Senior Product Manager Interview Questions

Please please always open and smell and try the product

I described how it's more relevant to think in terms of product vision, which is more broad and less transient, and how it's enabled by multiple measurable objectives (via product features) working in unison. You can know if the product is delivering on it vision by either measuring the impact it has on customers, or (less accurately), by using adoption and engagement metrics as reasonable proxies, or by comparing the difference between global customer behavior vs. that of your customers. I don't think this was the answer the interviewer expected. This question seemed very "consulting-ish".

This was a fun exercise - the interviewer in this case, was great and fostered a wonderful discussion. We did a whiteboarding exercise starting with 'WHY', and then thinking about 'WHO' (i.e. target customer segments), followed by thinking through the needed use-cases, prioritizing the use cases, and then thinking through current alternates for merchants and how the app's MVP should deliver that would significantly enhance the experience. Then I boiled down into specific product features and prioritized them using a framework I proposed. This was a fun exercise!

(This was a well-thought question, again from the same interviewer whom I had a good experience with) I proposed a framework for assessing the impact of features/fixes, and how I would measure. I listed different criteria for evaluating each feature/fix against: UX, Acquisition, Use-case expansion, etc. Then I made assumptions on the relative weight of each created a table to measure the net impact of each feature/fix. The interviewer challenged me on some and I was able to course-correct and change as needed. IT was a fun discussion.

this was too generic for me to answer so I asked for more specificity. It became clear to me that the interviewer basically wanted to understand if I have actually worked with Engineers on a daily basis and had any technical skills. I gave him a few examples of how I worked with Engineers covering different types of projects - I think this answered his question.

I mentioned about how I learned about Machine Learning algorithms and implemented one of them in a project and launched a new feature for customers. I explained how and why I was proud of that accomplishment. I also described about how I was proud of recently supporting a coworker through a stressful time in her life, and helped her ramp up on skills and capabilities. The interviewer seemed quite engaged with my responses and asked follow up clarifying questions.

I explained how I would first start with making sure that the OKRs for the product was broad enough to also encompass experience for internal customers, performance metrics like p90/95/99 latency, p90/95/99 uptime, Engineer satisfaction, etc. And how taking these as part of OKRs would automatically imply that lowering tech debt would become part of the same comprehensive prioritization framework.