The Top 10 Product Development Interview Questions to Ask Candidates

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Toptal sourced essential questions that the best product managers can answer. Driven from our community, we encourage experts to submit questions and offer feedback.

Can you describe how the product management team participates in sales enablement?

An experienced product manager will embrace the responsibility for the success of the product or service. They will know what the sales and marketing departments need and take the time to teach marketing, sales, and systems engineering staff. 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

• There are tools, processes, contacts, references, and online resources that will help a new sales team learn about your new product or service. This is called sales onboarding.
• There is professional sales training for both inside and outside sales, as well as training incentives, certifications, and customer communications training (customer success). There is also center of excellence training.
• Training library: Online quick video training (internal and external sourced)
• “Buddy” programs for new salespeople and inside campaigns (posters, contests, quarterly reviews, sales meetings) are examples of ways to coach and recognize employees.
• 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

• Managing demo systems and the executive briefing center (EBC): logistics and the customer experience; visual representation (videos, posters, food, decorations, etc.) ).
• Major account support (MVPs and VIPs): Handles and provides direct account support for major accounts
• Specialization in segments and vertical markets: changing content (messaging) and products for certain verticals (e.g. g. , healthcare, finance, public sector).
• Blogs, social networks, chat, online support, and other things that let you manage your customers and buy things online
• Documents like release notes, bulletins, notices, support, white papers, technical white papers, speaking engagements, events and trade shows, and thought leadership programs are all ways that customers can interact with the company.
• Channel programs: helping third-party channel groups (sell through, sell with, and embed relationships)

Marketing Effectiveness

• Resource management: Documentation, people, demos, EBCs, executive engagements
• Helping with the exceptions and negotiations for customer deals at the deal desk
• Making sure the messaging in sales scripts and vertical playbooks is factual and fits with the product and/or company direction
• Prospect qualification identification: Support in identifying high-value prospects

If your candidate can talk about at least three of these important areas, they have shown that they have worked as a functional product manager in the real world. Good candidates will focus their answers on the sales support, needs, and getting feedback from customers while working with the marketing and sales teams. They will talk about their experience in terms of KPIs like sales, clients, customer lifetime value, time to revenue, conversion rates (from prospect to customer), and other business metrics. 2 .

Have you ever been let down by your team and had to take the blame?

A professional product manager will always manage the communications around “fault. As a team effort, they would ultimately be responsible for the delay and take the blame. They would also need to learn from this and change their future estimates and promises. If the delay was due to bad behavior or a lack of skills, the product manager should take steps to fix the problem. It’s important to find out why the delay happened, and this should be a part of all efforts to keep getting better. 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?

A project manager is in charge of making sure that promises are kept on time and on budget. They will coordinate the day-to-day activities of every meeting and be very clear about who is doing what. But a product manager is more like a business owner and is in charge of the success or failure of the product or service in the market. They are also in charge of delivery.

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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?.

Listen for empathy and a willingness to listen. There are times when someone is just not a good fit, and that person may need to rethink their professional goals, even if they are very good at some things. If it’s not a direct report, they may have coordinated with the direct manager. The product manager needs to take care of things and make the necessary changes to get the team back on track.

An experienced product manager might have made a performance improvement plan (PIP) for the employee, which they then kept an eye on and went over with them once a week or once a month. 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?

You’re looking for the qualitative and quantitative measures that can identify a strong product manager. How much money or users did they make? How long did they do it for? What was the value they added? A professional product manager will be able to explain their successes in terms of business outcomes.

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. This year, our team made and patented a complex machine learning algorithm that can predict how much traffic there will be, which will cut traffic jams and accidents by 30% and 15%, respectively. “Dig deeper into the project to make sure they were actually leading the charge and not just a member of the team.” 6 .

How do you define market opportunity in a business plan?

A product manager with a lot of experience will be able to talk about market opportunity in a number of ways, such as by mentioning the total dollar value of the market. It shows how much everyone will spend on the same kind of products and services now and in the future. It’s also known as the “total addressable market” (TAM).

The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) shows how fast the market is growing. It is also often used to talk about the size of the market. In addition, a product manager should be able to explain the share of that total value that they could get. This is their potential market share, also known as their addressable market. This value might be represented as a percentage of the market, or in a dollar value. 7 .

What are some signs that it’s time to cut costs to get the product out the door?

An experienced product manager will recognize early that the are not going to meet their deadlines. It might be clear when testing isn’t working, sprints aren’t ending on time, or UX design is behind schedule.

An experienced product manager will be exploring different opportunities to meet their deadline. Explore some of the potential actions they took:

• Did they make the first release as simple as possible in terms of features?
• Did they re-prioritize their roadmap?
• Did they move ahead without an MVP?
• Did they soft-launch with a small group of customers and then say the full commercial launch would happen later?

That person should be able to talk about how they knew there was a problem and what they did to fix the gap. Listen for the impact on sales, marketing, and support. How did they let people know about the changes so that the effects could be managed? Confirm that the decisions were mostly small ones that didn’t affect the main idea of the product. 8 .

In the context of product management, how would you describe “low-hanging fruit”?

In the context of product management, low-hanging fruit often refers to a quick win. This could be a target market that needs a solution right away, or it could be an extra feature or function that will bring in a lot of money. Look into how a candidate for product management might be able to adapt to changes in the market that could suddenly open the door to big 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?

A professional product manager will be on top of the latest trends in the industry. Keep an ear out for augmented reality, the rise of audio interactions in all systems, virtual reality, analytics, AI, blockchain, or As they become more common, ask how they might affect people and listen for words like automation, predictive analytics, and process automation. Find out how they keep up with trends and how they might use new technologies in the products they put on the market. 10 .

What are the important elements of a competitive analysis?

A skilled product manager should divide a competitive analysis question into two parts. The first part is the strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis, which will be used by the company to help the sales and systems engineering teams come up with strong positioning statements. It should cover both the technical and business aspects of the competitor. For instance, if the business isn’t stable financially, this can be used in a “maturity and risk” conversation with a possible client.

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 could mean downloading and using the competing app or calling their customer service lines to see how well they work. Often, companies will have these comparisons completed by a third party to represent an independent assessment.

Make sure that the person you’re hiring for product management knows how to do both the business and technical parts of a competitive analysis. 11 .

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

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the strictest laws (along with HIPAA) and sets very strict rules for how any client in the European Union must handle data that includes personally identifiable information (PII). Fines for non-conformance are potentially in the tens of millions of dollars.

A professional product manager will know exactly what PII data is and what the most important things are when it comes to managing it. What is PII data (anything that can be linked to a person) and the right to be forgotten are very important things to know about the data collection process. This last part means that all records must be deleted from all archives, whether they are active or not. This can have complicated effects on solutions for historical analytics and machine learning.

The product manager should also know that if they don’t follow the rules, they won’t be able to do business, market, or advertise in the EU without possibly breaking the GDPR. In an internet commerce where apps can be downloaded from anywhere, explore their understanding of the risks. 12 .

How have you shut down a product or service before? What are the most difficult parts of the end-of-life (EOL) process?

The end-of-life (EOL) process can be complicated. A professional product manager should be able to explain the main parts, such as

• EOL decision-making: What drives the decision to EOL?
• Sales alerts: How to get sales ready for a customer’s end-of-life (EOL) situation
• Plans for customer migration: what other options are there, and how can they move?
• Are there other options for policies on returns, rebates, and upsells? What would the numbers look like?
• What time does “end of life,” “end of support,” and “end of availability” mean? When do selling, availability, and support stop?
• For big customer and/or channel notifications and meeting any contractual obligations that may have to do with penalties, service-level agreements (SLAs), and notification periods

Check to see if they have made decisions like this before and been able to handle the challenges without hurting the company’s image or losing important customers.

They need to know how the end of life (EOL) could affect future sales or lead to lawsuits, and they need to be able to do a good risk/reward analysis. 13 .

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

Product managers must make strong complex decisions. Look for the research that was done, the analysis that went into the decision, and the effect or result that came from the decision. Realizing that a suggestion will have an effect on many people and the business as a whole makes it hard to make a choice. 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 decision. 14 .

Can you talk about a time when you failed as a product manager? What did you learn from it?

You’re looking for someone with experience. Test the mettle of any product manager who can’t find a problem with a choice or outcome that falls under their purview. The lessons learned are very important because they show if a person has learned from the experience and become better.

What kind of failure they had should have had an impact on how well the product or service they were working on turned out. If they say they didn’t properly identify the customer or the product or service came out too early, that’s a red flag.

It’s possible that they were trying to compete in a market that was already full and where being different was hard to find or not worth enough. 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. They might not have been able to make the case for a good business plan if they didn’t have a marketing and sales team to spread the word. 15 .

How do you monitor performance and success?

A good product manager will keep an eye on a strong set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to see where they stand, how they’re growing, how far they’ve come, and how successful they are. You should pay attention to four main types of metrics: business metrics, product usage metrics, product development metrics, and product quality metrics. Listen for a solid selection of the following KPIs:

• Revenues or bookings: The top-line dollars that the sales team has agreed to spend.
• Funnel: Sales in process
• Track how customers move or flow: retention, attrition, churn, and customer lifetime value
• Customer counts: Current customer base
• Speed, time to revenue, and onboarding times: We want to speed up the time it takes to recognize revenue and get customers to adopt our products.
• Learn about margins, gross margins, costs of goods sold (COGS), and operational costs of goods sold (OCOGS) to figure out how profitable a business is.
• Net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT): An opinion poll of customers
• Number of users per feature or transaction volumes: Can keep track of how important features are for setting priorities for sprints and show their value for marketing or positioning against competitors.
• Time to execute: Records of how long functions take to run, which could mean that there is a problem with the infrastructure or the calculations that are too complicated, which will lead to customer complaints about poor performance.
• Timely delivery: Keeping track of the roadmap and building trust—the team’s honor will depend on meeting deadlines and doing what was agreed upon.
• Team velocity: Using story points to compare team performance to sprint calculations
• Resource availability: keeping an eye on the availability of key resources and making plans for how to cover them
• Support tickets and escalated cases: Making sure the quality of the product that is released is good
• Making sure the code that is going to be tested is good is called testing or QA.

After that, ask them what they did when they saw a KPI wasn’t going in the right direction. Listen for an action plan that includes a root cause analysis that makes sense and some creative thinking to fix a KPI that didn’t go as planned.

Product managers should also use KPIs to plan for growth, maybe in their NetOps environments or by hiring more people to meet demand. Also, if the metrics for support and maintenance are going down, you should expect that engineering resources will need to be changed. This is a good data-driven management decision. 16 .

How do you gain credibility from the development/engineering teams as a new product manager?

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 first interact with the team? Did they hold a workshop or webinar with the team to get feedback and new ideas?

As a team member, they should be honest and upstanding, and they should set reasonable goals for the business outside the team (sales, marketing, finance, operations, support).

In a technical sense, their technical knowledge of the environments should show in how well they can review proposals and suggestions. The people on the team will expect the product manager to make decisions quickly and take suggestions into account. They will also trust that the data they use to make 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.

Mostly when it comes to enterprise-level services that include SaaS or cloud infrastructure, listen for functional descriptions of the following:

• Securability: The ability to keep the environment safe, follow rules, get ready for high-availability (HA) or disaster recovery (DR) situations, and everything in between (identification, access controls (RBAC, VBAC), data management, encryption, archiving, and compliance reporting); this can be driven by anything from following a 5×9’s guideline (common in the telco world) to meeting rules (GDPR may be mentioned).
• Scalability means being able to handle high performance and/or growth needs without affecting the production environment. Managing any kind of migration or cloud environment shouldn’t have an effect on current customers. This is a must, and it’s especially important when there is a lot of room for growth. This may also include multi-tenancy.
• Dependability: Important KPIs for uptime and performance—systems must work at their best 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This means that peak load situations must be carefully planned, designed, and tested. Often, having a backup or failover plan that uses internal or external cloud providers can help in these situations.
• Manageability: It’s important to be able to support customer and user policy controls and access to the systems and the network. To shorten the sales cycle and deal with changes in the customer organization, it’s important to make provisioning and management of entitlements easier.
• Billing: When designing the system, it’s important to think about the different ways that it could be billed, such as by subscriber, by usage, by transaction, or by some other method. They need to be easy to change from one meter to another so that usage counts can be taken. Reporting of usage needs to be made easier and more automated so that it’s easier to track usage and record revenue. Further, when there are layers of responsibility (e. g. If a vendor sells through a channel to an enterprise with employees who need access, then the meters and security must be set up so that each level has its own reporting and policy controls.

An experienced product manager will have a handle on each of these elements in an enterprise setting. 18 .

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

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 challengers in an industry. The ability for a company to have their product in a specific quadrant on the Gartner Magic Quadrant can have a dramatic market impact on 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 good candidate for the job will be able to answer all of them, and answering all of them doesn’t mean they are a good candidate. At the end of the day, hiring remains an art, a science — and a lot of work.

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