The Ultimate Guide to Product Manager Interview Questions

Great product management isn't easy

Great product managers score off the charts in listening, learning, leading, analyzing, anticipating and re-imagining. Among other things.

How do you interview for that?

Get it wrong and your new hire might be shifting your business into neutral. Or worse yet, reverse.

Problem is, there are no standard best practices for interviewing product managers.

You might have developed your own approach. But is it coordinated with the rest of the interview team? Or does each interviewer ask his or her personal favorite questions?

Are you sure your team is covering all the key areas with enough depth?

Or are you rolling the dice?

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Warning: Don’t Hire a Product Manager Without These Key Leadership Skills

Steve Jobs said that “no matter how smart you are, to be successful you need a team of great people“.

Do you surround yourself with great people?

The difference between a good hire and a great hire usually boils down to leadership.

Jack Welch said “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” Growing others is what great product managers do.

Are you hiring leaders? Here is an interview framework to help you know—with highlights of the most important product management leadership skills.

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What Everybody Ought To Know About The Product Manager Case Interview

What does it take to be the best?

The best product strategist? The best product designer? The best technical innovator? The best product manager?

Malcolm Gladwell would tell you it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Problem is, no one tells you their “hours” in an interview. You have to figure out a candidate’s skills for yourself.

In product management, that’s far from easy. There’s no github code archive or design portfolio to look at. And how much of the candidate’s last product success was skill?

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Do Your Product Manager Interview Questions Always Get The Real Story?

Okay, show of hands.

Who else is tired of resumes that overstate accomplishments?

And as if overstatements aren’t bad enough—don’t forget about the blatant lies found on the resumes of some senior executives.

With 4.3 million results on Google for lying on resumes, it would seem that this is an epidemic.

As a hiring manager, are you protecting yourself?
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Do Your Product Manager Interviews Miss These Critical Analytical Skills?

You’ve always heard that you should hire the smartest product managers you can.

Some even say you should only hire people that are smarter than you.

But what does all this really mean?

Should you be trying to give candidates a verbal IQ test? Or should you be testing more practical problem solving?

What are the right questions to ask?

It is true, of course … you should hire the smartest product managers you can. And doing that well starts with a purpose-built interview.

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Give Me 3 Minutes and I’ll Make You a Better Interviewer

Sherlock Holmes

Ever notice that some people are better at getting a job than actually doing it?

These are the candidates who excel at interviewing, presentation and polish.

With their exceptional sales and communication skills, they present slick resumes and seem to say all the right things.

But when you hire them, they don’t produce. Not even a little. And sometimes you need to fire them.

How do you protect yourself against this?

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7 Warning Signs That Your Hiring Process Sucks

Admit it … you’ve wondered.

You’re hiring steadily, and it seems like you do what other companies do, but you’re just not getting results. Incoming resumes are at a trickle, the last offer you extended was turned down, and you’re having management issues with several new hires.

And you can’t help wondering …

Do you just need to be patient, and wait for the right candidates?

Or could it be possible that, in reality, your hiring process really sucks, and no one wants to say anything—or knows any better?

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The George S. Patton Guide to Winning the Talent War

Franklin D. Roosevelt called George S. Patton America’s “greatest fighting general.”

Hitler called Patton “the most dangerous man [the Allies] have.”

Though controversial, Patton achieved some astonishing and unsurpassed achievements in his day.

If you want to win the talent war…when sometimes it feels like it’s just impossible to compete…then look at Patton to see how he did things no one else thought could be done.

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The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Startup Hiring Efforts

Poison Bottle. Source: Leo ReynoldsHave you looked at a job board recently for open engineering or product management positions?

Did you read the job descriptions?

Notice anything strange?

The job descriptions all sound almost identical!

One generic paragraph about the company, followed by one generic set of job responsibilities, followed by one generic set of job requirements.

How is a job seeker supposed to know that your job is his or her perfect career opportunity if the job description is so generic it looks the same as countless other job descriptions? Will the interview team really be able to effectively assess candidates for the position with this type of job description?

If you hired an advertising agency and they produced ads for your core product similar to the average online job description, would you re-hire them?

In many cases, the reason job descriptions are so bad is that the actual job is not well defined. And without a well defined job, it’s very difficult to hire the right person.

As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, says

…the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.

A poorly defined job is likely the single most dangerous threat to your startup hiring efforts.

 

So what’s the solution?

There is a simple but powerful tool you can use to fundamentally improve your ability to source, hire and retain amazing people.
[Read more...]

How to Predict if You Will Be a Successful Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is tough. Do you know what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur?

What if you could take a quiz to learn if you are likely to be a successful?

Steve Case, former CEO of AOL, describes the three key ingredients to successful entrepreneurship as people, passion and perseverance. Most successful entrepreneurs would probably agree with him, though they might nuance it differently.

While this makes sense anecdotally, now there is research to support it. And a quiz that will generate a score for you.

The Research

Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania has developed a psychological personality trait called Grit that she defines as perseverance and passion for long term goals. [Read more...]