How PMs Interview Other Roles
Given their inherent cross-functional responsibilities, product managers are often asked to interview engineering and design candidates at a company. The Boston Product community shared their favorite questions for each role.
Interviewing Engineers
Good engineers ask questions. They don’t treat a specification as gospel and set about writing code. They know it’s a starting point for conversation, and they challenge assumptions and ambiguity. To test this, Max Milhan does a demo of a feature, reviewing requirements that he knows to be missing some context, and asks the engineer what next steps would be.
Product managers are often judged on their ability to communicate with engineers, but strong engineers are also able to make technical concepts accessible to the rest of the team. Amanda Cripps and Max Freiert ask engineers to explain technical concepts they’ve worked on. Specifically, they want to see how engineers convey their interest, whether they express any empathy for the user, humility for the work, and how approachable the response is from a non-technical perspective.
How does an engineer handle personal conflict? Marc Tollin presents candidates with scenarios: “Let’s say the person you’re pairing with isn’t writing unit tests for their work or has refused to do so in the past. How would you approach that?”
Erin Teare Martin uses behavioral interview tactics to suss out biases and habits. Using the “tell me about a time when” format, she asks about prior successful engineering-product relationships, disagreements with the roadmap, poor documentation, and collaboration with non-technical teammates.
Interviewing Data Scientists
Data science is all the rage lately, and if you haven’t interviewed a candidate for this role yet, it’s probably only a matter of time. Emily Batt likes to ask about unsuccessful applications of data science and looks for self awareness or an ability to identify why something failed. She listens for comments on overfitting data, using too many features in a model, or improper use cases—i.e. “machine learning isn’t the right fit for this problem.”
To assess the ability to communicate with non-data wonks, you might offer a data visualization exercise, or ask for an “explain it like I’m five” definition of machine learning. Melissa Appel asks candidates to present a project to a small group of colleagues to see how they handle the Q&A.
Lastly, you want to understand how a data scientist will behave with imperfect data sets. Are they comfortable with the 80/20 rule? (And is that something you want from your data scientist?)
Interviewing Designers
As with PMs and engineers, designers need to be able to communicate their decisions clearly. Justin Fyles likes to ask designers to walk through apps on their phone that they like or dislike and explain why.
As a PM on the Invision team, Brendan Quinn has lots of experience with product designers. He asks questions about their design process to see how much “problem focus” they have, the role that data/research play, and who gets involved at each stage.
Both he and Ray Cha agree it’s important for the company to know what type of designer they’re hiring for—visual design and UI only? UX and research? Front-end development? Some kind of hybrid?—and emphasize the right aspects of the role during interviews. You want to make sure you’re setting clear expectations for the role and that you end up with someone who will be happy at the company.
Of course, for any candidate, it’s good to ask questions that help you learn about the whole person, not just the employee. What are they reading? What do they do for fun? What hobbies or side projects do they have? What can you ask them about that gets them to light up and show their personality?
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