Product Manager Technical Background Interview Questions

1. Why did you decide to move from engineering to product management?
2. What is the biggest advantage of having a technical background?
3. What is the biggest disadvantage?
4. What was the biggest lesson you learned when you moved from engineering to product management?
5. What do you wish you’d known when you were an engineer?
6. How do you earn the respect of the engineering team?

Product Manager Design Interview Questions

1. Tell me about your product design process and experience?
2. Have you worked with UX/UI Designers and how so?
3. A product is ready to ship, but the UX Designer doesn’t approve of shipping because of an UX issue, what do you do?
4. How do you know when a design is “done”?
5. Analyze the UX/UI of our product, how would you improve it?
6. What are pitfalls of being too reliant on hard data in product design?

Product Manager Operations Interview Questions

1. What software development methods have you used?
2. How did you work with your engineers in your current or previous role?
3. What’s a cool innovative technology or product that you’ve seen recently and why?
4. What do you want to build here and why?
5. Tell me about that time when you’ve hit a sticking point with your engineering team. What was it and how did you work through it
6. Where do you think the industry is going? Is it ripe for disruption?
7. What’s the competitive landscape and revenue model? What’s the value chain?
8. Can the company position itself for success and what does that mean for the product?
9. We’re thinking about expanding into XYZ business, should we?Tell me about a great product you’ve encountered recently. Why do you like it? [By the way, it drives me crazy when candidates name one of my products in an interview. I had a hard time hiring anybody at Yahoo! who told me the coolest product they’d come across recently was Yahoo! Good grief.]
10. What made our product successful?
11. What do you dislike about my product? How would you improve it?
12. What problems are we going to encounter in a year? Two years? Ten years?
13. How do you know a product is well designed?
14. What’s one of the best ideas you’ve ever had?
15. What is one of the worst?
16. How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
17. What lessons have you learned about user interface design?
18. How do you decide what not to build?
19. What was your biggest product mistake?
20. What aspects of product management do you find the least interesting and why?
21. Do you consider yourself creative?

Product Manager Metrics/Pricing Interview Questions

1. When have you used massive amounts of data to drive a decision?
2. How would you price a product of ours?
3. Your sales and marketing team came to you with a feature request, build it and a deal gets done, what do you do?
4. Tell me about a business or product metric that you were responsible for and how you went about attaining it.
5. How would you determine the price for piece of wearable technology?

Product Manager Strategy Interview Questions

1. What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?
2. How would you build a website for blind people?
3. How would you re-position a company’s offerings to counteract competitive threats?
4. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
5. How many bottles of shampoo are produced in the world a year?
6. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
7. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
8. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
9. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
10. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
11. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
12. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
13. You have 15 horses that run various speeds. You own a race track on which you can race the horses, and this track holds a maximum of 5 horses per race. If you have no stopwatch or other means of telling exactly how fast the horses are, how many races would you need to run between the horses to be ABSOLUTELY SURE which horses are first, second, and third fastest?
14. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
15. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
16. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
17. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
18. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
19. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
20. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
21. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
22. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
23. You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
24. Describe a technical problem you had and how you solved it.
25. How would you design a simple search engine?
26. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
27. There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
28. What are three long term challenges facing Google?
29. Name three non-Google websites that you visit often and like. What do you like about the user interface and design? Choose one of the three sites and comment on what new feature or project you would work on. How would you design it?
30. If there is only one elevator in the building, how would you change the design? How about if there are only two elevators in the building?
31. How many vacuum’s are made per year in USA?

Product Manager Leadership Questions

1. Is consensus always a good thing?
2. What’s the difference between management and leadership?
3. What kinds of people do you like to work with?
4. What types of people have you found it difficult to work with?
5. Tell me about a time when a team didn’t gel. Why do you think that happened, and what have you learned?
6. How do you get a team to commit to a schedule?
7. What would somebody do to lose your confidence?
8. Do you manage people from different functions differently? If so, how?
9. What have you learned about saying no?
10. Who has the ultimate accountability for shipping a product?
11. Have you ever been in a situation where your team has let you down and you’ve had to take the blame?
12. How has your tolerance for mistakes changed over the years?
13. Which do you like first, the good news or the bad news?
14. What’s your approach to hiring?
15. How have you learned to work with sales?
16. What is the best way to interface with customers?
17. What makes marketing tick?
18. How do you know when design is on the right track?
19. How should a product manager support business development?
20. What have you learned about managing up?
21. What’s the best way to work with the executives?

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