Interviewing can be stressful! Especially in today’s market, when landing an interview itself is difficult. Then, you have 45-60 min to prove your worth and give compelling reasons to interviewers on why you will outshine the rest of the candidates. If you do great, that’s awesome. Even if you don’t, take it with a grain of salt and move on. I never take any interview (good or bad!) as a waste of time, I feel these are opportunities to put myself out there, and sort of, get experience, so I can take the learnings and move on.

After multiple job switches, here is a list of the most frequent interview questions. These are some that I ask as an interviewer of any product management candidate. I will include some tips on how to answer these, but I strongly suggest thinking about your own experiences and job description and preparing answers accordingly.

One thing to keep in mind is that keep all your answers close to the job description and requirements. A simple way to incorporate it is while preparing, to list down all the projects in your career that are somewhat related to the job description. And with all of the situational or project-related questions, give examples from your own career. This enhances your credibility in terms of the projects listed on your resume and adds weight to the answers you give.

Here’s a list of the most frequently asked questions:

1. Elaborate on the most challenging feature you deployed and share an end-to-end process on how you implemented it?

• The intention is to get an idea of how to deploy a feature end-to-end from Discovery to Design to Development to Testing and then Deployment.
• Take a project/feature that’s close to your heart in your previous role and answer it in STAR format And share the:
  • Situation or describe the feature
  • Your Specific Task why this feature was critical and what were the success criteria
  • Action in terms of the end-to-end deployment cycle and what you contributed to each of the phases: Discovery, Design, Development, User Acceptance Testing, Training, Launch, and Hypercare. Outshine by highlighting the challenges and how you overcame them.
  • Results of your efforts and what you achieved by deploying the feature. Include any learnings you had from your experience.

2. Tell us about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker and how did you handle it?

• This is more of an emotional quotient test, where the interviewer is looking for red flags such as self-defense, blame games, or any negative feelings and unprofessionalism
• While thinking on how to approach this question, this of a scenario where you had a conflicting idea and how you managed the communication:
  • Start with explaining the situation and sharing more about both of your roles
  • Explain how it is normal to have differences in opinion as well as how you communicated your ideas with each other
  • Share how you backed your point of view with the impact/basis
  • The best would be to share how you find a middle ground or understanding(keep it POSITIVE)

3. Why do you think you will be a great fit for the “Product Manager” role in Company XYZ?

• The intention of this is to see how you match the job description
• While prepping for this question:
  • Read the job description thoroughly and see if it fits any of your past experience
  • Share a story about your past experience that helped you prepare for this job and how you can contribute
  • If there is not much similarity from any of your previous experiences, talk about how you can pick up fast and how adaptive you are
  • Research about the company and if anything is interesting share that as well

4. Elaborate more on a time when a user raised an issue regarding the product? What did you do next?

• The reason you are asked this is to evaluate empathy with the user, analysis/problem-solving skills, and cross-functional collaboration
• Again, think about a situation where there was an issue raised by a user and what are the steps you took to resolve it:
  • You looked into the issue yourself, with the help of user and dev teams
  • Share how you worked towards Identifying the root cause(via triage calls etc)
  • Talk about the next steps in terms of fixing the issue(long term/short term), any data analysis to prioritize the fix, and follow-up and communication with the user after the fix

5. How do you share product updates/capabilities with different stakeholders?

• The interviewer would like to evaluate your communication skills, stakeholder collaboration, and feature documentation knowledge
• Break it down into different stakeholders you interact with and share the communication process:
  • Users/Business: Share high-level features/demos in regular cadence
  • Developers: Share functional documents and PRDs in Grooming sessions
  • Leadership: High-level exec summaries with objective and status
  • Leverage tools like Jira, Confluence, etc for communication

6. Share about a time when you had to prioritize between multiple features. How did you make a decision on which feature to work on next?

• One of the key roles of a Product Manager is to define a product roadmap. It’s also one of the most exciting parts of the job. This question is to check your prioritization skills and what criteria you use to decide what to do next.
• Again, dig through your career to get to some important features you decided to build
• Share more on what’s the basis of taking it up: is it impact and effort? urgency? alignment to business goals? etc.

7. How do you handle disagreements among stakeholders?

• The intension is to get an idea of your empathy towards different opinions and ability to facilitate alignment.
• Talk about any instance where you had to mediate a discussion between developers and users. Or any other heated discussion.
• Elaborate on how did you talk through and tried to get to the next steps.
• You can talk about how you facilitated trade off discussion with Must do, Should do, Could Do and Won’t do features (MoSCoW).

8. Tell us a time that was most challenging for you personally or professionally, how did you handle the situation?

• The interviewer is trying to gauge you stress handling capabilities and resilience.
• Share about a time that was very difficult for you – personal or professional(job loss, job hunt or any other high-stakes life event)
• Emphasize on why it was so stressful- how you handled it and got out of it.
• You can even talk about your learnings from it. (Positive learnings)

9. Which tools are you familiar with that enable Product Management?

• This is to assess if you know the basics of user story creation, documentation and data visualization tools.
• This is also to check if you have any technical skills needed for the role for a specific software like Order management system, CRMs etc.
• Skim through the job requirements to see the softwares that you need to know about
• Talk about any tools you know such as JIRA, Confluence, Airtable, Power BI, Figma, Slack, SQL queries etc.

10. Have you worked in an agile environment?

• This is to check your understanding of Agile terminologies and processes. Most of the companies have adopted Agile Framework in their ways of working.
• Dont just say “yes” and end this question. Share more about the processes in place for the same in your current workplace.
• Talk about the ceremonies(Sprint planning, demos, stand ups, grooming/refinement, retrospective, release).
• Share the duration of a sprint and your role throughout. Talk about backlog management and prioritization.

After taking multiple interviews for Product manager role, I can assure you, these are some of the most frequent questions. Take this blog post as a reference point to jot down the projects and your own stories about how you are the best fit for the role you are applying. This is also your chance to pivot the interview towards a project/topic you are comfortable with.

Stories stick – so tell your story with every question! Wish you good luck in your job hunt!