Product Ownership Interview Questions and Answers

Product Ownership for Product Managers & Product Owners contains the most frequently asked questions that you might face in an interview & this will help you competently crack the interview. 

Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers – Part I: Click Here

Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers – Part I: Click Here

Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers – Part II: Click Here

Questions: Do you believe a successful product owner should have a software development background? What would you recommend to a new product owner who does not have this background? 

Answer: No it is not required for a product owner to have a software background, currently product owners work in many different industries in many different roles. It is not necessarily that teams are always building software there can be many different products. Even if you are building software still Product Owner’s role is to represent the customer, not to say how to develop the product. Product Owner can make a contribution without getting into specifics and saying how to build it. 

Representing the customer can be tough. Sometimes the team will want to build it in one way but your instinct may be to do it another way. You do need to spend enough time with customers to understand their needs and you need to spend the time with the team to understand the things that get in the way of meeting those needs. Just ask. Say, “I want to learn more about the challenges that you face” and then listen. Because there are many, many real barriers to technical implementations that will be helpful for you to understand, and at the end of the day you don’t have to have a technical background to learn about those obstacles.

Questions: How do we differentiate between the product owner and the product manager? Can both roles be a single person?

Answer: The product owner and product manager work very closely together and we overlap a lot. 

In my experience, product managers tend to do more customer-facing interactions and product owners tend to face the team and interact with the team. In larger organizations, there’s a lot of complexity. There’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to measure and a lot of customers. So all of that is just harder to separate and harder to do as one person when you do it at scale.

• Product managers are strategic. They focus on the product’s vision, company objectives, and the market.
• Product owners are more tactical. They translate the product manager’s strategy into actionable tasks and work with cross-functional agile teams to execute those requirements.

Questions: Do you have a tool you use to reduce accidental scope creep? 

Answer: The tool is saying no. It is so hard because a lot of ideas that come through and that end up as scope creep are things that you want and you know the customer wants, too. So the tool I use is just to always remember, “We have to get something out the door in order to get more feedback on it.” And remembering that helps me to say no. It just takes practice.

Questions: How does a large and mature organization deal with pushing out a “just good enough” feature to customers?

Answer: Even medium-sized companies don’t have the same processes across all groups within the organization, and this is magnified in a large organization. Larger companies may make use of beta programs and have various communication channels set up with their customers. These types of channels vary with each organization. These channels provide a way to continuously talk about iterations and set expectations of what will be delivered, when, and why. 

You can do iterative feature development at a large organization – but it should involve more testing. Test, test, and test some more to make sure you don’t interrupt or break something that already exists. It’s also imperative to stay aligned with the various teams that your releases may impact.

Questions: You mentioned that the customer goals were the product owner’s goals. Can there be a divergence between the customer’s goal/ask and what the product vision is?  Should that really be addressed by the product manager? What if what customers are asking for doesn’t align with my product vision? 

Answer: If one customer is asking for something, and it doesn’t align with the product vision, then that might be a unique situation you can ignore. If a larger percentage of your customers are asking for something, and it’s not the product vision, then you need to ask yourself a couple questions:

• Are we building the right thing?
• Is the customer telling us something by saying these things that don’t seem to connect with the product vision?
• Is the product vision off a little bit?
• Are we working with the right audience? For example, have we built something for a team or team-level activity, but all of our customers’ feedback is coming from executives?
• Does that feedback actually counter what you’re building?
• Or are you targeting the wrong folks in order to get feedback, the actual users versus the buyers?

I would say, to the original question about customer’s goals or the product goals, you don’t write the product goal, like, “the customer wants to increase revenue, or customers want to balance their own supply and demand abilities.” Instead, establish their end goal and go from there.

Questions: What are some of your strategies for dealing with the loudest voices or “highest-paid-person” opinions?

Answer: Be confident and represent your customer. Often, the loudest voice in the room is 100% not the correct answer, right? There is no one person that has the right solution to build. So if you have had customer conversations and incorporated feedback from different areas, then you have something to put in front of people and say, this is what the evidence says is what people are actually looking for. Don’t make it about the person, make it about the product or feature. Focus on the thing that the customer is asking for, and then just bring evidence, go to metrics, and use data to have those conversations. 

Sometimes you may have to compromise if there’s some nugget in their feedback that’s actually valid. Sometimes you have to compromise to build relationships and help them trust that you are bringing together the right stuff. Eventually, the loudest voice might start advocating for you. 

Questions: Curious about how you keep various levels of stakeholders up to date on your team’s work.

Answer: This could be different for each organization, but I generally do a monthly mashup to align with stakeholders, separate from a sprint review. In a larger organization, the number of stakeholders may be too numerous to get good feedback from during a review for the team, so a separate meeting may be best to keep the conversations focused on product feedback from users and alignment with stakeholders. Anyone is invited to the mashup and the agenda is co-created by attendees.

Questions: Could you please share your experience with metrics relevant to customer satisfaction?

Answer: There is a difference between overall customer satisfaction and feature satisfaction. NPS score is a generally accepted measure of how likely someone is to recommend your service/product/company. However, there is no easy way to measure feature satisfaction. To understand if something you released was positively accepted by your users, look at validation testing and more specifically, hands-on testing with users rather than a poll. It may be tempting to leave specific feature feedback to a poll or survey, but there is a lot you miss out on from the user if you don’t sit down with them and see how they use your feature or the entire product. After a number of interactions with your users, you can start to see trends in how they feel about your product. 

Also, work with brand marketing and customer success teams, and anyone who is measuring overall product satisfaction. Work with the teams that are connected directly to customers for their insights;  they may have tools to measure sentiment.

Questions: How do you prioritize the competing needs of multiple stakeholders? How do you keep stakeholders in the loop without making them believe that they get to make all the decisions?

Answer: This is all about the refinement steps and stakeholder analysis. When you’ve done the latter, you can include them in your steps to refine the backlog. 

Questions: How do you say no to leadership or stakeholders?

Answer: As it relates to imposter syndrome, this is about quieting the messages that come from your survival brain that say you’re not enough, you’re not high enough on the hierarchy. This is about meeting your stakeholder where they are and meeting them with humanity and empathy.

Questions: How would you deal with team members who reject decisions from a product owner and play down the product owner role within a team?

Answer: This speaks of negative conflict on the team and there are some things you can do to reveal what’s happening and address it. This is very much about leadership and bringing the team together to design an alliance. Your scrum master can help with this if they are a skilled facilitator. If you don’t have that as an option, you might reach out to an agile coach who works at the organization level.  

Questions: Do you have any suggestions for ways to quantify project priority within a backlog?

Answer: Prioritization and ways to do this are organizationally specific. There are lots of models out there so it’s important to establish a consistent approach to defining priorities for your organization. There is a difference between project priority and product and portfolio level prioritization. Maybe you use a KANO method, maybe you prioritize because of financial concerns, or maybe you use a Decision Matrix. Lots of options. Pick one that works for you and your organization and be consistent with using it. It will help clean up the ‘noise’ in the conversations about priority. Without a consistent method for prioritization, I promise you that everyone has a different idea about what ‘priority’ means.

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