The Most Asked Behavioral Interview Questions for Product Managers
As I write this, Q4 of 2022 has been pretty tumultuous for those of us in the tech and web3 sectors. Amazon, Stripe, Meta, DoorDash, OpenSea, Lyft, Zillow, Twitter, Kraken, Bybit, Swyftx and many more have announced mass layoffs, not to mention the FTX meltdown.
If you’ve been laid off in the midst of this tough market, please know that your skillsets are still incredibly valuable and I hope you’re able to take some time for yourself to pause, recuperate, and re-evaluate to make sure you’re on the best path for you and your goals.
It’s a time of endings and new beginnings, and many people are reconsidering what they need and want from a career, how to reposition themselves and dusting off their interviewing materials.
There are a lot of materials on the web for product managers, but I couldn’t find a resource that I felt that offered a relevant and all-encompassing guide for behavioral interview questions. Many resources I found were outdated or specifically targeted for FAANG companies, so I compiled and researched over 50 different resources to create an overarching framework for behavioral interview questions most asked of product managers.
I hope this strategy and rubric can be useful for others looking for new opportunities, and please reach out if you have any questions or feel as though I missed something so that I can update it for everyone. When looking for your next job, I really believe that one of the best things you can do is build up your community. If you need some tips as to how you can leverage your network, I recommend this article and also using Phyl Terry’s framework for a “social search” outlined in Never Search Alone.
In this checklist of interview questions to be prepared for, I focus on behavioral interviews (not case study type questions) since that’s what most companies use to hire product managers. I’ve made this list as succinct as possible so as to follow the 80/20 rule. I would recommend taking these questions as the base layer of the cake, and adding on icing as needed for your specific field and interests.
Basic Checklist Before Each Interview:
- Practice my introduction and make sure it’s relevant to the job description
- Be able to explain what the company does, why I’m interested & be aware of any recent news regarding the company
- Know who is interviewing me
- Review the job description criteria — know which skillsets that I want to highlight in this particular interview & have specific examples
- Have a list of questions to ask
If you’re thinking to yourself that this checklist is 101 stuff, it totally is, but having a checklist systemizes your approach so that you can make sure you’ve covered the basics 100% of the time. Referencing Atul Gawande’s work, if surgeons and pilots benefit from checklists, I think product managers can too.
Introductory/Recruiter Questions:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What are you looking for in your next opportunity?
- What are your salary expectations?
- Why are you looking for new opportunities?
- What’s your greatest strength?
- What’s your greatest weakness or area of improvement?
General Product Approach:
- Tell me about a time you defined & measured the hypothesis of an MVP.
- What’s your process for developing a product?
- Tell me about a time when you owned a product from start to finish.
- Why product management?
Leadership:
- Can you tell me about a time you had a conflict with a stakeholder?
- Describe a decision you made that wasn’t popular. How did you handle implementing it?
- Describe a time when you had to motivate employees or coworkers.
- Tell me about a time when you showed initiative.
- Tell me about a time when you had to give a presentation to people who disagreed with you.
- Tell me about a time when you built a team.
- Can you tell me about a time you influenced a stakeholder?
Product Sense:
- What process do you go through when deciding what features to build?
- How do you determine if your (product or feature) is successful?
- Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision with little or ambiguous information.
- What’s your favorite product?
- What product have you used and disliked before? How would you improve it?
Collaboration:
- What would your co-workers say about you?
- Tell me about how you work with others and achieve the desired results.
- Tell me about a situation where internal company issues affected your job, and what did you do to resolve it?
- Tell me about a time when you were able to create a win-win situation.
- Describe how you would convince engineering to work on a business-requested feature that would interfere with their existing work, especially if the engineering team is working on meeting a deadline.
- How do you resolve conflicting product requirements? What or who determines which requirement takes the hit?
- Your largest customer is loudly advocating for a new feature which is not in your prioritized roadmap. Sales, eager to please, have gone straight to engineering to see if they can drop everything and get this done. What do you do?
Successes:
- What product are you the most proud of and why?
- Tell me about a time when you set and achieved a goal.
Challenges:
- When’s a time you made a mistake and how did you handle that?
- Tell me about a time when you had to work with a difficult teammate.
- Can you tell me about a time when you solved a complex problem?
- Tell us about a recent feature you released within a product you own. What problem were you trying to solve and what did you build? How did you de-risk what you were building?
- Tell me about a time you failed.
- Talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges or poor feedback.
- What’s your biggest product failure?
Data:
- Tell me about a time you used data to solve a problem.
- Tell me about a time you had two conflicting data sources and how you made a decision in spite of that.
- How would you measure success for [insert product like Facebook events]?
Conclusion
These are the core behavioral interview questions that I try to have prepared for every interview. If you are a specialist as a certain kind of product manager or specialize within a certain industry, please layer on questions relevant to you as needed, but I find that these are a pretty decent starting foundation.
If answering all these interview questions is a little overwhelming, another approach is to have 4 stories for each of the below categories: General Product Approach, Leadership, Product Sense, Collaboration, Successes, Challenges, Data. I sometimes find it’s helpful to take a break and try to think of stories that exemplify these traits and see which ones can fit into these questions if I can’t recall examples just by reading specific prompts.
Go forth and conquer!
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Looking for a product coach to level up your product game or a product consultant for your startup? Email allymexicotte@gmail.com.
About The Author
Ally Mexicotte is a product manager who specializes in building strong user experiences, empowered teams and community-based products. She’s built B2C and B2B products in sports betting, mental health, insurtech, and real estate. Most recently she was the head of product at a peer-to-peer sports betting startup and increased MAU by 713%. Prior to that she was the director of product at a Fortune 200 company where she built many products from 0 to 1.
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