Shadowing Practice: Top 5 Product Manager Interview Questions & How to Answer - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

If you're trying to get a job as a product manager,

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If you're trying to get a job as a product manager,

you must have prepared for these top five most asked questions.

In this video, I'm going to share some tips with you on the framework on how to tackle these questions,

some sample questions, and mistakes that you want to avoid.

So these are specifically product case interview type questions.

So the first of most commonly asked question is the favorite product question.

And that sounds like, what is your favorite product and how would you improve it?

And here's the six step framework you want to use to tackle this question.

The first, you want to identify a software product,

a hardware product, or a physical product.

So some examples of my favorite for software are apps like Too Good To Go for You Foodies,

or hardware products like my robo-vac or the dishwasher

because i cook a lot and the dishwasher has saved me

so many times or a physical product like the back scratcher

so you can choose any of those three products you can

even ask the interviewer to specify do they want you to

choose one in any of the three domains a common question

that i get from my clients is what What product should I pick?

I would say pick a product that you actively told friends about,

because that means you've loved it enough to tell other people.

And this can either be a product that's more well known like Uber,

maybe you are obsessed with the Uber app,

or one that's a bit more niche.

So for example, my favorite product as someone who's really into fitness

that I've told tons of friends about is one called FitOn,

a fitness app that was just saved me during COVID.

So step number two, talk about the main goal of this product.

What is it trying to accomplish?

Step three, you want to talk about the users.

Usually most products have two sides of the ecosystem or more.

Step four, you want to talk about how this product specifically helps users accomplish the product goal.

Step five is talking about pain points.

And here you want to start actively answering the second part of the question,

how would you improve this?

And it starts with identifying,

well, what are things that suck with the product today?

So talk about some things that are really painful.

And the last step is to come up with solutions that solve for those pain points.

I covered this question in much more depth in this video that I'll link above,

covering, I told you, my favorite product,

the Too Good To Go app.

Mistakes that you want to avoid.

I remember in college when I got this question interviewing with Yahoo,

I started blabbing on about the product that I liked

and things that I random assortment of things that I think they should fix.

That is not what a great answer sounds like.

They're not asking you to rant about your favorite product.

Instead, they're asking for a structured and strategic viewpoint on the product.

So you might be wondering,

well, what are they actually testing for?

two things.

Number one, they're testing your strategic thinking.

Things like, can you think big picture?

Can you understand goals?

Can you discuss trade-offs?

When making decisions, do you start with a criteria that's logical?

The second thing they're testing for is product design.

Can you empathize with users and design a great user experience with minimum friction?

Can you create delightful experiences that users feel like there's a wow factor to your product?

The second most asked question is the product improvement question.

And it sounds something like,

how would you improve a product like Spotify?

How would you improve Google Maps?

And the framework for this is kind of similar to the one we just talked about,

except they're giving you a specific product rather than asking you to think about a product.

So here, I actually recommend using the same framework as the one we just talked about above.

So what are some mistakes to avoid?

So some common questions I get about this question is,

well, what if I'm not familiar with the product that they're asking me about?

Your first attempt is to try to take a best guess.

Sometimes the name of the product is exactly what it is.

Other times it's not super clear.

For example, if someone was in a country where Spotify was not well known,

it'd be hard to guess that it was a music app.

So for those, you have no choice but to ask the interviewer,

can you tell me a little bit more about the product?

I'm not super familiar.

But note, if you're in the US and you're not familiar or had never heard of a product like Spotify,

I don't know how well that's going to look on your behalf.

So make sure to study up the top 10,

20 most downloaded apps out there.

You might even ask the interviewer,

can I take a look at the product in real time on my phone?

What should you avoid for these questions?

Avoid, similar to the last one,

ranting about features that you would wish this product has.

Instead you want to think strategically about what the product is trying to accomplish for its target users

and solutions given those pain points make sure that those pain points are generalizable to a larger population than just yourself.

This video was originally going to cover the top 10 most asked questions,

but that would probably take more than 30 minutes.

So I'm going to cover the next set of five questions in an upcoming video.

So subscribe to make sure you don't miss that video.

Question number three that's most commonly asked is the product design question.

And it sounds like What product would you build for X?

So some example questions that have been asked by companies like Google,

Facebook, etc. What product would you build in the travel space?

What product would you build to help people find roommates?

So the structure for this is quite simple,

but answering this question is not easy.

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So don't get fooled by the simple framework.

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It's a four-part framework.

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And the first part starts with why do we want to build for this problem?

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So for example, why do you want to build in the travel space?

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Why would a company want to invest in this?

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The second, who are the users in this space?

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So ecosystem-wide, but also who are the subset of users?

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Step number three is think of pain points

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that these users might be suffering with in the travel space

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that you could build for and make sure to prioritize which pain points you're going to go for.

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And step number four is to think of solutions for the prioritized target segment

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and the pain points for those user segments that you identified.

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Here's a link to an example question where I answer,

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what product would you build to help people buy and sell antiques?

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Funny side story

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that a friend told me was one time for his company

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he asked an interviewee the question what product would you build to help people get more pizza

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and the candidate goes I would build a pizza canyon.

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I thought that was pretty hilarious

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so don't be afraid to infuse some humor in there because technically Pizza Canyon could get people more pizza.

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What are common mistakes to avoid for these type of questions is starting with a solution rather than the problem.

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I see a lot of candidates fall into this trap where they think oh travel space something

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that I've always wanted to build

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or I think is cool would be a travel app to help people meet each other locally

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and then they work backwards from the solution?

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Note for this question, it's never about the idea,

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rather the process that you walk through to show the interviewer that you can think logically,

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structurally, and that you have user empathy.

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They're not just looking for creative ideas.

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You can have the most creative ideas,

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but if you can't identify who the user segments are or their pain points,

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you're not going to succeed in this interview.

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The fourth most asked question in product interviews is a success metric question

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and it sounds like what success metrics would you set for product X

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or it sounds something like what goals would you set for product X

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so for example some questions

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that have been asked in real interviews are what metrics would

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you set for the ubereats app what metrics do you think Airbnb goals against

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so how would you tackle this here's a five step framework to tackle this.

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The first one starting with understanding the product.

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So what does the product do?

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Who are the users?

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What are the users trying to accomplish?

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Step two is then qualitatively.

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What do we want to measure to help us get a sense

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that this product is helping those users accomplish their goals and helping the business accomplish their goals?

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Step three is then translating those qualitative things into quantitative metrics.

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Step four is identifying, let's say two to three North Star top metrics that you care about,

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that you want to prioritize.

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And step five is to think of counter metrics and downstream metrics.

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If you're wondering, how do I actually tackle this question?

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Here's a link to one of my most popular videos answering what metrics would you set for Airbnb?

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A common mistake that you want to avoid is listing a bunch of very generic metrics.

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So a lot of people tend to use certain metric frameworks like the Pirates framework R,

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which stands for acquisition, retention,

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revenue, etc. So they're not necessarily wrong,

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but they're a pretty generic framework that people use to tackle any question,

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which more so shows memorization than it actually shows thinking about the product.

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For example, some common metrics I hear all the time when I interview clients is,

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oh, the key metric for this product is DAO,

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daily active users or monthly active users or time spent.

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So again, it's not wrong.

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Like at companies, we do measure those things,

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but you want to show a bit more thought than just throwing the most commonly measured metrics.

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And even if you do call on metrics that are more often cited than not,

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explain your thinking why now is important.

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So you might say something like,

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for example, for an app like Airbnb,

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I might expect people to book travel somewhere around once a month

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or once every quarter and hence i want to measure something like monthly active users

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so make it specific to the product you're talking about

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and not just throwing out generic metrics

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that show you know how to memorize versus think through the

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question question number five is the debugging root cause analysis question

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that sounds something like we're seeing metric y go down for product x what's going on and how would you fix it?

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An example question for this is we're seeing the number of riders go down on Uber.

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What's going on and how would you fix it?

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Here is your six-part framework to tackle this type of question.

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You first start off with qualified questions like this metric went down in what time span?

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Was it the last couple of days?

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Was it a month?

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Are we seeing these metrics localized to just a specific region or globally?

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These questions are important

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because they help you understand what issues might be more likely to contribute towards this drop versus less likely.

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So you can eliminate options.

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Step number two is talking about the product.

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Basically what does the product do?

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What is it?

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Step number three is then talking about the user flow.

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How do people experience this product?

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How does this metric reflect a step in the user flow for users?

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And what are the steps that are attributed to this metric.

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Number four is talking about hypotheses on why you think this metric might have dropped.

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Number five is answering the question how would you validate or invalidate certain hypotheses that you have.

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And step number six based on your prioritized list of hypotheses

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that you would go try to understand first

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or validate invalidate first what are some solutions to solve for some of those hypotheses.

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I will link an example question in the video above answering

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we're seeing uber cancellations go up what's going on now what are common mistakes

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that you want to avoid so commonly

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when i ask this question most people go through a checklist of things they memorize of things

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that could go wrong

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and you'll see a video where i cover a skit of the most common type of interaction

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that i see when i ask these questions in an interview This isn't high school,

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so you're not going to impress them by memorizing things.

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So think thoughtfully through the question,

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and the framework I just shared above will almost force you to think versus memorize.

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So we have the five most commonly asked questions.

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The first one is the favorite product.

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Second is product improvement.

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Third is product design.

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Fourth is success metric.

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And number five is debugging root cause analysis.

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A common question I get all the time is,

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which is the toughest out of these five questions?

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I would say probably the toughest is the product design question.

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If you want to see an example where a real candidate that got an offer at Facebook tackle this question,

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take a look at this video to see what is needed to pass these interviews.

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And I will see you guys in the next video.

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