10 product manager interview questions you should definitely use

When it comes to hiring product managers for software businesses, it’s not quite as straightforward as it is for some roles.

Designers — look at their designs

Software engineers — look at their code

Product manager — ?????

That’s why the questions you ask are key to understanding what kind of a product manager you’re going to get. You want to understand how they’ll interact with stakeholders, how they’ll figure out where the product value is going to come from, and how they’ll work with the team.

So what do you ask?

1) How do you measure the success of a Product Manager?

I like this question as it’s a tough one. Sales people get measured by sales. Developers get measured on delivery of good code on time, so what a product manager thinks about how they should be measured tells you a lot about how they think.

Do they care about well-crafted user stories, running effective A/B tests, or getting features released?

And on a similar note …

2) If you come across a software company and they don’t have a product manager, what would you say to them to convince them that they need one?

This lets you know where they think the value they deliver sits. They’ll tell you all about what’s being missed by not having a PM, and this (if they’ve got any sense) will focus on the skills that they have and would bring to the role.

3) Where do your skills lie as a product manager?

Again, it’s an opportunity to identify which end of the product spectrum they sit on. If they’re all about ‘working through the requirements and giving detailed user stories’ then you’ve got a processor, whereas if they talk about ‘measuring usage and developing tests’ then you’ve got an analyser.

4) Why does your current product exist?

If they say something like ‘we have appointment booking systems for managing bookings for retailers’ or whether they say ‘retailers want to get customers to commit to visiting their store and to direct traffic into non-peak times’ you know whether they’re thinking about value, needs, systems etc… You’ll also get a good…