3/18/24, 1:46 PM 18 Essential Product Management Interview Questions and Answers | Toptal®

18 Essential Product Management

Interview Questions *
Toptal sourced essential questions that the best product managers can
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INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Can you describe how the product management team participates in

sales enablement?

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An experienced product manager will embrace the responsibility for the success of the
product or service. They will understand the needs of the marketing and sales departments
and invest time to educate sales, systems engineering and marketing resources. A
successful product manager should be able to discuss their role in supporting sales
enablement. Listen for the key activities that support or drive the following activities:

Sales Effectiveness

Sales onboarding: Tools, processes, contacts, references, online resources—the

materials that will get a new sales team up to speed with your new product or service
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Sales training and workshops: Professional sales training for inside and outside sales;
training®incentives, certifications, customer communications training (customer success);
center of excellence training

Training library: Online quick video training (internal and external sourced)

Coaching and recognition: “Buddy” programs for new sales professionals; inside
campaigns (posters, contests, quarterly reviews, sales meetings)

Spiffs and contests: Programs to incentivize deal acceleration

Sales Efficiency

Sales journey roadmap: Engagement plan and account plan support

Process streamlining: Eliminate “order closure” roadblocks; simplify onboarding

Order finalization: RFP/RFI response boilerplates, proposal templates, FAQs, exception

management

Sales repeatability: “Look alike” customer case studies

Customer Engagement

Demo systems and executive briefing center (EBC) management: Logistics and
customer experience; visual representation (videos, posters, catering, décor, etc.)

Major account support (MVPs and VIPs): Processes and direct account support for
major accounts

Segments and vertical markets specialization: Content (messaging) and product

adjustments for specific verticals (e.g., healthcare, finance, public sector)

Online buying experience and online customer management: Blogs, social, chat, online
support, etc.

Customer interactions: Release description documents (RDDs), bulletins, notices,

support, white papers, technical white papers, speaking engagements, events and
tradeshows, thought leadership programs

Channel programs: Supporting htird-party channel organizations (sell thru, sell with,
embed relationships)

Marketing Effectiveness

Resource management: Documentation, people, demos, EBCs, executive engagements

Deal desk support: Supporting the exceptions and negotiations for customer deals
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Sales scripts and vertical playbooks: Ensuring the messaging is factual and represents
the product
® and/or company direction

Prospect qualification identification: Support in identifying high-value prospects

If your candidate is able to describe at least three of these key areas, then they have
demonstrated the real-life experience of working in a functional product management role.

2. Have you ever been in a situation where your team has let you down
and you’ve had to take the blame?

Hide answer

A professional product manager will always manage the communications around “fault.” For
a team effort, they would ultimately own the responsibility for the delay, taking the blame
and need to learn from that experience to correct estimates and commitments for the future.
If the delay was caused by malfeasance or lack of skills, then corrective action should be
initiated by the product manager. Performing a root cause analysis for the delay is important
and should be part of every continuous improvement initiative. In discussing this with your
candidate, listen for the business approach to addressing slippages.

3. What are the identifiable differences between a project manager and

a product manager?

Hide answer

A project manager will drive the day to day activities for every meeting, will be very detailed
about who’s doing what, and will be responsible for the on-budget and on-time delivery of
commitments. A product manager is also responsible for the delivery but they will act more
as a business owner, responsible for the success or failure of the product or service in the
market.

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4. Product managers will often have to manage personnel issues or

conflicts. Can you describe a time where you had to deal with a
personnel issue?

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Listen for empathy and a willingness to listen. In some cases, an individual just might not be
a fit, and that person—while they have great talents in certain areas—might need to rethink
their professional goals. If it’s not a direct report, they may have coordinated with the direct
manager. The product manager needs to manage the situation and make the changes that
will get the team back on track.

An experienced product manager may have developed a performance improvement plan, or

PIP, which they monitored and reviewed with the employee on a weekly or monthly basis. In
larger enterprises, this might have included human resources. Termination or reassignment
may have been required. Explore how they were able to deal with this type of situation and
the result. Listen for concrete steps to get the team back on track.

5. What was your most successful product as product manager?

Hide answer

You’re looking for the qualitative and quantitative measures that can identify a strong
product manager. What were the revenues or user count? Over what period? What was the
value that they achieved? A professional product manager will be able to point to simplify
their achievements in terms that relate to business results.

For example, even for highly complex technological innovations, they should be able to
convert it into business values. “Our team created and patented complex machine learning
algorithm to predict traffic volumes” is a reasonable response. But this has not provided the
“So what?” answer. “Our team created and patented complex machine learning algorithm to
predict traffic volumes, reducing congestion by 30% and traffic accidents by 15%.” Drill down
into the details of the project to confirm that they were actually driving the effort, not just
part of the
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6. How do
® you define market opportunity in a business plan?

Hide answer

An experienced product manager will be able to describe market opportunity in various

ways, including the total dollar value available in the market. Often 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 a market size. A product
manager should also be able to describe the portion of that whole value that would be
available to them, 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.

7. What are signs that it’s time to cut corners to get the product
launched, and what would you cut?

Hide answer

An experienced product manager will recognize early that the are not going to meet their
deadlines. It might be apparent when testing is failing, when sprints are not completing on
time, or when UX design is falling behind.

An experienced product manager will be exploring different opportunities to meet their

deadline. Explore some of the potential actions they took:

1. Did they reduce functionality to a minimum for the first release?

2. Did they re-prioritize their roadmap?

3. Did they move ahead without an MVP?

4. Did they soft-launch with selected customers and announce full commercial launch for a
later date?

They should be able to explain how they determined that there was a problem and what
actions they took to resolve the gap. Listen for the impact on sales, marketing, and support.
How did they communicate the changes to manage the impact? Validate that the decisions
were typically ancillary changes, not impacting the core of the product.
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8. In the ®context of product management, how would you describe “low-

hanging fruit”?

Hide answer

In the context of product management, low-hanging fruit often refers to a quick win. This
might refer to a target market that is in dire need of a solution, or may be a
feature/functionality add on that will drive exponential revenues. Explore how a product
management candidate might be attuned to market changes that would suddenly create an
opportunity for dramatic changes in results.

The 80/20 rule applies here—gaining 80% of the value with 20% of the effort. Or, from
another perspective, addressing 80% of the market and treating outliers as exceptions.

9. What are the most exciting technology trends and why are they
important?

Hide answer

A professional product manager will be on top of the latest trends in the industry. Listen for
augmented reality, the growth of audio interactions in all systems, virtual reality, analytics,
artificial intelligence, or blockchain. Ask how they might affect individuals as they become
more prevalent and listen for automation, predictive analytics, and process automation.
Explore their methods for staying on top of trends and how they may incorporate advances
into the solutions they are bringing to market.

10. What are the important elements of a competitive analysis?

Hide answer

An experienced product manager should break a competitive analysis question into two
parts—the first 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.
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A second, more detailed technical analysis 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.

11. Can you explain the impact of GDPR on today’s products and
services?

Hide answer

One of the most stringent regulations (in line with the complexity of HIPAA), the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides very stringent rules for how data related to personally
identifiable information (PII) must be handled for any client in the European Union. Fines for
non-conformance are potentially in the tens of millions of dollars.

A professional product manager will have a concrete understanding of what comprises PII
data, along with the key concerns for management of the data. Of key importance is to listen
for the collection process for data, what comprises PII data (anything that can be tied to a
person) and the right to be forgotten. This last element implies that all records must be
purged from any active or inactive archive and can have complex implications on historical
analytics and machine learning solutions.

Furthermore, the product manager should be aware that if they are not compliant, they
cannot operate, market, or advertise in the EU without potentially being in violation of the
GDPR. In an internet commerce where apps can be downloaded from anywhere, explore
th i d t di f th i k

12. What is your experience with shutting down a product or service?

What are the key challenges in an end-of-life (EOL) process?

Hide answer

The EOL process can be complicated, and a professional product manager should be able
to describe the key elements, including:

EOL decision-making: What drives the decision to EOL?

Sales notifications: How to prepare Sales for an EOL situation with their customers
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Customer migration plans: What alternatives are possible, how can they migrate?
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Returns, rebates, upsell policies: Are there alternatives? What would the financials look
like? ®

End of life, end of support, end of availability: The timing of stopping selling, stopping
availability, and stopping support

Contracting: For large customer and/or channel notifications and meeting any
contractual obligations as it may relate to notification periods, service-level agreements
(SLAs), and penalties

Explore whether they have had the experience to make the decision and manage the
complexity without damaging the company brand or losing large customers.

They should be concerned how the EOL might affect future sales or create litigation and
need to have a good handle on the risk/reward analysis.

13. What was the hardest decision you had to make as a product
manager? How did you handle it?

Hide answer

Product managers must make strong complex decisions. You’re looking for the analysis that
went into the decision, the research that was done, and the result or impact that happened
as a result of the decision. A hard decision is driven by recognizing that a recommendation
is going to impact a lot of people, and the business overall. It might be a personnel decision
or perhaps a dramatic change in product direction.

Hard decisions imply having to convince a lot of people of a point of view. Listen for the
process that was employed to get agreement from the company to proceed with the
d i i

14. Can you describe a scenario as a product manager where you failed?
And what did you learn from it?

Hide answer

You’re looking for someone with experience. Challenge any product manager who could not
find fault with a decision or outcome within their realm of responsibility. The learnings are
key, as they will identify an individual who has taken the experience to heart and improved.

The type of failure they encountered should be material to the results of the product or
service that
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Perhaps they were trying to compete in a saturated market where differentiation was hard to
identify or did
® not have enough value. Other challenges might be internal to the company
operations.

Perhaps they did not price it effectively, or the pricing model was too complex. If the solution
was too complex for onboarding, then perhaps the churn rates were too high. If there was
not marketing and sales team to get the word out, then perhaps they were unable to make
the case for a strong business plan.

15. How do you monitor performance and success?

Hide answer

A professional product manager 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. Listen for a solid
selection of the following KPIs:

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
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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

As a follow up, ask them what they did when they found a KPI that was not moving in the

16. How do you gain credibility from the development/engineering

teams as a new product manager?

Hide answer

Product managers should be comfortable with jumping in and providing leadership to a

team. Listen for their ability to listen and respect opinions and suggestions of the team. How
did they initially engage with the team? Did they engage in a workshop or webinar session
with the team to get feedback and new ideas?

They should represent the team with honesty and integrity and set reasonable expectations
to the business outside the team (sales, marketing, finance, ops, support).

From a technical perspective, their ability to review proposals and recommendations should
reflect their technical knowledge of the environments. Team members will expect the
product manager to make timely choices and reflect recommendations, and remain
confident in their data-driven decisions.

Listen for explanations that describe their decision-making acumen, their communication
skills, and respect for the team. They should represent that credibility means honest, clear
communications with results that match the commitments that they set.

17. Please describe the “…ilities”—the foundational elements that are

required for a SaaS-based enterprise offering. For example, scalability
would be one.
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Primarily in ®the context of enterprise-grade offerings where a SaaS or cloud infrastructure

element exists, listen for functional descriptions of the following:

Securability: The ability to protect/secure the environment; meet regulatory

requirements, preparation for a high-availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR) situation;
and everything in between (authentication, access controls (RBAC, VBAC), data
management, encryption, archiving); and compliance reporting—this can be driven from
following a 5x9’s consideration (prevalent in the telco world) to meeting regulatory
definitions (GDPR may be mentioned).

Scalability: The ability to manage peak performance and/or growth demands without
impacting the production environment; managing any kind of migration, or cloud
environment must not impact existing customers. This is a core requirement—especially
necessary when dealing with high growth potential. This may also include multi-tenancy.

Reliability: Critical KPIs for uptime and performance—24/7/365 systems have to be

working at peak performance, so peak load conditions must be planned, designed, and
tested. Often, having a failover or backup strategy leveraging in-house or external cloud
providers can support these situations.

Manageability: The ability to support customer/user policy controls/access to the

systems and the network is critical, so consideration must be taken to simplify
provisioning and management of entitlements to shorten the sales cycle and deal with
change in the customer organization.

Billability: The system design must consider the potential for different billing meters—
whether it be subscriber-based, usage-based, transaction-based, or via other meters.
They must be able to be easily adjusted (from one meter to another) to capture usage
counts. Reporting of usage must be simplified and automated for simplified revenue
recognition and auditing purposes. Further, when there are layers of responsibility (e.g.,
vendor selling through channel to enterprise with employees that need access); then the
structure of the meters (and security) must allow for distinct reporting and policy controls

18. What is the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and why is it important for
many software vendors?

Hide answer

An experienced product manager should be able to explain that Gartner is an analyst firm in
the IT sector. Gartner has defined a methodology for identifying leaders, visionaries, niche
players, and
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revenues, and on acquiring investments. Explore whether they have experience in moving
the position® of a product on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and if they have, how they
accomplished it.

* There is more to interviewing than tricky technical questions, so these are intended merely as a
guide. Not every “A” candidate worth hiring will be able to answer them all, nor does answering
them all guarantee an “A” candidate. At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a
lot of work.

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