Product Manager Interviews
Product managers own the product strategy and deliverables of a company. It’s their job to know what is most important, what project should be worked on and in what order, and what the product should look like. They often meet with customers to define “user stories” which Software Engineers or others then take and build out based on the criteria defined.
Interview Questions
General Questions
- Intro and ice breakers
- Tell me about your past experience
- Why do you want to join “Company ACME”
- What interests you about the “insert team they will be working with here”
- What does SCRUM mean to you?
- How do you deal with engineers who don’t have the same product roadmap vision as you?
- How do you balance customer feedback (bug reports, feature requests) with internal engineering needs (dependencies, testing, etc). They both compete for time on a product backlog
- Do you know much about “Company ACME”? Could you explain our product to me?
- Tell me about a time where you had to work across various departments for a project, how did you handle all that communication?
- How do you handle trigger happy engineers who pick up tasks outside of the planned sprint?
- Talk to me about a large feature you oversaw. How did that process go from start to finish?
- How do you prioritize user stories?
- If time permits, ask questions about items on their resume
Developer Experience Team Questions
- What does it mean to “make it easy for developers to understand, use, debug, and get help” with our API per the job listing
- What does developer experience mean to you?
- What are some things you know a developer experience team can focus on?
- What’s a client library and why is it important?
- What’s the importance of documentation? What makes good documentation? Can you share examples of fantastic documentation you’ve come across yourself?