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We're big into practicing interview questions.
Not because we think practice makes perfect, but because we know it makes you more prepared. That's why we've been writing articles on all types of interview questions—breaking them down to help you succeed in your next interview, and snag that dream job.
And what if your dream job is to be a product manager? Well, the interview prep gets even more specific because these unique roles vary from company to company. From technical skills to business skills, the role of a product manager can include overseeing the development of new features, working with engineers and designers to help bring a company’s vision to life, or even conducting customer research.
If a company is hiring a product manager to help with their overall company strategy, they're going to want to put the person through a thorough interview process. That's what we're going to cover ALL the insider tips including product manager interview questions you should prepare for.
Jump To Section:
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What Recruiters Want To Learn In Your Product Manager Interview
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Common Product Manager Interview Questions to Prepare to Answer
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Product Manager Interview Questions: Interpersonal Skills
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Product Manager Interview Questions: Technical Skills
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Product Manager Interview Questions: Analytical Skills
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Product Manager Interview Questions: Leadership Skills
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Product Manager Interview Questions: Remote Product Management
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Product Manager Interview Questions From Facebook
What Recruiters Want To Learn In Your Product Manager Interview
The recruiting process for a product manager is going to be unique to each company and its goals for the role. However, most recruiters have a few similar learnings goals when hiring product management talent:
- Your interpersonal skills, values, and personality
- Your product management experience—both formal and informal training
- Your critical problem-solving abilities
- The results or value you can bring to the organization and their business goals
Now that you know the initial goals for hiring, you can prepare for the most common product manager interview questions that initially help the recruiter get insight into your skills in one of these categories.
Common Product Manager Interview Questions to Prepare to Answer
As we mentioned before, product management is a unique role and that's because it includes a combination of skills including business, technology, and design. When it comes to "common" interview questions, these will focus more on your understanding of the role and if you understand how a product manager contributes to a company.
When a role is more "grey," you should focus on highlighting your understanding by giving examples of your past work. Here are some of the common questions you might get asked:
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What does a product manager do?
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What qualities and characteristics make a great product manager to you?
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What’s your approach to prioritizing tasks?
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How do you conduct user feedback? How often do you collect feedback from users?
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How does that feedback shape your product and timeline?
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How do you know your product is satisfying users? What teams and resources do you use to help you evaluate this?
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What's your approach to user research?
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In your last job, how did you interact with your users?
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What’s your approach to developing a product strategy?
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From idea to launch, share how you would introduce a new product feature to the audience.
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What goes into a successful product launch and timeline?
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Tell us about a time you were working with an existing product and needed to improve it. What did you do and share the creation roadmap?
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What techniques, strategies, and processes do you use for a product launch?
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What does good user design mean to you? How do you evaluate that?
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Using one of our products, tell me how you would launch it?
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Using one of our products, tell me how you would redesign it?
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What resources and inspiration do you turn to?
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Tell me about your most successful product and why it was successful.
Product Manager Interview Questions: Interpersonal Skills
Since the company is hiring a person and not a robot, they will want to get to know you on a personal level and see if you'll fit into the company/team.
The purpose of asking interpersonal questions is for them to get to know you better including learning about your values, work habits and styles, interests, and what type of problem-solver are you.
As a product manager, you need to be a critical thinker and ideally, you like to solve problems and keep improving them. This means you don't get frustrated when you need to pivot and you don't create something once and then call it a day.
Product managers also collect lots of feedback so you can't be overly sensitive to their ideas not working or letting their ego make business decisions. Hiring managers want to know what it's like to work with you and this is your chance to show that you take ownership of your mistakes and don’t shift the blame to others.
These types of questions are also the opportunity to showcase your passion, knowledge, and interest in the company's product and why you chose to pursue a career in product management. Here are some questions to prep for:
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Tell us about yourself.
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Why do you want to work here?
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Why are you looking for a new job?
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Why should we hire you?
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Why did you pursue a career in product management?
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How do you see your career evolving? What are your future career goals?
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Do you like to work with other teams? Tell us about a time you had to collaborate with another team and the results from that teamwork.
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To be successful in a product management role, what do you need from your manager?
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How do you prefer to receive feedback? Tell us about a time you had to give tough feedback to someone else and how you did it.
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How would people describe you?
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Tell me about a time you failed or your idea failed. What happened next?
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Where do you find value or purpose in a product management role?
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What does success mean to you? How do you define success in your role as a product manager?
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What's your work style?
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What are your pet peeves?
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What motivates you?
Product Manager Interview Questions: Technical Skills
While you don't need to be a computer engineer with a software development degree, product managers do need to understand technical concepts and communicate them to non-technical people.
Think of it this way: if tech was a language, product managers need to be bilingual and act as a translator.
The purpose of asking technical questions is to assess how well product manager candidates understand the role tech plays in a product and your ability to share that information in a way that a business or design team will comprehend. If you understand something really well, you can teach others. That's what you want to showcase with your answers. Here are some technical questions you might get asked:
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Explain your technical skills and any formal product management training you have.
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Teach me the difference between C++ and Java.
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You need to write an algorithm to do XYZ; how would you do it?
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How do you define product-market fit in your business plan?
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Show me how you build a new product roadmap.
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Provide a brief explanation and process for designing an [insert specific name] product for [insert specific audience] people?
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Define machine learning.
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Define recursion.
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Define user interface.
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Define user experience.
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Define protocol.
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Define competitive analysis and give an example of when you did this in the past.
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Name one product you absolutely love and one product you hate and explain why in both cases. Now tell me how you would improve the one you hate.
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What is the importance of engineers and technical teams as stakeholders? How do you integrate them into the overall product vision?
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How do you ensure that market-oriented teams fully understand technical challenges?
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Has a technical solution designed by you or your team ever become a commercial product?
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What skills and experience set you apart from other product managers?
Product Manager Interview Questions: Analytical Skills
The purpose of analytical questions is to reveal how you think, and how you approach a problem. These are asked because product managers are constantly trying to solve problems where there aren't super clear answers. They have to consider what information they need and how they will get that in order to recommend some solutions. When they are doing that, they are using analytical skills.
When you're trying to answer an analytical question, don't rush or put pressure on yourself to answer right away. Take time and even write out some ideas before you talk through your approach with the interviewer. Here are some examples of analytical questions to prep for:
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How many internet users will there be by 2050?
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How many quarters would it take to get to the top of the empire state building?
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How would you go about reducing water usage in California?
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Customer churn rates are up. How would you go about determining the root cause?
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How much internet bandwidth do you estimate is needed for us to run ____ product?
Product Manager Interview Questions: Leadership Skills
Leadership is an essential skill for all product managers. Even at a junior level, a product manager acts as a leader on a project so regardless of what level you're interviewing for, the recruiter will ask about your leadership skills with you.
Remember that product managers sit at the intersection of business, tech, and design teams. This means they are communicating with a diverse group of stakeholders and collaborating with teams that have different priorities, job responsibilities, specialties, and goals.
A product manager has the challenge to get all these teams on the same page and aligned with the same purpose. Once they do that, product managers then have to keep them organized toward that collective goal.
When answering questions about your leadership skills, focus on strong communication skills, collaboration, and how you manage a project to a successful conclusion. To get a sense of whether you have these soft skills—or human skills—an interview might ask you the following:
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As a new product manager, how do you establish yourself with the other teams you need to work with?
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What’s the best way to work with executives?
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What are the characteristics of a successful team dynamic?
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Is there a difference between leadership and management?
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What’s your approach to dealing with customers and users?
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What type of people do you work well with? What types of people are hard for you to work with?
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What would you do to get a team to stick to a schedule?
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How do you like to run team meetings?
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Tell us about a time when a project went south. How did you fix it?
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How do you share critical feedback or disagree with teammates?
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What is your leadership style or approach?
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What's your communication style?
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Do you have any experience trying to inspire or motivate a team?
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What’s your approach to communicating your product strategy?
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How do you communicate and gain buy-in on your roadmap from other team members?
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How do you manage unconscious bias or group thinking?
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What happens if a project is being slowed down by one person. How would you fix that?
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What organization skills do you bring to a team?
Product Manager Interview Questions: Remote Product Management
In today's competitive job market, it's very likely the company you’re applying to offers some mix of remote work, flexible hours, or hybrid work schedule. Most people are thrilled about this option, but hiring managers are also wising up to the fact that remote work brings its own set of workplace skills. That's why they are asking specific interview questions about how you work remotely.
The purpose of these questions is to see how you get work done when no one is managing you and when you're only able to connect to a team virtually. Communication changes. Deadlines and the process for managing a project change when done remotely. Your goal is to highlight your virtual skillsets.
Even if you’ve hated remote working, try not to use this as an excuse to vent! If asked, be honest about the challenges remote work has presented you but then spin those into learning opportunities. How do those learning influence future you? Here are some remote work interview questions you might come across:
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Tell us about your experience working remotely or in a flexible work environment?
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How do you keep open communication in a remote setting and ensure everyone is on the same page?
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How do you run online meetings and keep the team engaged?
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What about collaborating or managing a team across different time zones? What tools and resources would you use?
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What challenges have you faced when working remotely? How have you overcome them?
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How do you stay connected to your teammates when you're not in person?
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How do you structure your remote work day?
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Tell me about a time you completed a project 100% remotely.
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How do you track metrics and KPIs with a fully remote team?
Product Manager Interview Questions From Facebook
We don't have a product manager here on the CC team—so we reached out to an expert to give her sage advice on how you can stand out in your next product management interview. Enter, Facebook’s Vice President of Marketplace, Deb Liu.
Deb is a leading voice at Facebook, overseeing product management and engineering for dozens of products and initiatives—which means she's just the right person to be giving us the inside scoop on what a product management interview looks like. Here's our Q+A with Deb.
What are three interview questions you ask in a product management interview (and can you give tips on how to answer them?)
1. Leadership and Drive—Who is the hardest person you ever worked with? What made the relationship difficult? How did you address that situation? If I called them up today, what would they say about your time together?
"We are not looking for perfect people, but rather those with humility, grit, and the ability to be self-reflective. Everyone has difficult relationships in their past, but it is how you deal with them that matters most. The best answers are when a person owns up to their part of why the partnership didn't work and showed constructive action or at least reflection on what they could have done better. Many people try to skirt the question, but you can tell when someone struggled with a relationship and came out stronger on the other side."
2. Product Sense—For example, how would you build commerce into Facebook?
- "Focus on the people problem first. Why would consumers buy and sell things on Facebook? Then they focus on why it is a good fit for our company given our mission and strategy. The most common mistakes are when people are too focused on the market size, and not the people problem and why our company can bring something unique to the table.
- Good answers usually look at what people are trying to do on the platform today and how we can extend that to a broader audience. This problem is also one that encourages whiteboarding and designing a solution."
3. Execution—Let's say your biggest partner calls you upset that there is a 2 percent drop in their daily traffic. How would you go about figuring out what happened?
- "Execution interviews are about understanding how to use data effectively and structure thinking through a product challenge. The best way to work through the problem is to think through the data you need to solve the problem and gradually update your hypotheses as new data becomes available.
- The most common mistake is someone comes in with a fixed hypothesis and doggedly pursues it no matter what the data is telling them. Being flexible in your thinking and the ability to adapt as new data is shared is critical."
What’s the most important thing for me to do in a product manager interview? What would make me stand out as a candidate?
"Successful product managers are able to solve real-world problems, articulate their points of view, and adapt to new information. At Facebook, we look for PMs with self-awareness, a learning mindset, and humility in the face of uncertainty."
If I’m looking to transition into a product manager role from a different job, what skills should I focus on making transferable? What skills are most valuable in a great product manager?
- "Product Managers are often asked to wear many hats in order to do their jobs well. Companies look for PMs with problem-solving skills balanced with strategic thinking and the ability to collaborate well with others. Showing you have experience solving real-world problems while building and leading a cross-functional team will help you smoothly transition into a PM role.
- Consider participating in hackathons or helping out a team that has an idea they want to bring to life.
- Many people cite networking as an important part of transitioning to new roles or companies, but I find building relationships to be more effective. Networking is something done in passing, but building a relationship can last well beyond the initial contact. Join an organization like Women in Product, which has an active Facebook group and hosts local events and meet-ups. It's a great way to get to know people in the PM field while also learning something new.
- Consider an Associate Product Manager role or apply to a Rotational Product Manager (RPM) program. Facebook has an RPM program to help open doors to people with or without a technical degree; prior PM experience is not required. Candidates get hands-on experience working on projects across different product areas, and they're part of a strong internal PM community to learn how to build impactful products."
What’s the best question you’ve been asked as an interviewer?
"What keeps you at Facebook after all of these years?"
If I’m going into a technical product manager interview, what can I do to make sure I’m prepared?
Technical Product Managers help teams solve problems by breaking down challenging and complex areas into workable timelines and deliverables. They keep the team aligned and often own communication with stakeholders outside of the team.
Making sure you can demonstrate clear execution, technical understanding, and the ability to coordinate and lead people from different functions on a major initiative are critical elements for this role.
If you're prepping for your next interview, we're here to help. We've written plenty of articles on the topic—like the hardest interview questions (and how to answer them)—and even offer free downloadable resources to help you impress any interviewer.
