How to Master the Product Management Case Study Interview
A step-by-step guide
As product managers, we’re responsible for the future of the product. We’re the product’s visionary, the user’s advocate, the team’s motivator, and one of the company’s most important decision-makers.
For that reason, it’s no surprise that it’s notoriously difficult to hire and evaluate product managers. Great product managers exhibit strong product sense, leadership, communication, intellectual aptitude, strategic visioning, and analytical decision-making skills. Each of these skills is critical to the product manager ability to lead a variety of stakeholders in developing, designing, and shipping successful products.
To evaluate this vast skill set, product managers are tested on the following:
Background
During phone screens and behavioral interviews, you’ll likely be asked about your previous product management experience, your approach to product management, and your most significant product accomplishment(s). In order to be prepared for these type of questions, you might want to think about the ways that you’ve been most impactful throughout your career.
Analytical & Cognitive Skills
You may be asked to speak about your previous analytical experience, whether it was evaluating a new market opportunity or making recommendations after analyzing your company’s user acquisition funnel. Such questions that commonly come up during these interviews are “How might you do a funnel analysis for our product?” or “How would you build a dashboard for our product — what metrics would you track and why?
Leadership & Communication Skills
Some interviews will drill down into your experience with customer engagement, emotional intelligence, operational management, interpersonal teamwork, and cross-functional leadership skills. When thinking about your answers, consider telling stories about the times that you had significant influence or impact while working with others.
Product Sense
Your product sense, in addition to your other decision-making skills, are typically tested in the product management case study interview, which may take place in-person or through a take-home assessment. Many product managers downplay this part of the interview, feeling that they already have these skills from practicing them on the job. That said, interviewing is a different skill and requires dedicated practice as well.
Think of Yourself as a Product During the Interview
Over the last few months, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with dozens of product managers about the most sought-after qualities among product managers and the most effective ways to test those qualities and skills.
From these conversations, it’s clear that the product manager case study is the most popular interview for testing a candidate’s skills. This is because these interviews closely mirror your day-to-day activities as a product manager — testing your product sensibilities while brainstorming, prioritizing, designing, and/or improving features.
Consider telling stories about the times that you had significant influence or impact while working with others.
In these interviews, hiring managers will present you with a scenario and ask you how you’d approach the problem. Questions are typically related to problems faced by the company (“How would you improve Uber’s signup process?”), but may also be more abstract (“Design a vending machine for the blind”).
Whether the case study is practical or abstract, you’ll need to:
- Approach a seemingly intractable problem
- Be thorough when discussing user personas, use cases, and solutions
- Provide product-driven and customer-focused recommendations
- Answer the question in a structured and organized way
There’s no single correct answer in case study interviews, so it’s important to state any assumptions you’ve made and clearly demonstrate the process you took to get to your solution. You’re primarily being evaluated on your approach to the problem, which includes, but is not limited to, identifying types of users, analyzing whether the product is working, and determining key technical considerations (which data to save or metrics to measure).
Preparation is Key
“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
— Alexander Graham Bell
To prepare for product management interviews, be sure to do the following:
- Product Research: Most companies ask product questions related to problems they’ve faced. For the best chance of presenting your interviewer with customer-focused recommendations, it’s vital to spend time researching the company’s product(s) and competitive landscape. By knowing their product, you’ll be able to identify insights that other candidates may miss.
- Develop your approach: A good practice for product management case study interviews is to brainstorm ways that you’d improve the products that you use in your day-to-day activities. As a user yourself, you’ll be able to best understand your needs for using the product, which will help when you start developing improvements for products that you’re not familiar with. When conceiving of your solution, make sure that you start with customer empathy and work backward from the needs of the customer.
- Practice Interviewing: Interviewing is a skill of its own and even the best candidates need to practice communicating under pressure within an interview setting. Whether you’re an experienced or aspiring product manager, you likely already have strong product sensibility and analytical skills, but so does your competition. Doing mock interviews with a fellow product manager will allow you to get critical feedback to help you improve your performance.
Like many interview processes, the product management case study interview is far from perfect. For the best chance of being hired, you’ll not only need to have great product sense, but you’ll also need to be good at interviewing, allowing you to present yourself in the most compelling way possible.
