Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers

Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers contains the most frequently asked questions that you might face in an interview & this will help you competently crack the interview. A Product Manager is a professional role that is responsible for delivering a differentiated product to market that addresses a market need and represents a viable business opportunity. A key component of the Product Manager’s role is ensuring that the product supports the company’s overall strategy and goals. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product, specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features. Although the Product Manager is ultimately responsible for managing the product throughout its lifecycle – conception through end-of-life – they receive assistance throughout this process from specialists such as designers, developers, quality assurance engineers, supply chain and operations experts, manufacturing engineers, Product Marketing Managers, project managers, sales professionals, and more.

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1. What is Product Management & what are the stages of the Product Life Cycle?

Product management is a process within a company that involves product development, planning, research, forecasting, pricing, and more, all of which lead to a product launch and product marketing. 

Once a product is brought to market, Product Managers will often also continue to refine the product after its launch. Product Managers make strategic, creative, and data-driven product decisions, conducting user research and market analysis to help lead a product team to create unique and attractive products that meet customers’ needs and ultimately help a company meet its business goals.

The product life cycle is split into four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

1. Introduction: the first stage is when an approved idea turns into an actual product and is marketed to consumers of its existence.
2. Growth: a successful product will grow and see an increase in demand. It’ll be made more accessible.
3. Maturity: if a product reaches the maturity stage it means it has become profitable. It also means there will be a rise in competitors and its market share may start to decrease.
4. Decline: the last stage of the product life cycle sees the collapse of the product. This can be due to high competition or a lack of demand.

2. Why is Product Management important & list a few challenges organizations face in this process?

Product Management works across departments and functions to define the strategy, roadmap, and features of entire product lines. Without product management, different departments would struggle to come together to figure out what they need to provide in order to create a successful product. So it helps the rest of the company understand the value of a product. 

Product development only works with a system of oversight to ensure all those parts are working together properly.  Product Management is important because it helps the rest of the company understand the value of a product. Product management not only figures out what customers like and don’t like but also why.

Here is few challenges faced by an organization in product management terms:

• Customers cannot easily articulate what they want
• The technology landscape is changing rapidly
• Competition is fierce and global
• Industry boundaries are changing
• Players from outside are launching products in your markets (Tesla, Apple)
• Product pricing is more challenging than ever, especially given global competition
• Operational efficiencies and economies of scale are making mincemeat of margins
• Getting the maximum ROI from an organization’s existing financial resources and other resources is difficult

3. What are the differences between a product manager and a project manager?

A project manager is in charge of the day-to-day activities of the processes that revolve around all the projects an organization is running. This includes; assigning duties and responsibilities to every member of staff, and ensuring that everyone meets their KPIs, being in charge of every meeting regarding the project, and ensuring that there is a budget that is strictly adhered to.

A product manager focuses on a product, or more, depending on the company, not the entire project/projects run by the company. Their job is to outline all the steps from when the product idea is conceived to when the product reaches its final consumer. They are in charge of making sure that the process is a successful one and that the product does well in the market.

In simplest terms, a Project Manager delivers a complete project, while a Product Manager delivers a usable product. The difference here is that a product isn’t “complete” in the same way a project is once it’s launched.

Project Manager Responsibilities

• Project plan: A detailed document that includes scope, timeline, resources, and costs that maps out the optimal path to project completion.
• Stakeholder communication: This can be something as simple as an email or as detailed as a presentation, but typically outlines progress and next steps.
• Project handover: All of the documents and artifacts needed for the next or future teams to operate and maintain the outcome of a project (ie. a new product).
• Post-mortem: A report or presentation that explains what went well and what didn’t. It’s meant to help future Project Managers better predict obstacles and identify helpful shortcuts.

Product Manager Responsibilities

• Product strategy: A document outlining the vision of the product that includes how the product will evolve, how it will get there and why it’ll be successful with customers. The customer’s needs must have a starring role in this document.
• Product roadmap: The roadmap is a visual representation of how your product will evolve over time. It helps ensure that even the smallest tasks roll up to the grander goal. It used to prioritize tasks, coordinate teams and track overall progress.
• Product backlog/user stories: This is essentially a working list of things to be done during product development from the perspective of the user. The product manager is constantly maintaining the backlog.
• Product analytics: Once the product is launched, a Product Manager monitors its usage, analytics, and customer feedback to look for areas of improvement or new opportunity.

4. What are the Skills and Competencies required in a Product Manager role?

Product Manager roles have several key components as mentioned below

Domain expertise: Very often, your knowledge of the market and product area is why the company hired you. 

Business expertise: You need to have a suite of business skills to keep your product profitable.

Leadership skills: Many people within the company are looking to you for guidance & leadership skills.

Operational ability: Product Managers need to dive deep into the many nitty-gritty details needed to manage a product: for example, creating part numbers or updating a spreadsheet. Sometimes you can get someone else to do these tasks, but many times you are responsible for them.

5. How do you monitor performance and success?

Product Managers will have a strong set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that they will monitor in order to understand their position, growth, progress, and success. There are four key categories to listen for, including business metrics, product usage metrics, product development metrics, and product quality metrics. 

KPIs which Product Manager monitors are:

• Revenues or bookings: Top-line dollars that have committed to in conjunction with the sales team
• Funnel: Sales in process
• Retention, attrition, churn, customer lifetime value: Track the movement or flow of customers
• Customer counts: Current customer base
• Velocity, time to revenue, onboarding times: Looking to accelerate revenue recognition and customer adoption
• Margins, gross margins, costs of goods sold (COGS), and operational costs of goods sold (OCOGS): Understanding the cost basis on which to calculate profitability
• Net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT): Subjective analysis of customer feedback
• Number of users per feature or transaction volumes: Can track feature importance for prioritizing sprints, and can highlight value for marketing or competitive positioning
• Time to execute: Records of time that functions take to perform, possibly indicating infrastructure or complex calculations which will result in customer complaints for poor performance
• On-time delivery: Managing the roadmap and creating credibility—the integrity of the team will depend on delivering as expected, on-time
• Team velocity: Monitoring team performance against sprint calculations using story points
• Resource availability: Monitoring critical resource availability and planning appropriately for coverage
• Support tickets and escalations: Monitoring the quality of the released product
• Testing or QA: Monitoring the quality of the code going into test

6. What is the key to a good user interface?

Simplicity and Functionality are both crucial to a good user interface. They should be intuitive to use and navigate, with a consistent look and feel. The key UI design principles are:

• Place users in control of the interface
• Make it comfortable to interact with a product
• Reduce cognitive load
• Make user interfaces consistent

7. Describe a scenario that required you to say no to an idea or project without impacting the motivation of the person?

Product Managers guide products from ideation to launch, and that means they’re involved in a great number of decisions – and brainstorming sessions. So if you’ve been in the job for any amount of time, you’ll likely have a long list of suggestions, concepts, and even projects that you’ve had to shoot down as being ineffective, unrealistic, or unoriginal. The key in answering this question in an interview, however, is showing that you can be tactful and encouraging even in saying no. Show that you can be flexible and open-minded.

Framework for Saying No

1. Listen Actively– Reserve judgment, Don’t interrupt, Use affirmative body language to show you are paying attention, Pay attention & Paraphrase.
2. Find the Value – Ask clarifying questions, quantify the value, gather additional data if needed.
3. Summarize – Summarizing is a powerful tool to demonstrate that you’ve understood what the other person has said.
4. Explain the Cost – The effort to develop this idea vs ROI, divergence if any from the product strategy or roadmap, Accrual of technical debt & overall impact on user experience.
5. Say no – Reiterate that you appreciate their idea and would like to hear any more they have in the future.

8. What Does a Product Manager Do Day-to-Day?

The Product Manager is responsible for overseeing product development from ideation/conception to launch/completion. Product Managers rely on a deep user experience understanding when working with their research, technical, and marketing teams. They also cultivate a comprehensive understanding of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, always maintaining a desire for improvement. This role has both internal-facing and external-facing aspects, and requires a mix of:

• Research
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Documentation
• Management

A Product Manager’s daily tasks depend on what stage of product development their product is in but typically Product Manager’s tasks fall into four (categories:

Product Strategy

Before development begins, the Product Manager develops a document to clearly outline a vision for the product, including how the product will evolve over time, how it will get there, and why it will be successful. Underlying all of these considerations are the customers’ needs.

Product Roadmap

The roadmap is a visual representation of how the product will evolve over time. This big-picture plan helps to ensure that even the smallest steps of the product’s development play their part in helping to reach its grander goal. This plan is then used to prioritize tasks, coordinate between teams, and continually measure overall progress.

Product Backlog and User Stories

Getting into the nitty-gritty of building out the product’s features, this list is essentially a running tally of things to be done during product development. This to-do list is framed from the perspective of the user, not the Developer, and so focuses on the product per se and not the work that goes into making it.

Product Analytics

After a product has launched, the work continues, as new features are rolled out and bugs are removed. Product Managers monitor all the data that feeds into this ongoing process (including how the product is used, performance analytics, and customer feedback) to identify areas for improvement.

Underlying each of these responsibilities is Product Managers’ passion for understanding their users’ problems and needs, which they translate into a comprehensive understanding of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, always maintaining a desire for improvement.

9. What Are Product Management Tools?

A Product Manager will need to use a number of tools, including:

• Industry analysis tools
• Roadmapping and flowcharting software
• User survey and analysis tools
• Project management tools
• Collaboration and team messaging tools

Industry Analysis Tools

Product Manager contributes to a company’s overall business plan with their insights on which products to create and which features to highlight. They usually begin with industry reports from research firms like Gartner or Sirius Decisions, who collect the kinds of data crucial to building a business plan.

Roadmapping and Flowcharting Tools

The next step in any product’s development is to lay out a clear plan for how the process will unfold. They use native applications like ProductPlan, designed for building out flexible and easy-to-share roadmaps that include built-in features for version control issues, visualization, and interactivity, helping to better convey the plan to the entire team. Flowcharting tools like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle enable Product Managers to diagram and rapid-prototype the user journey, identifying all the points of contact between customer and brand along the way.

User Analysis and Feedback Tools

User’s experience of a product is one of the Product Manager’s key focuses. This can be done by customer survey tools, like Google Surveys, SurveyMonkey, Pollfish, and Typeform, give test users an easy, web-based forum to submit their input in response to specific questions—which features they use most, for example, or would most like to see added in the future.

To learn things about your users that they don’t know about themselves—and so can’t report—there are product analysis tools like Pendo, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. These help Product Managers collect data on the user experience by tracking users’ actual behavior on their sites or using their software.

Project Tracking and Management Tools

Jira, Microsoft Project, Pivotal Tracker, and Trello are a few project tracking and management tools to track of different tasks and their statuses, share information with team members, and monitor issues for resolution.

Collaboration Tools

Product Managers for team messaging rely on, platforms like Slack and Confluence, while collaborative files frequently live in places like Evernote, Google Drive, and Dropbox. For presentation rely on PowerPoint or Keynote to deliver ideas to team members or other stakeholders.

10. What Is the Design Thinking Process?

Design thinking is an iterative process that aims to understand users, challenge commonly held assumptions and conventions, and find innovative solutions to complex problems. Design thinking can be used to describe Designers’ approach to looking at practical problems and how they can be addressed through design. In the world of development, “design thinking” typically refers to a more structured methodology with clearly delineated steps.

Design thinking not only provides a way to develop and define which measures need to be taken, it also ensures that nothing is overlooked as you move forward. Through repetition and by constantly questioning the effectiveness of your solutions with each cycle, the flaws that might be lurking in the conceptualization process can be brought forward, examined, and solved sequentially.

11. What Are the Five Steps of the Design Process?

The design thinking process typically involves five phases that Designers move through, though not always in that exact order:

• Empathize – This phase is all about researching your end users’ needs through an empathetic lens.
• Define – Once you’ve dug into what your target users need, it’s time to compile and analyze those observations to figure out the true nature of the problem you’re trying to solve.
• Ideate – With lots of insight into your users’ needs analyzed and your goal clearly defined, it’s time to start brainstorming concepts—and challenging your own assumptions.
• Prototype – This is the phase where you’ll want to zero in on which of your solutions are actually feasible, and which will produce the best results.
• Test – Trying your ideas out to see if they work isn’t the final phase of the cycle,

12. How do you define market opportunity in a business plan?

The Product manager describes the market opportunity in various ways, including the total dollar value available in the market referred to as total addressable market (TAM). It represents the current and growing (future) total value of what everyone will spend on solutions of the same type.

The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) represents the speed at which the market is growing, and would often also be referenced when talking about market size. 

A product manager describes the portion of that whole value that would be available to users, which represents their potential market share (or addressable market). This value might be represented as a percentage of the market, or in a dollar value.

13. What are the important elements of competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis has technical and business aspects. The business aspect is the strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis that will be used internally by the company to develop strong positioning statements for the sales and systems engineering teams. It should cover both the technical and business aspects of the competitor. For example, if the company is financially unstable, this can be used in a “maturity and risk” discussion with a potential customer.

The technical aspect would do a feature-by-feature comparison, highlighting the gaps that the competitor has. It should be factual and presented in a professional, non-slanderous format. This may include actually downloading the competitive application and using it or calling their support lines to explore how they perform. Often, companies will have these comparisons completed by a third party to represent an independent assessment.

14. How do you determine which features you should add to your product?

Product managers should have extensive knowledge of their users’ needs to design features and products that appeal most to their customers. The most effective way for them to come up with features that will benefit users is to have a strategy for researching their users and determining their needs. You should emphasize:

• Research and analytical skills
• Familiarity of common frameworks to determine users’ needs
• Clear strategy for applying feedback and data to their updates and additional features

e.g. I’ll typically start by conducting research on our current users. I’ll review insights to determine which features they’re currently using the most and will determine what type of updates I can add to make that specific feature more enjoyable for them. Another method I use is reviewing the comments and feedback that users will leave on our software or the input they provide our sales or customer service teams.

15. How do you avoid and manage scope creep?

Avoid – I normally allocate a good amount of time at the beginning of the project with clients and stakeholders, getting them to agree to what I am about to do. Also, I made sure that our team has a detailed product roadmap, so we know ahead of time what we are likely going to be working on. This way, when new features come up during development, it is easy for everyone on my team to know whether they are part of the scope we agreed upon.

Manage – If a request is out of scope and would have a significant impact on the timeline or budget, I let the person asking for the feature addition that it doesn’t fall into scope. I outline the overall impact the new request could have, including timeline delays, budget implications, and risk increases. Then, I would provide additional information about how they can have their request assessed in the future, potentially allowing it to be added to a future project.

16. If you have two desirable features, but the budget and timeline only support one, how do you choose which to pursue?

The first step is to consider the customer & their need. If one is more desirable than the other, that is a priority. Then factor in whether one feature would differentiate the product from the competition, as that could result in greater market success. Finally, consider the cost and time required for each option account.

17. How do you decide what not to build?

Five-step process which will help to understand what needs to be built:

• Identification of market trends and demand for the product, available resources and if it is feasible.
• Brainstorming with the team to plan out product design, development, and process of execution.
• Measuring scalability to figure out the availability and quantity of resources for product development.
• Preparation for the execution by collecting resources and resolving challenges
• Execution to bring the plan to action.

18. Based on what metrics would you measure a product’s success?

I will measure a product’s success on 6 parameters:

• Product Awareness (number of people that know about the product)
• Product Breadth (Number of people using the product)
• Frequency of Use (How frequently does the user return)
• Product Depth (analyzing features of the product being used)
• Efficiency
• Customer Satisfaction

19. On what parameters do you base the performance of a product in the market from a product manager’s perspective?

A product’s market success can be measured on 4 parameters:

• Product Usage– monthly users and users per feature.
• Product Quality– escalation and negative feedbacks, product testing to validate the quality of the product and draw a roadmap for ongoing improvement.
• Product Development– On-time delivery, resource availability and estimated time to complete development.
• Business performance– Customer experience, revenues, bookings, profits, and costs.

20. What Does a Product Manager Do & what are they responsible for in SAFe?

The Product Manager:

• Defines the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
• Gathers manages and prioritizes market/customer requirements.
• Acts as the customer advocate articulating the user’s and/or buyer’s needs.
• Works closely with engineering, sales, marketing, and support to ensure business case and customer satisfaction goals are met.

With respect to SAFe Framework

The Product Manager has content authority at the program level and is responsible for Program Vision and Program Backlog. Listed below are the primary responsibilities of the Product Manager in the context of a single Agile Release Train.

• Understand customer needs and participate in the validation of the proposed solutions
• Has the responsibility to understand and support portfolio work
• Develop and communicate the program vision to the development teams and defines the roadmap
• Manage the flow of work through the program Kanban and into the program backlog
• Participate in PI meetings and Inspec & Adapt workshops

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