What to look for when interviewing a Product Manager

Tami Reiss is the founder of The Product Leader Coach where she works with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If Product Management is both an art and a science, evaluating candidates cannot be something which is 100% objective. That hasn’t stopped people from making millions writing books about acing the PM interview at places like Google or Amazon. This guide isn’t for job seekers, it’s for interviewers, though it could be used by either. It’s particularly targeted at CEOs and other leaders who have not hired a product person before.

You’ve read Ben Horowitz’s Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager, but what should you look for when the candidate is sitting in front of you?

The psychologist next to me on the plane as I blog says that you should look for eye contact. I agree with her, but that’s really something you should look for in any potential hire. Let’s focus interviewing on a product manager.

Depending on your product, the amount of industry or technical experience required will differ, but all product managers should be good story tellers. That is what the rest of this post will center on, what to expect in the stories that a quality candidate tells. The reason why this is important is because how a product manager communicates with you and your team will define their success.

The ideal PM Interview story format:

1. Starts with a problem — Product people are problem solvers, so you should expect their stories to start with an issue they observed or were presented with.
2. Researches the problem — You don’t want to hire someone who jumps straight to a solution, instead look for an individual who invests in understanding the problem first.
3. Collaborates on solution — If the interviewee doesn’t talk about the other people who worked with them to design a solution, it is a big red flag, collaboration is key.
4. Validates problem/Solution match — After problem investigation and solution ideation, they ideally talk about how they validated there was a problem/solution fit.
5. Evolves the idea — Good product managers will leverage the feedback they received while validating their solution to advance the product feature to best match the problem.
6. Empowers builders — Listen for how they talk about working with the developers and note if they only giving instructions or working with the engineers to create the best options.
7. Enables sales/marketing — Whether it’s through a B2B sales team or B2C consumer marketing group, an advanced PM will describe how the feature or product was sold to the market.
8. Measures success — Data driven decisions are what separates average PMs from great ones; an ideal story will include how they collected metrics to define whether the released solution actually solved the user problem.
9. Follows the data — Unless the candidate includes information about how the metrics guided them towards next steps, what was the point of collecting the information?
10. Iterates on product — Launching new things is fun, but a lot of the role will consist of iterating on the same product over and over again, it’s important that they are excited by later versions too.

Though the list of things above seems long, the last thing to look out for is the person’s ability to tell the story in a succinct way. You as an executive and other leaders within your organization will not have time to invest in long drawn out narratives.

What do you look for when PM candidates are answering questions?

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.