager is prioritization. That’s why companies love asking prioritization questions: to assess how you think and create a process around managing the tasks of your team. Here is one quick and easy way I structure my answers during interviews.
Understand the objectives
As a PM, I always like to understand what the goals are to anything before I start. This gives me a clear path and a “north star” so that I know where to anchor my answers. You can ask the interviewer what the company or team wants to achieve or if they cannot provide them for you, make assumptions and state them verbally. Some questions you can ask yourself (out loud) or the interviewer are:
- What is the goal we are trying to achieve with this initiative?
- How does it align with the company mission?
Having clear goals from the beginning allows you to set a reference point for all of the solutions you create in the next steps.
Use a prioritization framework
Now that you’ve established the objectives, you may now talk about how you will analyze the options provided to you. You will have to demonstrate that you are not prioritizing based on gut feelings, but based on actual criteria that you have set that targets your goals.
There are several prioritization frameworks that I like to use depending on the situation. There is no rule of which one to use, you can even mix and match some of the existing frameworks (this also happens a ton in real life). Here are some of my favorites:
- Moscow Framework (Must have, should have, could have, will not have)
The MoSCoW framework provides an analysis of tasks/ features that you can categorize in 4 buckets: must haves, should haves, could haves, and will not haves.
Must have: Items that are vital for the product/ team’s success
Should have: Items that add value but are not crucial
Could have: Items that are nice to haves, but do not add significant value
Will not have: Items that are not important at the moment but could be revisited in the future
Based on this criteria, you can put the items into the categories and describe why. This way, your recruiter knows your rationale behind every step you are taking.
2. Impact, Urgency, Cost
This framework scores the options based on three things:
Impact: How does this impact the product’s users? Will this increase user engagement or any other user objectives?
Urgency: How fast do we need to build/ fix it?
Cost: How much will it cost to build? (This can be measured through the number of engineering resources needed, for example).
Measuring the items using impact, urgency and cost is another great way to prioritize. As a PM, this is what I use the most in real life since it directly targets my objectives.
3. Business value, user impact, level of effort
The last framework I like to use is very similar to the second one in which it has three criteria:
Business value: How much value will it bring to the business based on revenue/ number of users/ other metrics?
User impact: Does this feature make it easier for users to go through your product? Will it increase engagement?
Level of effort: How long will it take to build? How many engineers and design resources do we need to build it?
These are only some questions you can ask yourself to be able to score based on these metrics, make sure to think about more questions that are relevant to the task on hand.
Give your recommendation
Now that you have identified your goal, chosen a prioritization framework and discussed how you would rank or bucket the tasks given, you may now provide your recommendation.
In any PM interview, the interviewer is always assessing how you are systematically thinking about how you come up with your conclusions. This will show them that as a product manager, you use your analytical abilities in determining why and how you are doing what you do.
Conclusion
While I have provided a few frameworks to use for you to structure the prioritization interview, there are so many others out there that may be to your liking! In any case, always remember to ask relevant questions, keep the goal in mind, and verbalize your thoughts.
