Best 6 Product Manager Interview Questions

Are you looking to hire a project manager to propel your company forward and make revenue goals come to fruition? Take a look at the top product manager interview questions to pose during your next hiring cycle.

Best Product Manager Interview Questions

Tell me about recent product launches in your last role and how you determined their success or failure.

A good product manager understands the problem he or she is trying to solve before solving it. This means that the candidate will have clear, data-driven metrics for success and failure pinpointed before the work begins. As such, the interviewee should be able to clearly tell you if the launch was a success or a failure.

Walk me through the steps of how you would design “X Product.”

A great candidate would follow up with clarifying questions for this one. This is one of the top product manager interview questions, as it reveals a specific example of a product—and how the interviewee would execute the idea from start to finish.

If you were given two products to build from scratch, but you only had the time & resources to construct one, how would you decide which one to build?

Product strategy means saying “no” sometimes. Product managers should prioritize by selecting the project that will likely generate 80% of the impact and forecast what that impact is. Also, he or she should factor in the SWAG cost in resources, money and other scarce resources before deciding to build.

This system forces a product manager to really think through themes, create a plan, allocate resources, eliminate the need to prioritize different projects against each other, and forecast impact. That’s what makes this one of the top product manager interview questions.

Tell me about your current role on your team, or previous role. Who else did you work with, and how did you work with them?

Excellent product managers will discuss working with analysts and engineers. Listen for indications that the candidate follows a continuing regular and flexible feedback loop with everyone involved.

Share some insight on how you would improve our own product.

This is one of the best product manager questions to ask, because it opens the floor for the candidate to be honest about your product. What works? What doesn’t? How could it be improved? Dig deep on this one; it also reveals if the interviewee has done his or her research.

How would you explain product management to a stranger?

An excellent candidate for the position of product manager would know the ins and outs of the role. Watch out for a candidate who hesitates or speaks in cliches and offers an unclear picture of product management.

Do you have any more product manager interview questions to add to this list? Let us know!

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