How to crack the Product Manager interview?

Before you plan to make Product Manager your career, here are few questions that you should ask yourself.

“Are you really passionate about product management? What part of this role excites you the most? Does it give you an adrenaline rush to make a change when you see non-intuitive apps?”

or

“Are you someone who is having FoMo because your Product Manager friends are doing pretty well, or you find Product Manager a fascinating job to be into?”

If you fall under the second bracket, then I suggest that you do some retrospection and seek mentorship to figure out your “Ikigai”. Following the flock will lead you nowhere.

Product management is for passionate people who want to make a difference. It could be a passion for technology, innovation, solving a customer problem, or redefining the user experience. Or it could be a passion for capturing a market and implementing a winning strategy. Nonetheless, there is a passion for what they are doing and what they want to do.

In this article, I am sharing few simple tips & tricks that have helped me cracking Product Manager interview(s). These are from my personal experience and I hope you will utilize the below to your advantage and breakthrough your interview.

1. Practice case studies

Case studies are the most effective method used by the interviewer to evaluate your skill set. Remember there are no right and wrong answers. These are given to evaluate your analytical skill, critical thinking, problem-solving skill, data-driven approach, soft skills, frameworks understanding. Note — these case studies are always open-ended questions. The interviewer expects you to ask questions, seek clarity, break down problem statements, make assumptions. Do not jump into the solution directly, I repeat, do not.

Be thoughtful, empathetic, practical, goal-oriented and analytical in your approach.

Few case studies for your reference:

• How would you monetize a parking app built for streets? What will be your strategy? How would you inform the availability of parking slots to the user?
• Create intelligent chat support for your application that caters to your customer problems without manual intervention. Your market presence is global.
• You are a product manager for a payment gateway and you observe an increase in bounce rate which directly impacts your revenue. What measures would you take to decrease the bounce rate, retain users and increase overall revenue by 15%?
• You are a product manager at YouTube and one fine morning you observe a sudden decline in traffic and conversion rate. How would you go about this situation?
• You are a product manager at WhatsApp. You are asked to build a marketplace feature to help local grocery stores to sell their products & services online via WhatsApp.
• Build a coffee vending machine for blind people.

Double Diamond Approach for product discovery & design

Tip: Focus on the why, what, how, who of the problem statement. Do summarize your findings, ideas, solution, user experience. Do a pros-cons analysis of your proposed solution. Be your own critic.

2. Learn about KPIs, OKRs, and metrics

KPIs and OKRs are the heart and soul of product management. Good PMs will have the KPI for their product, initiative, feature, etc, and will be able to articulate why that KPI is important. KPIs allow product managers to evaluate engagement, feature usage, user experience, and of course, commercial success. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

KPIs example:

• Keywords in top 10 search engine results
• Number of customers retained this month

Metrics is a quantifiable measure that allows businesses to define and track the success of a product. It is used by Product Managers to detect problems, set goals, and make informed decisions.

Metrics examples:

• Increase website traffic: The number of people that visit your website.
• Increase email click rates: The number of people that click on links included in your sent email.

Tip: Identify and define the KPIs, metrics and OKRs for the given problem statement. Discuss it with the interviewer with examples.

3. Explore prioritization techniques

We all do prioritization in our everyday life, because we have limited time for every set of tasks to execute, and that’s why we choose the most important actions to execute first followed by lesser important ones. Similarly, we prioritize functionality, tasks or defects in software development, because few asks are more important than others.

Product prioritization isn’t just about making a stack of features in a certain order — it also involves juggling the many inputs and opinions of stakeholders. Narrowing down the list of demands, ideas, feature requests, defects, technical debt for a product roadmap is one of the most challenging parts of a product manager’s job. Love it or hate it but you can’t just ignore it.

The influencing factors for prioritizing product backlog items are customer satisfaction, business value, complexity, impacted users, risk and opportunity, cost.

Various prioritization techniques which you need to know as a Product Manager.

• MoSCoW
• RICE prioritization
• Story mapping
• KANO model
• Stack ranking
• Cost of delay

4. Study about estimation techniques

Understand the different estimation techniques applied in product management. It’s required to scope your sprint, set the right expectations with your stakeholders and define the delivery timeline. It’s important to discern when to use which technique for estimations.

Few techniques which you should definitely explore are -

• Planning poker
• T-shirt sizes
• Affinity mapping
• Big /uncertain/small

5. Prepare situation-based & guesstimates questions

The interviewer evaluates you on multiple criteria before they make a final decision of hiring you. They will throw you under the bus just to see how you react in a pressurized situation. They will test your patience, compassion, perseverance, logical approach towards solving a problem. Here I am citing few examples which you should practice beforehand.

Situation based questions:

• Two of your top-performing clients are asking for two different features and you can accommodate only one request in your sprint. How would you go about this situation?
• Your development sprint is about to complete and suddenly your CEO or client made a change request. How would you handle this situation?
• Your development team is showing resistance towards a certain feature? How would you handle this situation?
• You are not able to meet a timeline and your stakeholder is quite upset about it. How will you negotiate with your stakeholder and reset the expectations?
• Your client is asking for a feature that doesn’t align with your product vision. How will you respond to your client?

Guesstimates questions examples:

• How many orders does Zomato receive daily?
• Estimate the total number of people using the Mumbai International Airport daily.
• Estimate YouTube’s daily revenue.
• Estimate the number of delivery agents for Swiggy.
• How many windows are there in Venice?

6. Talk about your key contributions

If you are an experienced candidate, make sure that you pick one of your best projects and walk through the interviewer about the project context, your key contributions and role in that project. Try to cover the below facets while talking about the project.

• Talk about your involvement in the project right from the ideation phase to the delivery phase.
• Cite data points and numbers to highlight the impact made by you.
• Talk about the highlights and lowlights of the project.
• Defined KPIs and metrics.
• Cross collaboration with different teams involved in the SDLC.
• Talk about the difficult situation that you have handled. How would you have done differently to avoid such situations?
• What went wrong in the project and what were the learnings?
• Tough decisions taken by you.
• Post-production monitor & support.

If you are a novice, my suggestion would be to build your own portfolio. Wondering how you can do that? Pick any hypothetical or real problem statement, work on it as it's your actual project, do the research, document your analysis, findings, recommendation and approach, pen down assumptions you made. To earn brownie points, support your solution with wireframes, user stories with acceptance criteria. Create a prioritized product backlog and do the scoping. This is a one-time investment but worth all your efforts.

7. Do mock interviews

There is this old proverb “Practice makes a man perfect”. All you need to do is practice off-stage before you make a cameo on-stage. Take notes of your strengths & weaknesses from these mock interviews. Work on bridging the gaps, turn your weaknesses into strengths, continue this entire process until you feel confident about your on-stage performance.

There are many mentors out there to help you conduct these mock interviews. Just go for it!

Tip: There are plethora of mock interview videos available on YouTube. Watch and observe them carefully, understand the do’s an dont’s, make notes of your learning. These videos will serve as a foundation for your actual interviews.

8. Show your passion

Product management is all about PASSION. First things first, always TURN ON YOUR CAMERA during online interviews. Facial expressions create dynamism, they give the impression that you stand behind your ideas and believe in them. Did I forget to mention this? — always carry your radiant smile on your face throughout the interview, even when you feel things are going south.

Few questions that are typically asked to understand the granularity of your passion towards product management are -

• Why do you want to be a product manager?
• What do you like the most about being a product manager? What do you dislike about this role?
• What would you do in your first 90 days in your new job?
• What is your favorite product or app? List two things that you like and dislike about this product or app.
• Talk about innovative ideas
• Talk about skill sets that you will bring to the table
• What tactics and processes would you use to manage the launch of a new product?

Don’t answer these questions just for the heck of it. The golden key here is to make your interviewer believe in what you are saying. Give reference from your personal experiences, have clarity in thoughts while delivering your answers. Do not give artificial answers, you will be unloaded with umpteen follow-up questions. So, try to be real as much as possible.

Pro tip: Always observe the apps and products that you use on a daily basis. Make a note of the features that you like and dislike about it. Pen your pain areas or suggestions that you would like to improve upon or innovate. Make this a practice and I promise this is going to help you in a long run in your Product Manager career.

9. Getting to know more about you

Companies don’t hire you just on the basis of your educational background, experience, expertise, and skills that you bring to the table. Your cultural fitment is as important as other factors. The interviewer is interviewing the next potential team member for his/her team, he/she will leave no stone unturned to know about you and your personality before making a final call.

• What are your hobbies?
• How do you handle conflicts with your team members?
• What gets you excited about coming to work?
• How do you like to work? What’s your working style?
• How do you handle stress or tight deadlines?
• What is your ideal workplace?
• What are your three strengths and weaknesses?
• Are you a team player or an individual contributor?
• Which was the last book you read? Would you recommend it to others and why?
• When was the last time you made a big mistake at work?
• How do you keep your team motivated?

Tip: My only advice is “BE YOU”! No matter how technically sound you might be and have a knack for product management, but if they find a cultural fitment gap, they will not hire you. And, that’s a harsh reality.

10. Ask questions

Never lose this opportunity to ask questions to your interviewer during and at the end of the interview process. The questions you ask will reflect your intelligence, interest and investment in the process. Ask smart questions based on the below pointers -

• Understand career progression for your role
• Understand the vision of the company and product
• Understand the project/product for which they are hiring you
• Understand high-level roadmap
• Understand team culture and ways of working
• Understand how they calculate the success and failure of their apps/products

Remember, this is the time to set the right expectations, clear all your apprehensions, redeem this opportunity to the fullest.

Pro tip: Frame questions in such a way that it speaks aloud that you are already part of the organization. Example: What kind of learning & development program will be offered by <organization name> to support my career path?

A general tip for any interviews ‘DO YOUR HOMEWORK with due diligence’

Here are a few to-dos before you appear for an interview.

• Study about the company, its product & services offering
• Understand the job expectations (Ask questions to the recruiter to get more clarity)
• Know your interviewer (Your interviewer knows about you even before meeting you. All thanks to your resume and LinkedIn profile)
• Read reviews on glassdoor
• Understand the interview process

I would like to share a particular quote that is close to my heart, which instills confidence in me, keeps my energy high, and help me deal with situations in all spectrums of my life.

‘ Never hesitate, never feel low, wear a smile and steal the show.’

Remember you are a Rockstar and you got this! Don’t fret about the results. Just enjoy the process. Learn and unlearn from these experiences and evolve.

Wishing you lots of luck in your job search!