Updated: October 23, 2024- 19 min read
Increase your chances of getting hired (and calm your nerves) with interview preparation á la Product School. In this post, we'll explore different types of Product Manager interview questions and how to answer them with examples, frameworks, and free resources galore!
At Product School, we are always in conversation with product leaders about cracking the PM interview. These professionals have been on both sides of the interview and are experts in product manager interview questions and answers. We've distilled those insights here to help you ace your next interview.
In this article, we've got you covered with common interview questions and examples of how to answer them. We'll dive into interview question frameworks and when to use them, plus examples of product sense, behavioral, technical, estimation, and personal questions so that you've got an answer prepped for the most general down to the most specific question you might face.
Interview Prep Checklist
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Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers
While you can't anticipate all potential interview questions for product managers, you can be sure that you'll need answers for some of the ones listed below. Preparing to answer these typical interview questions will give you the best chance of nailing your next PM interview. Take a look at the example answers below to start thinking about how you can ace all 10 questions.
These questions are common, but your answer doesn't have to be! Remember to personalize your answers and reference your own experience:
“The more you can bring the interviewer in, and show them how you are unique and a value add to their company beyond just a resume, the better. ”
– Erik Huckle, former Sr Product Manager at Amazon, in How to Ace the PM Interview
10 common interview questions
What do you see as a Product Manager’s main role within product development?
How do you stay user-focused?
What main changes would you make to [our product]?
How do you see your career developing in the next five years?
Tell us about a time you used data to influence an important stakeholder.
Tell us about a time you faced failure and how you bounced back.
How would you improve your favorite product?
What’s your approach to prioritizing tasks?
Why do you want to work at [our company]?
Why do you want to be/what do you love about being a Product Manager?
Answers to PM interview questions
Question: Tell us about a time you used data to influence an important stakeholder.
Example answer: I used data to demonstrate that our mobile app's user engagement was declining due to an overly complex onboarding process. By presenting clear, actionable insights from user behavior analytics and A/B testing, I convinced stakeholders of the need to simplify the onboarding flow. We redesigned the onboarding process, which resulted in a 20% increase in user retention within the first three months post-launch.
What's behind this interview question?
Analyzing product data is central to Product Management, but it's only half the battle. It's what you do with the data that matters. This question assesses the candidate's ability to leverage insights into actionable results.
As a bonus, the question also throws some basic stakeholder management in there! Remember, PMs have to influence without authority, balancing stakeholder needs with those of customers and the rest of the team. Data is a great way for Product Managers to influence stakeholders and align everyone around the same problem.
Question: How would you improve your favorite product?
Example answer: To improve [Trello], I would focus on enhancing the automation capabilities within boards to increase efficiency for power users. I would start by analyzing user behavior, particularly how frequently users interact with existing automation features like Butler, and identifying common repetitive tasks that aren’t currently automated. Based on these insights, I would propose introducing customizable automation templates that users can easily apply across multiple boards, along with a library of community-shared automations. This improvement would likely result in higher adoption of automation features and greater user productivity, aligning with Trello’s vision of making it easier to work together and get things done.
What's behind this interview question?
This question provides insight into the candidate’s problem-solving skills and their ability to identify and address user pain points, showing their creativity and understanding of product enhancements.
It also gauges your passion for Product. Enthusiastic PMs have several favorite products and lots of ideas for making them even better. A well-thought-out answer to this question shows you have Product on the brain!
Question: How do you prioritize your product backlog?
Example answer: As a Product Manager [at Netflix], I prioritize the product backlog by using a combination of the MoSCoW method and Impact vs. Effort analysis. This ensures that high-impact features with reasonable development effort are prioritized. I regularly collaborate with cross-functional teams, including engineering, design, and sales, to gather input and align the backlog with Netflix's business goals of enhancing user engagement and expanding global reach. This approach allows me to focus on delivering the most valuable features first, such as improving content recommendation algorithms and optimizing streaming quality, while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to new content trends and user behavior data.
What's behind this interview question?
This question tests the candidate’s knowledge of prioritization methods, a fundamental aspect of Product Management.
As a result, it also assesses the PM's understanding of balancing user needs, business objectives, and technical constraints within their specific context.
Want more product manager interview questions with answers? Download the Interview Prep Checklist and get more example answers, plus an answer template and explanation for each question!
Product Manager Interview Prep Checklist
Product School's Interview Prep Checklist provides Product Managers with a structured approach to preparing for PM interviews. It guides you through essential pre-interview research and gets you ready to answer even the toughest Product Manager interview questions with detailed example answers and proven problem-solving frameworks.
The resource has been validated by Cara de Freitas Bart, Group Product Manager at LinkedIn, a knowledgeable expert and superstar in the recruitment and product space!
The checklist's tasks are divided into five sections. Add a tick mark next to each task as you complete it, and check off the whole section when you’re ready to move on to the next one. When you're done, you can easily download your answers as a PDF to use as a cheatsheet during your interview:
Pre-Interview Research:
Start with a deep dive into the company, product, and team to create a strong foundation for your interview.Product Problem-Solving Frameworks:
Familiarize yourself with proven methods like STAR and CIRCLES to structure your answers and tackle complex interview questions with confidence.Interview Questions and Answers:
Prepare for common interview questions with our Product-Leader-approved cheatsheet. For each question, you have a space to fill in your own answer. Draw inspiration from the answer template and example answer provided for each question. Tick off each question as you go!After the Interview:
Reflect on your performance, identify areas for improvement, and follow up with a professional thank-you note.Free Resources:
Round out your interview prep with a list of free interview-related articles and webinars from Product School, plus our eBook Hired to accompany you throughout your job hunt!
Check off your product management interview prep to walk into your interview with confidence, ready to blow them away!
Interview Prep Checklist
Land your dream job with expert-approved example answers and proven frameworks!
GET THE CHECKLISTHow to Answer Product Management Interview Questions
The CIRCLES framework for product sense questions
Some companies will dedicate an entire interview just to product questions, often referred to as the product sense interview. The idea behind these common product questions is to evaluate a candidate's ability to understand what makes a product great (and profitable) within the context of market demands.
Many PMs find that the CIRCLES framework helps them approach these tough questions in a logical order.
Comprehend the Situation: Start by ensuring you understand the problem space and user needs, asking clarifying questions to remove ambiguity in the interview prompt.
Identify the Customer: Pinpoint the primary customer or user segment by discussing who will benefit most from the product and their key pain points.
Report the Customer’s Needs: Explore the most important customer needs by articulating what problems they're facing and how those issues impact their behavior.
Cut, Through Prioritization: Prioritize potential solutions by weighing trade-offs, using criteria like feasibility, impact, and urgency to show decision-making clarity.
List Solutions: Brainstorm a range of possible solutions, articulating each one concisely while keeping customer needs and product goals in mind.
Evaluate Trade-offs: Discuss the pros and cons of each solution, showcasing your ability to think critically about potential risks, benefits, and resource constraints.
Summarize the Recommendation: Conclude with a clear, well-reasoned recommendation based on customer impact, feasibility, and alignment with long-term product goals.
The STAR method for behavioral questions
Behavioral questions (see example questions below) are the "tell me about a time when..." questions. They evaluate how Product Managers deal with failure, work as a team, manage stakeholder expectations, etc. To answer these questions, you need to deftly braid humility with your best qualities and blend failures with your most impressive experience. The STAR method can help by clearly demonstrating structured problem-solving and decision-making. Here’s how each step applies:
Situation: Set the context by briefly explaining the problem or challenge, ensuring the interviewer understands the background and any relevant constraints or objectives.
Task: Clearly define the specific responsibility or goal you had in addressing the situation, emphasizing your role and what was expected of you.
Action: Describe the steps you took to address the task, highlighting your decision-making process, strategies used, and why you chose a particular approach.
Result: Conclude with the outcome of your actions, quantifying the impact if possible (e.g., increased user engagement or revenue growth), and reflect on any key takeaways or learnings from the experience.
Psst! Wondering how to land an interview in the first place? Download Product School's tried-and-true Product Manager cover letter template and fill up your calendar with PM interviews!
Cover Letter Template
Seeking the next step in your Product journey? Use our template to spotlight your strategic brilliance and land your ideal role. Our Product Manager Cover Letter Template is your key to standing out!
Free template
Product Sense Questions
Product-related questions are so crucial to the hiring process that they sometimes get their own product sense interview. Regardless of how the process is structured, this is the type of question you now will come up in one form or another.
How to answer product sense questions
As discussed above, the CIRCLES method is your friend when it comes to Product questions. It helps interviewees tackle every aspect of improving or building a new product in a logical order.
Regardless of the framework you use, remember that practice makes perfect. Work through the questions below and challenge yourself to answer them using different examples. In your interview, you're bound to come across one that is similar to the questions on this list:
How would you prioritize resources when you have two important things to do but can’t do them both?
Describe a scenario that required you to say no to an idea or project.
How do you decide what and what not to build?
What is a product you currently use every day? Why and how would you improve it?
There is a data point that indicates that there are more Uber drop-offs at the airport than pick-ups from the airport. Why is this the case, and what would you do within the product to change that?
How would you improve the functionality of the product?
How would you increase adoption of X feature?
What is the key to a good user interface?
While we make X product for the consumers, we also have a B2B division. What is your experience with juggling both markets?
How do you know if a product is well-designed?
How would you redesign our product?
What is one improvement you would implement for our product in the next 6 months?
What is a major challenge our company will face in the next 12-24 months?
How would you describe our product to someone?
Suggest a new feature for Amazon. What metrics would you use to measure its success?
What has made X product successful?
What do you dislike about our product?
How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
How do you think we came up with the product pricing?
Who are our competitors?
Tell me about a company that has great customer service, what they do, and why do they do it well?
____ metrics are down. How would you go about determining the root cause?
Technical Questions
How to answer technical questions in PM interviews
In most product management interviews, technical questions are designed to see how well you would work with engineers and to test your familiarity with the tech the company is working with.
To answer, you don't need to be a tech wiz—and you definitely don't want to exaggerate your expertise. Instead, focus on what you know about topics that matter to development teams, such as:
If you are applying for a technical product manager role, check out these technical pm interview questions.
Our engineering teams are used to employing X methodologies. What is your opinion of them? Have you used them in the past?
What is the importance of engineers and technical teams as stakeholders? How do you integrate them into the overall product vision?
How do you ensure that market-oriented teams fully understand technical challenges?
What are the key conflicts between development and business teams? Can you show examples of how you reconciled them in the past?
Estimation Questions
A Product Manager has to come ready with an analytical mind in order to succeed. Some companies may ask you logic-based questions designed to reveal how you think.
For the first question below, your first response might be that it's impossible to know how many people are currently online in Europe. You'd be right. The key to answering the question is making an educated guess based on some rough estimations of the total population and your assumptions about what percentage of it would be online at a given moment. Use ballpark guesses for the real numbers to show how you would go about making a calculation.
Sample estimation questions
Prep for this type of PM interview questions by taking a stab at the examples below:
How many people are currently online in Europe?
How many windows are in New York City?
How many iPads are sold in the USA every year?
How much money is spent in the USA per year on gas?
How would you go about finding out the number of red cars in China?
If you wanted to build the world’s most popular mobile messaging product, and you need to estimate how much network bandwidth would be used in a year, how would you go about doing this?
Product Management Questions
Hiring managers often ask candidates this type of question in order to see if they are the right culture fit. The role of the PM takes different forms at different companies, which can make it difficult to know how to answer questions about Product Management. Keep in mind that it's important to be positive and specific and to highlight the experiences and skills that make you a great PM.
Examples of product management-related questions
What aspects of Product Management do you find the most exciting?
Tell me about a time when you had to build or motivate a team.
What do you think a day-to-day would be like for a Product Manager?
How do you think Product Managers interact with engineers?
How would you explain Product Management to a 5-year-old?
What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting?
Tell me about your role on your team, who else you work with, and how you work with them.
Behavioral Questions
Hiring managers know the importance of soft skills for product managers. They want to know that you work well in high-pressure environments, influence without authority, and manage stakeholder expectations.
These are the "tell me about a time when..." questions. To prepare, review important projects in your portfolio and jot down some ideas about the main challenges, results, and personal takeaways. What role did you play, and what did you learn? Having these reflections top of mind will help you respond to the questions below.
How to answer product management behavioral questions
As discussed above, PMs often use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to tackle these types of questions.
Behavioral questions that often come up in product interviews
Tell me about a challenging issue or challenge you took on.
How do you interact with customers/users?
Tell me how you've overcome product failures/challenges or poor feedback.
Tell me about a time you had to influence someone.
Tell me about a mistake you made and how you handled it.
One executive says that Feature A is more important, and another executive says Feature B is more important. How do you choose which one to implement?
Tell me about a time you used data to make a decision.
Check out the webinar below for a deep dive into the STAR method from Microsoft Senior PM Diego Granados:
Leadership and Communication Questions
Even at a junior level, a Product Manager is a leader. Even entry-level Product Management roles will come with questions about leadership. They’ll be more similar to behavioral questions with an emphasis on how you interact and communicate with the people on your teams.
How to answer leadership questions
To prepare, look over your past experiences again, this time with a focus on your interpersonal interactions. Identify some times when you took the lead on an initiative or helped out a colleague.
Sample leadership questions
What’s the best way to work with executives?
Is consensus always a good thing?
What kinds of people do you like to work with?
What kind of people do you have a hard time working with?
What would you do to get a team to stick to a schedule?
What’s the difference between leadership and management?
General / Personal Questions
Sometimes the simplest questions are the most important. Make sure you prepare your answers to personal questions so that they have a clear structure and tell a compelling story.
How to answer general interview questions
When talking about the company, explain what the brand means to you or how you relate to the mission statement on a personal level.
“A lot of people do not prepare well enough for these questions. That tells me that you've not thought seriously about what you've done and where you want to go.”
— Ameya Thorat, former Amazon Product Leader, in Preparing for the PM Interview
Examples of general questions
Tell me about yourself
Why should we hire you?
Why do you want to work here at Company X?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
What do you need from your manager to be successful?
Remote Product Management Questions
These days, it’s quite likely that the company you’re applying to has some kind of remote working/flexible hours possibility. You could even be applying for a 100% distributed remote team.
Answering questions about remote work
If you are interviewing for a remote or hybrid role, consider the pros and cons of different working models and educate yourself on best practices for remote, asynchronous teams.
Remote work example questions
Do you have experience in a remote working environment?
How have you kept communication from breaking down in a remote setting?
How would you face the challenge of managing a team that works across time zones?
What challenges have you faced when working remotely? How have you overcome them?
How would you build a high-performance async product team?
Cover Letter Template
Seeking the next step in your Product journey? Use our template to spotlight your strategic brilliance and land your ideal role. Our Product Manager Cover Letter Template is your key to standing out!
Free templateProduct Manager Interview Resource Kit
Master the Product Management Interview YouTube Playlist: We’ve collected our best webinars on acing the PM interview. Check out the entire playlist here, or head straight to one of our favorites from DAZN Talent Acquisition Lead Kasia Paczynska:
Proven examples of Product Manager interview questions to ask: We've curated and listed all the questions an interviewer could ask you. But what about the questions YOU should ask during a Product Manager interview? Don't miss these 20 questions to ask at the end of the Product Management interview.
Do a mock interview: Partner up with a fellow product manager or someone you trust and go through the questions above. You'll learn a lot from how you answer questions out loud and on the spot. Check out this mock interview with Adecco Group Product Leader Motunrayo Apara for inspiration:
Books for Product Manager interview prep
Hired — How to Get a Great Product Job: This is a tailored guide to land Product Manager positions in top tech companies. As this book will show you, some of the most successful product transitions originated from people in music production or finance, with full-time jobs or with no prior experience.
The Product Manager Interview: 167 Actual Questions and Answers: This is the second edition of Lewis C. Lin’s book, a great resource for both budding and seasoned Product Managers. Lin’s book will not only provide you with good pointers for interview preparation but also help you in day-to-day life as a Product Manager.
Decode and Conquer — Answers to Product Management Interviews: An industry insider’s perspective on how to conquer the most difficult Product Manager interview questions. Covering frameworks for tackling product design and metrics questions, the biggest mistakes, and answers to the top Product Manager interview questions.
To complement your learning, check out our reading list: Books Recommended by Product Leaders
A Last Word on How to Prepare for a Product Manager Interview
In this article, we've covered 72 possible interview questions, yet you'll likely be asked one that's not on this list. There are infinite versions of product interview questions. However, your answers will always be top-notch if you understand the logic behind each question. This is the key to knowing how to answer.
Once you have your story straight and your frameworks mastered, nothing can stop you!
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After years of working with and learning from today’s top Product Leaders, we’ve condensed their knowledge into this all-in-one guide to starting your PM career.
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Updated: October 23, 2024
