1. What are some of the tasks for Mobile Project Managers?
Typically, a mobile PM is hired when a mobile application startup reaches a certain size, where multiple projects or an increasingly complex product means that the founders do not have the capacity to be heads down in product related tasks or projects. This point of saturation is very much dependent on the company and its structure. A mobile PM can be involved in several areas, including deciding features, being involved in user interface decisions, planning project budgets and road-maps, some engineering, analytic, and also QA. A mobile PM can truly be a very versatile role, requiring a varied skill set.
2. You are the CEO of Research In Motion. What would you do?
Strategy questions require that you put aside product-level considerations and focus on the business and available market opportunities. This type of question is frequently amenable to a diagnostic approach which begins with an assessment of the current state, identifies gaps, and proposes a future state solution. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats analysis can be a good place to start. Focusing on financial metrics and broad market needs (versus individual user needs) will enable you to uplevel your answers. Competition and partnerships come into play more prominently in strategy questions than they may in product questions. A CEO will not be thinking of individual products and perhaps not even product lines. Overall company value proposition and market segment needs will be the right level to consider for this question.
3. Would you learn from Mobile Product Manager?
The best hires are those based on mutual respect. The candidate should know more than you do in the chosen field, and be able to teach you to bridge the gap. You should feel comfortable taking instruction from your hire, within this sphere of influence. He in turn must respect your expertise and seek your advice when needed.
4. How do you define product success?
Good product managers crisply define the target, the "what" (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the "what." Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out the 'how'.
Last but not least, you do not want to hire someone who shows up simply because there was an advertisement in the news paper. It's important that your candidate not only knows something about the company and ideally the product he will be working on, but is excited about the prospect.
6. How would you determine the price for piece of wearable technology?
For a pricing question, Lin suggests triangulating between the customer's willingness to pay, competitive pricing, and cost-based pricing. Understanding the cost structure is a good basis, but won't get you all the way to the answer. Consider what alternatives the customer has and what type of demand and supply dynamics there are in the market. If you are targeting a heavily business-oriented product management role, you will need to have pricing frameworks in you back pocket so that you are not a deer in the headlights at the whiteboard.
7. Would you want to work with Mobile Product Manager?
You don't necessarily need to have all the same interests, or to laugh at the same jokes. But it helps. You should at least be able to chat with your new hire comfortably at the coffee maker/water cooler.
8. What role does your competitor or market have in driving product decisions?
Just because competitors have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. If they obsess about competitor's features will permanently deliver yesterday's technology tomorrow and that is a really bad idea. However, making sure that they stay abreast on how the market is shifting and evaluating features and products, is an important part of the role.
Products are developed through a pipelines of tribes, each one seeking maximum say in the development process. Marketing, designers, developers and sales have their own culture code that do not allow them to develop complete or holistic product development view. As a PM its your responsibility to make them listen to each other in a constructive way and to understand the whole product. This means you have to be polymath or create a perception that your are. All in all this requires amazing amount of persuasive skills on PM's part.
10. Tell me about your current role?
If the candidate isn't working, I modify this to "tell me about your last role." If the candidate has never worked in product management and is looking to making a career change, I ask, "Tell me about your ideal role."
The point of this question is to surface their mental model about product management. Product managers come in many breeds. I want to know are you a data-driven optimizer, are you a visionary strategic thinker, are you an Agile product owner, are you a backlog manager? There is no right or wrong answer. In fact, what I'm looking for is always dependent on the type of role I'm trying to fill. But if there's a mismatch, there's no need to continue. So this is where I start.
11. How would you improve our product?
This common product management interview question is meant to test your ability to propose impactful changes to an existing product. Weak answers will either be one obvious improvement or a rambling set of changes which do not move any metrics. A strong answer starts with identifying the goals of the product and the target customers. A key metric or metrics should be identified by which to measure the improvement.
From there, a set of use cases can be identified which will lead to a set of alternatives for product improvements. An important skill to demonstrate when answering this question is the ability to prioritize. From the set of possible personas, use cases, and improvements, select the ones that most closely meet the goals and metrics identified at the outset. Presenting several alternatives at each level is a great opportunity to show creativity and your ability to think outside the box. In some cases, linking to product strategy will be critical to providing an on target answer.
Answering this question without building the links between strategy, business metrics, and user needs will result in a random response that will likely miss the mark.
12. Tell me about recent product/feature launches and how you determined their success or failure?
A good product manager understands the problem they are trying to solve before they solve it. This means that they will have clear, data-driven metrics for success and failure identified before the work begins and as such, should be able to very clearly tell you if the launch was a success or a failure.
13. Basic Common Mobile Product Manager Interview Questions:
► How do you prioritize among competing features?
► How do you say no to people?
► What is your favorite (software) product and why? How would you improve it?
► Tell me about how use data to make decisions.
► How would you describe our product to someone?
► How do you know if a product is well designed?
► What is one of the best ideas you have ever had?
► What is the worst idea you have ever had?
► What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting?
► What are some of the challenges working with development teams to create software?
► How would you explain Product Management to a 5 year old?
► What is your current role on your team: who else do you work with and in what capacity?
► How do you decide what to build?
► How do you interact with your users?
► Tell me about an application you are very familiar with; what drives you nuts about it, how would you fix it; what would your next release look like (tell me the theme/top features).
► Provide a number of products (websites) that you think are particularly well-designed.
► Suggest how you would improve the targeted company's product/site
► Talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges/poor feedback
► What metrics do you think are important to track for our products?
► What would you measure to tell if a new feature was successful or not?
► Give an example of a well executed product. How would you improve it?
► What are the roles and responsibilities of a product manager?
► Describe what happens when you type a URL into your browser and press Enter.
14. Sample Mobile Product Manager Interview Questions:
► Which is the best Product feature that you have built in your present/past company and why?
► How much time do you spend on Analytics?
► How do you build the product roadmap?
► Do you like to work as an individual or in a group?
► Tell me about a failed product/feature that you had built.
► What comes to you first: business or customer?
► What is your favourite site and why? How will you improve it?
► How do you keep track of competition?
► How can you improve our (the recruiting company) website/business?
► How do you test the demand for a new product?
► How comfortable are you with coding?
► Do you sit with engineers and tell them how to code?
► How do you convince other people?
► Who does give the final sign up for product release?
► Will you make a responsive site or mobile site or mobile app first?
► Assignment: How will you improve the conversion rate of this page?
► Assignment: Which of these 2 landing pages will work better and why?
► Guestimates: How many people left New Delhi via flight today?
► Guestimates: What is the total no of Product Managers in India?
► Math: Revenue break even related problems.
15. Job Interview Questions for Mobile Product Manager:
► Give an example of a product lifecycle. Specify stages such as market research, development, documentation, mass production, launching, marketing, branding, services, etc.
► Take me through how you've defined and managed a product from start to finish.
► Describe a new product market research. Go through its value proposition, target customers, and competitive analysis, to the product's positioning strategy.
► How do you measure product success?
► How do you decide on the product pricing strategy? What are the factors you consider the most?
► Would you change product pricing according to market needs, competitors, or profits/losses?
► How would you increase clients' satisfaction?
► Give an example of an innovative idea/solution you've identified and implemented.
► Would you modify/correct business priorities for a product (features, marketing, etc.) for any new condition that arises that you haven't considered before?
► What are the differences between Waterfall and Agile development techniques?
► Have you had a situation in which a product went over its budget and timeline? How have you handled this case and what did you learn?
► Tell us the steps you take to obtain feedback from clients and integrate relevant requirements into the company's products.
Good product managers will talk about working with analysts, UX designers and engineers (both front and back end). Listen for words that indicate they follow a continuing regular and flexible feedback loop with all parties.
17. Can Mobile Product Manager come up with a convincing strategy to win for a different market?
The ideal candidate should be able to identify key product features for individual markets, whether this be a separate industry, or a separate culture. He should be able to prioritize these features in order to answer the needs of the industry or culture, and promote these features accordingly.
18. Tell me about your role on your team, who else you work with, and how you work with them?
Usually, the first question elicits a broad, far-ranging response that nobody could accomplish all on their own. So I follow up with this question. I want to know how well you play with others. How well do you interact with engineers? You said you ran a usability study, did you recruit the participants, did you conduct the study, did you tabulate the results, or did you work with a user researcher to do these things? Do you work with sales and marketing to get in front of the customer? Do you work with senior management? And so on.
Again, there are no right or wrong answers here. It all depends on the role I'm trying to fill. But again, who you work with most, how you work with them, what challenges you encounter, who you forget to mention, these all tell me what you value, where your strengths are, and whether or not you are the right person for the role.
Product strategy means saying no from time to time. Product managers should prioritize by cherry-picking the project that's likely to generate 80% of the impact and forecast what that impact is, as well as the SWAG cost in resources, money and other scarce resources before they decide to build.
This framework 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 model/forecast the impact.
A strong part of on-the-job success is to be able to identify key differentiators in a competitive marketplace. If the key differentiator is not yet there for a particular industry or marketplace, the job is to put it there. This means understanding the resources available to you, as well as understanding the needs of clients and users, and more importantly, understanding what the competition is offering, in order to produce what they are not.
21. Tell us about how you interact with customers / users?
If we've gotten this far and you haven't talked about being the voice of the customer, getting out and talking to users, doing any type of user research, I'm already concerned. This is your last chance to convince me you can be the voice of the customer.
If throughout the call, you've been talking about this all along, then we are in good shape. Now I want to dive into the details. Do you know how to find users or does someone do that for you? Do you know how to ask questions that aren't leading? Do you share the research with the rest of your team? Are you able to turn your learnings into actionable next steps?
22. What is one thing you would change on your favorite product and why?
There's no 'right' answer for this one, but depending on the answer, it should show how detailed and analytical they are.
23. What is the most effective way to involve your customer in product direction?
If they have a process for pulling customer insights, and mention market research tools and how they have used them in the past, they most likely understand generating customer feedback is important to inspire good products.
24. How would you design a to do list?
Product design questions test the applicant's ability to think on their feet and create a full product or feature. New product design questions can be very high level ("design a lamp"). Start with identifying the goal of the product-if the interviewer won't tell you, state your assumptions so that you have something to build on. Decide which metric or business driver you will impact most. From there, identify the possible users for the new product or feature. Select the one that seems most relevant.
You won't have time to cover everything in the answer. Once the user is selected, move on to use cases, goals, and scenarios for that user. The use cases should naturally result in a set of features for your new product. Prioritize these and close by linking back to the goal of the product, the business strategy, and the user needs you are meeting. Show you aren't afraid to color outside the box by including a range of features in the product or tackle a novel problem. Present a range of ideas ranging from mundane to outlandish and demonstrate that you can generate a broad range of ideas and decide among them quickly.
25. How to develop infectious customer, market & product intimacy?
Easiest way to earn your team's trust and support as PM is to develop intimate customer & market understanding. Having a well developed spidery sense is not only a huge plus but an requirement. On various occasions you have prove that you know and care about customer more then anyone in the organisation. This can be tricky thing to accomplish as many PM rely on others for market & customer information. In other cases PM job description may fail to communicate your responsibility as customer evangelist clearly. Keeping all this in mind ability to filter noise from signal and developing strong intuition about market becomes the most critical skill for PM's survival.
Now coming back to interviewing questions I think any question that help you gauge a candidate on above skill parameters is a good question.
Moreover I believe organisations as well as products go through an evolutionary life cycle and each stage requires different attitude and temperament from new PM. It would be better if you keep your organisation and product goals transparent in the interviewing process. Let the candidate evaluate product path and if it'd not fit into your organisation goals communicate your desired product trajectory to him so that he can answer your question according to new expectations.
