13 Most-Asked Product Manager Interview Questions (+ answers)

two product managers practising interview questions

Product manager interviews at top companies such as Google, Amazon, etc. are tough. But with the right preparation, you can dramatically increase your chances of landing an offer.

Below are 13 product manager interview questions you're very likely to be asked (we know because we analyzed over 1000 Glassdoor interview reports and we've worked with thousands of PM candidates.)

We've provided a high quality answer outline for each question. Work through these and you’ll be well on your way to acing your PM interviews!

(Note: If you want a very long list of PM questions, skip to section 14)

  1. Design X product for Y user
  2. What metrics would you use to measure for X product?
  3. How would you improve X product?
  4. Tell me about a time you failed
  5. X metric changed unexpectedly. What do you do?
  6. What's your favorite product and why?
  7. Why do you want to work at this company?
  8. How do you deal with conflict?
  9. Tell me about yourself
  10. How would you prioritize between A, B and C?
  11. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
  12. Tell me about a time you overcame a challenge
  13. Explain X technical concept
Click here to practice 1-on-1 with FAANG ex-interviewers

Question 1: Design X product for Y user

This question and its infinite variants (e.g. “design a fridge for blind people”) made up 13% of all the interview questions we studied. Google PM candidates, for example, face this question extremely frequently.

Interviewers use this question to assess your customer empathy, creativity, and ability to use a structured approach to managing products.

We recommend that you structure your approach to design questions by using the BUS framework. Check out the abbreviated sample answer below to see how it works.

Sample answer: Design a computer keyboard

Business objective

First, clarify the question and confirm its scope:

  • What's the business objective and target user?
  • Are we designing a mouse to go with it?

Let's assume that the interviewer wants you to design a keyboard for casual gamers, and that the business objective is to maximize revenues.

User problems

Brainstorm typical problems casual gamers face when using standard computer keyboards:

  1. Keys are slow to respond, collect dust underneath over time, aren’t easy to replace
  2. Keys that are repetitively used wear out
  3. Keyboard is uncomfortable to use for long periods of time
(see more user problems in the full answer, here).

Most gamers' primary objective is probably to win at the game they play. As a result, it makes sense to prioritize solving problems which will help users improve their performance, like problem one.

Solutions

Here are some solutions which could help solve this problem:

   a. Build keys that don't need to be pressed as hard / deep to register input

   b. Build keys which register user input quicker using alternative technologies 

   c. Build keys that can easily be removed to clean the keyboard

You'll want to prioritize your solutions using a simple framework that allows you to compare effort and impact.

Conclusion

Your prioritization framework might lead you to conclude that solution a) is low effort and high impact. Make sure you link back to the business objective you outlined at the start of the interview and confirm how this solution meets that objective.

There are always trade offs when choosing solutions: in this case, the keys could become overly sensitive, increasing user errors. Show you're aware of trade offs and be ready to discuss how you might mitigate for them.

Want to see more detail on how to answer this question? For the complete answer and an explanation of the framework, take a look at our guide to product design questions.

MOCK INTERVIEW: If you want to watch someone answer this question, this video is good: Design a movie product for Facebook 

Question 2: What metrics would you use to measure for X product?

This analytics/metrics question accounted for 7% of all the interview questions we studied. Interviewers want to assess whether you know how to use a set of hero and secondary metrics to assess if products are successful and to decide what your team should work on next.

We recommend using the GAME framework to approach metrics questions like these. Let's take a look at an abbreviated sample answer.

Sample answer: What metrics would you use to determine success for the Facebook newsfeed?

Goals

You could begin by saying, "My understanding is that there are multiple use cases for the Newsfeed such as engaging users and generating ad revenue. To stay healthy, Facebook needs strong user engagement, so I would pick this as our primary business goal."

Actions

Consider what it means for a user to be “engaged.” List every relevant action (e.g. creating a post, viewing a post, commenting, liking, sharing, etc.). Next, you need to prioritize your list of actions: “There are a number of user actions which reflect engagement, but I think the three most important ones are likely to be posting, commenting, and sharing.”

Metrics

Imagine that in the previous step, after discussing with your interviewer, you prioritized the “comment” and “share” actions. In order to measure engagement based on these actions, here are some metrics that would make sense to track:

  • "Comment" metrics: Comments per 1k sessions, comments per 1k posts seen, etc.
  • "Share" metrics: Shares per 1k sessions, shares per 1k posts seen, etc.

Evaluations

You could summarize by saying something like, “So, in order to increase Newsfeed engagement, I would first look at comments and shares per thousand sessions. These metrics would give us an idea of meaningful engagement for the average user…”

For the complete answer and a more detailed explanation of the GAME framework, take a look at our guide to product metric questions.

Question 3: How would you improve X product?

Another product design question, this one assesses how well you can analyze an existing product’s features and change them to better meet user needs.

Below is an abbreviated sample answer to this question, using the BUS framework, same as question 1 above.

Sample answer: How would you improve Facebook?

Business objective

First, clarify the target user and the specific product. Assume here that the interviewer wants you to improve Facebook's Ads Manager, and that the business objective is to grow the conversion rate from registered to active users amongst small businesses.

User problems

Brainstorm typical problems small businesses face using Facebook Ads:

  1. Users might not have run ads before and are unsure where to start
  2. Users might be overwhelmed by all the customization options offered by the Ads Manager and not have enough time to learn it all

It makes sense to prioritize solving problems that will let users launch an ad and see results as quickly as possible. Therefore, focus on problem two. 

Solutions

Here are some solutions which could help solve problem two:

  1. Create a custom onboarding experience to guide small business users through creating a first simple ad
  2. Create a simpler and separate version of the Ads Manager with less granular controls but that's much easier to use

Assume you’ve discussed with the interviewer and chosen option b.

Finally, summarize your results with the interviewer and discuss trade-offs.

For the complete answer and an explanation of the BUS framework, take a look at our guide to product improvement questions.

MOCK INTERVIEW: Watch this ex-Google PM give a very strong answer to the question "How would you improve Google Chrome?"

Question 4: Tell me about a time you failed

A hard-hitting behavioral question (especially beloved by Amazon interviewers), this question requires you to dive into your past experience to prove your ability to take calculated risks and learn from past mistakes.

When answering behavioral questions, you should focus on your most relevant achievements and communicate them in a compelling, structured way. An easy way to achieve this is to use a step-by-step method to tell your stories, such as the STAR method or the SPSIL method used below (which we prefer).

Let's take a look at a strong example.

Sample answer: Tell me about a time you failed

Situation

“In my last position, I was the product manager for a key feature of a new product we were about to launch. My team was ahead of schedule, so I told our chief product officer that we would finish a week before the deadline. She rearranged launch dates accordingly.

Problem

However, as we continued work on the launch, it quickly became clear that the final details would take longer than anticipated, and we would not be meeting the earlier deadline.

Solution

I took it upon myself to speed up the process. First, I added some of my team’s workload to my plate in order to accomplish everything faster. I worked overtime to take care of the loose ends, then booked a new meeting with the chief product officer to explain. 

Impact

Ultimately, we were able to complete our preparations a couple days before the original launch date, though not a full week ahead like I'd anticipated. Thankfully, since it was only the earlier deadline I failed to meet, the product was still able to be launched on the original launch date one week later.

Lessons

The failure to meet that deadline reminded me to make decisions based on data and observation, not excitement. Since this mistake, I’ve been meticulous about deadlines, only setting or changing them after I’ve discussed it with the team and considered the repercussions. I haven’t missed a deadline since.”

For more tips on how to answer this question, plus five different example answers, see 5 ways to answer "Tell me about a time you failed".

VIDEO: You can see another sample answer to this question in this Careervidz clip.

Question 5: X metric changed unexpectedly—how do you react?

With this question, interviewers at FAANG and other top companies want to test your data analysis skills as well as your ability to communicate issues and act under pressure.

Below is an abbreviated sample answer to this question, using a three-step method.

Sample answer: YouTube traffic went down 5% —how would you report this issue to the executive team?

Define the metric change

Here are some questions that immediately come to mind to help clarify the question: How do you define “traffic,” what segments and device types is it affecting, and when did it start?

Explore possible root causes

Assume the interviewer tells you that the average time spent watching per session is down 5% month-over-month worldwide on mobile only. Now, brainstorm potential factors. Assume the interviewer has asked to focus on internal factors only. 

Internal factors:

  • Data accuracy (e.g. confirm reporting tools are working as expected)
  • Context (e.g. it could be an expected seasonal drop)
  • Access to the product (e.g. possibility of a major outage)
  • Product changes / quality (e.g. possibility of code that introduced a bug)

Assume the interviewer has confirmed that the reporting is working as expected, there is no seasonal drop, and there has been no major outage. Consider product changes: Did they release any significant feature changes?

The interviewer says that the user interface for the video player was recently changed on mobile, which involved making the “Send video to device” button two times larger, and reducing the “Full screen” button by half its original size. 

Discuss and conclude

At that point, you could form a hypothesis and say something like, “Have you noticed a change in the frequency at which the ‘Send video to device’ and ‘Full screen’ buttons are being used on mobile? Maybe mobile users are having a harder time tapping the ‘Full screen’ button now that it’s smaller, and are tapping the ‘Send video to device’ button by accident because it’s too big?”

For the complete answer and an explanation of the framework used, take a look at our guide to product metric questions.

MOCK INTERVIEW: If you want to watch someone answer a similar question, check out this video - root cause analysis of cart metrics, with Razorpay PM.

Question 6: What is your favorite product and why?

With this question, interviewers are assessing your understanding of product design, your ability to deliver constructive criticism, and your knowledge of a specific product. They may ask about your favorite product in general or your favorite among their own line of products.

It doesn't really matter which product you choose. The important thing is providing good arguments for the product in a structured way.

Below is an abbreviated sample answer using the BUS framework.

Sample answer: What is your favorite product and why?

Business objective

"My favorite product right now is Instagram. I tend to use Instagram mostly as an end user, not an advertiser, so let me explain more about the product from that user perspective. Here’s one of the problems it addresses:

User problems

It is tough to find one easy place to share casual photos, promote artwork, or build a small business where there are many users who are likely to find and share your content.

Solutions

Instagram solves this problem by giving users the option of exactly what accounts to follow, so there’s a really high chance a user’s feed is full of content they’re going to enjoy as soon as the app launches on their phone. This is a better solution than some alternatives which require you to scroll through videos at random until the algorithm catches on to what you like (such as TikTok).

The core design of the app therefore makes the barrier to engage with Instagram content really low compared to other alternatives. A trade-off here is that the focus on visual content inhibits users’ ability to post long-form or written content.”

For the full answer and an explanation of the framework to use in your own answers, take a look at our guide to the favorite product interview question. It's also worth watching this video example of a great answer to the favorite product question, from an ex-Google PM.

 

Question 7: Why do you want to work at this company?

You're almost certain to be asked this question at least once during your PM interviews. It's frequently used in phone screening rounds and as an icebreaker in final interview rounds.  It tests how well you've researched the company you’re interviewing for, and whether you have the right reasons for wanting to work there.

Below is a brief sample answer to this question, targeted to Google.

Sample answer: Why do you want to work at Google?

"I want to work at Google for three reasons.

First, I'm excited to join Google because of its deep technical culture. I actually did a PhD in Computer Science before becoming a product manager, and I know that by joining the company I'll be working with colleagues who are as excited as I am about advanced technology.

Second, I'm attracted to Google because of its spirit of innovation, exemplified by the famous 20% policy—whether or not that policy is still a hard and fast rule at the company today. Being creative and pursuing novel opportunities is what inspired me to organize a PM committee and internal innovation events in my previous position, which ended up reducing turnover in my team by 15%. It sounds like Google is a place that encourages special projects like these.

Finally, I studied with Nancy Smith and Aaron Fox, who were part of the same PhD program and now work at Google. Both of them are enjoying their time here and encouraged me to apply to join the team."

For instructions on crafting your own perfect answer to this crucial question, follow the steps in our guide to the "why do you want to work here" interview question.

VIDEO: Check out this fairly short video which has some great points about how to approach the question.

Question 8: How do you deal with conflict?

This is another revealing behavioral interview question, which interviewers use to test your interpersonal skills and ability to work in cross-functional teams.

Collaborating with different specialties and personality types is key in product management, and interviewers want to know you’ll handle the kinds of tricky situations that are bound to arise.

Below is a shortened sample answer to a common version of this question.

Sample answer: Tell me about a past conflict you faced

Situation

"In my past job, I was on a product team composed of coworkers from various functional areas of our company. I frequently jumped in with ideas and volunteered to lend a hand in many tasks.

Problem

I noticed that one of my coworkers was cutting me off when I presented ideas. When I volunteered to help with a task in his functional area, he neglected to give me the information and resources I needed in order to contribute. This behavior continued, causing a conflict that slowed down our progress on important tasks.

Solution

I met with my coworker. I politely expressed how his behavior was affecting work and asked if I had overstepped boundaries. He explained that my initial eagerness had taken up too much time in the meetings, giving him and others less of an opportunity to contribute. When I helped in his functional area, it slowed him down to have to explain the processes to me.

I then presented a plan to avoid further conflict: I would be more attentive to the time I spent speaking in meetings and would only volunteer for tasks when I was confident I was well equipped to contribute. In exchange, I requested that he approach me in case further issues arise, instead of closing me off from discussions or projects. 

Impact / Lessons

We each adjusted our behavior and avoided further conflict. We were able to catch up on the delays we were beginning to incur with our communication issues, finishing the project on time and meeting our initial goals.”

For the full answer and a repeatable answer framework, study our guide to behavioral interview questions in tech interviews.

Or see our guide: 5 ways to answer "Tell me about a time you had a conflict"

MOCK INTERVIEW: Watch a strong answer to the question "How would you deal with a conflict with a co-worker'"

Question 9: Tell me about yourself

This is another common icebreaker question, used both in initial phone screens and in the final onsite or virtual onsite interview rounds. It often forms the interviewer’s first impression of you as a candidate and sets the stage for the rest of the interview.

When preparing your answer, take care to align your past experience with the role you’re interviewing for, and be sure that it takes no longer than 1-3 minutes to recite.

In the video below, watch former PM interviewers from Google, Meta, and Amazon answer "Tell me about yourself" and see feedback on their answers to show you the benefits of their different approaches.

 

Alternatively, for a written illustration of what makes a good answer to this question, see below.

Sample answer: Tell me about yourself

“I’m currently finishing out my third year as a senior product manager at X company.

To work up to this position, I started out as a rotational product manager at Y company. We had three rotations as a part of their program, and the one that really hooked me was with their Data team. I loved the combination of creativity and design mixed with the analysis and technical needs of the data platforms that I ultimately got to launch once I was hired on as a full time product manager.

I stayed on that team for another year, until I applied for my current position, looking for more opportunities for growth. There, I was able to work on our product recommendation and CV forecasting solutions, ultimately improving our product CTR by 10%.

Now, I’m hoping to tackle new challenges by making the transition to this role on Z team, to work on platforms that serve millions of users while giving a great product experience.”

Question 10: How would your prioritize tasks A, B, and C?

Prioritization questions like this one test how well candidates can identify customer needs when it comes to picking the most important features and/or building out a product roadmap.

Even if you don't get asked a prioritization question, you'll often need to prioritize between solutions or problems in design or strategy questions, so you need to be ready to use a prioritization framework, even if you won't always have time to go into a lot of detail.

The abbreviated answer below shows how to use the RICE prioritization framework. To save space, we've just prioritized two tasks, but you can see a full version of the answer in our guide to prioritization and trade-off questions.

Sample answer: How would your prioritize tasks A and B?

Define the business objective

Imagine that the interviewer has given you this hypothetical situation: you’re the PM for a brand new photo-editing mobile app, with the following projects.

  • Project A: update the in-app messaging system
  • Project B: add a cropping tool to the editing suite

Apply a framework to the question. Here, we’ll use the RICE framework: [(Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort].

Rice framework: Reach

First, we’ll determine the Reach for these two projects. For project A, the in-app messaging update, imagine that the interviewer said that an average of 250 users have sent messages each month over the last quarter. As project B is adding a cropping tool to the free category of the full editing suite, you can assume the majority of users will use it, so you could round the Reach number to 600.

Rice framework: Impact

Next, evaluate Impact. For project A (messaging update), imagine the interviewer has informed you that users who send messages appear to do so sporadically. As users who do make use of the messaging system don’t engage with it heavily, you could say the impact is low, with an Impact score of 0.5. Project C involves adding a simple cropping tool to the editing features that are available to all users. You could choose the “high” Impact score of 2.

Rice framework: Confidence

For Confidence, Our Reach values for both Project A and Project B are data-based; However, we are largely estimating Impact. You could give both projects an 80% Confidence score.

Rice framework: Effort

Finally, for Effort, imagine there’s already a framework in place for the messaging update, so the timeline of Project A won’t take longer than one person-month. For Project C (cropping tool), imagine that the interviewer has told us that the team’s previous time investment for adding new editing features was three person-months.

Evaluate and conclude.

When you take the four previous values and run them through the RICE formula for each project, here are the results:

Project A: (250 x 0.5 x .80) / 1 = 100

Project C: (600 x 2 x .80) / 3 = 320

According to the RICE scores, you would prioritize the cropping tool.

For the full answer, including trade-offs and other factors, as well as an explanation of the RICE framework, consult our guide to prioritization and trade-off questions.

MOCK INTERVIEW: See a candidate take on a prioritization question in this mock interview video.

Question 11: What are your strengths and weaknesses?

This is a classic getting-to-know-you question that interviewers use to assess your self-awareness and what you will bring to the team.

Below is an example of how you could answer this question. When considering your own response, be sure to choose an honest answer. Everybody has weaknesses. This question is a chance to show that you are self-aware enough to be conscious of yours, and that you've taken steps to address them.

However, you don't want to highlight a weakness that could really hamper your ability to thrive as a product manager. Examples of weaknesses you should NOT admit to would be "I have poor communication skills", "I find it really hard to create a product roadmap" or "I struggle prioritizing tasks and managing my workload"!

Sample answer: What are your strengths and weaknesses?

“One strength is that I have excellent interpersonal and communication skills. It’s something I’ve had to perfect over years of client-facing jobs, as far back as being a clothing store cashier in my teens. When I started my past position, my manager quickly put me at the head of a project team of 15, and we were able to complete the project a week ahead of time, with no issues.

A weakness is that I have a short attention span. It’s something that I have struggled with in my studies in particular, but since then have adopted habits and timing methods that help me manage it. I take frequent short breaks as I work, which allow me to focus on long-term projects, rather than spacing out and getting frustrated.”

MOCK INTERVIEW: This is a good example of how to answer the 'What's your biggest weakness?" side of the question.

Question 12: Tell me about a time when you overcame a challenge

Interviewers use questions like this to find out how well you can act in the face of adverse circumstances. Product management at big tech companies is a challenging job, so they want to be sure that you can go the distance.

Below is an abbreviated example of an answer to this question. It's written from the perspective of a non-experienced candidate, but the logic behind it works for anyone.

Sample answer: Tell me about a time when you overcame a challenge

Situation

“When I was in college I was a barista at a 30-year-old, local coffee shop called Sunny’s. It was a small business with less than ten employees, located in a neighborhood with new shops and restaurants opening at a rapid pace. 

Problem

The shop was losing customers, and the owner had a hard time turning it around.

Solution

I decided to find an easy way to understand the market and find some of the root causes of the problem we were experiencing. I informally surveyed customers and scoped out other shops around the area.

I noticed a few common themes at these other popular shops: 1) They offered soy and almond as alternatives to dairy milk, and 2) they printed the WiFi password on receipts.

I mentioned these themes to the owner. First, we bought a few cartons of alternative milk test if this made a difference to Sunny’s customers. Second, printing the password on receipts was too cumbersome of a change, so instead we posted it around the cafe.

Impact / Lessons

After these changes, sales returned to normal within a couple months. Seeing this, the owner started more regularly surveying customers and executing competitive analysis, which has helped to make Sunny’s one of the top coffee shops in the neighborhood to this day.”

For the full sample answer and the repeatable answer framework that you can use in your own interviews, study our guide to answering behavioral interview questions.

MOCK INTERVIEW: This video gives a strong example answer for another version of this question "Tell me about a time you handled a difficult situation".

Question 13: Explain a technical concept to a non-technical person

Finally, interviewers sometimes ask technical explainer questions like this one in order to assess how well you understand relevant technical concepts to the position you’re applying for, as well as if you can communicate with teams of engineers.

Obviously, if you're applying for a technical PM position then you can expect plenty of technical questions related to your role, but at some companies non-technical PMs should be ready to show they can talk comfortably about technical topics.

Below is a shortened sample answer to the question, “explain how the internet works.”

Sample answer: Explain how the internet works

Clarify

To reduce the scope of the explanation, you can start with, “The internet is composed of many complex elements. I could talk about network connections, blockchain technology, specific web services, etc. But the most fundamental feature of the Internet is probably that websites can be accessed by typing a URL in a browser, so this is what I suggest we focus on.”

Explain step by step

Take some time to write out your thoughts, then walk the interviewer through the steps:

  1. The Client browser uses the URL (e.g. example.com) to find the website’s IP address, which is either stored in local memory or found with a DNS lookup. Here’s a metaphor to help explain: a DNS resolver is like a big phone book matching URLs and IP addresses. If you wanted to call “John Smith” on the phone, first you would need to find his number in the phone book.
  2. Next, the browser uses the IP address and queries the Internet for the website’s data. This is like if you dialed John Smith’s number, then the phone company would make a connection between your phone lines.
  3. Then the website’s Server sends appropriate data (e.g. an index.html file) back across the Internet. To continue the metaphor, when John Smith answers and says hello, his voice is translated into an electronic signal that’s passed through the phone lines.
  4. Finally, the website’s data reaches the browser, which then displays a visual interpretation of that data. This is like your phone’s speaker turning the electronic signal into John Smith’s voice again.

Conclude and discuss

After going over the above, you could conclude by saying, “So, typing a URL into the address bar of a browser works a lot like making a phone call. Information is transferred back and forth between two connection points, and the transferred information needs to be interpreted by the receiver.”

For a framework you can use for this type of question, as well as the full sample answer, take a look at our guide to answering technical questions in PM interviews.

14. 106 more product manager interview questions from FAANG interviews

Now that you’ve seen the top 13 product manager interview questions, it’s time to prepare for every type of question you may be asked.

Keep in mind that some question types are asked more frequently than others. After analyzing over 1,000 questions, we came up with the percentages below.

FAANG PM interview question categories

14.1 Behavioral interview questions (33% of questions)

Tech companies use behavioral interview questions to assess candidates based on their past experiences, their motivations for applying, and their understanding of what makes a good PM.

Example questions: Behavioral

  • Tell me about yourself
  • Why do you want to work at this company?
  • Tell me about a time you had an innovative idea that had a positive impact
  • Why product management?
  • Tell me about your most significant accomplishment. Why was it significant?
  • Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership
  • Tell me about a time you worked backwards from a customer problem — how did you solve it?
  • Describe a project that you wish you had done better and how you would do it differently today
  • Tell me about a time you applied judgment to a decision when data was not available
  • Tell me about a product you led from idea to launch
  • Describe the last time you had to make a challenging decision when prioritizing

Remember, you'll probably be asked more behavioral questions than any other type, so it's worth preparing thoroughly. Here's our guide to answering behavioral questions. This guide primarily focuses on Meta interview questions but can apply to any company.

14.2 Product sense & design interview questions (28%)

There are three types of product sense questions: Product design questions, Product improvement questions and Favorite product questions.

Each of these sub-types assess your creativity, customer empathy, and your ability to use a structured approach to design products in different ways. Prior to the interview, be sure to familiarize yourself with the company’s products to best answer this type of question.

Example questions: Product sense and design

Product design

  • Design an app for a theme park
  • Design an alarm clock for the blind
  • Design a pen for an astronaut
  • Design an umbrella for kids
  • Design a phone for deaf people
  • Design a washer and dryer
  • Design Google radio
  • Design an antiques marketplace
  • Design a dictionary lookup for scrabble
  • Design an app for a community of Celiac's disease patients
  • Design a grocery app
  • Design an app for the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
  • Design a bike-based delivery service
  • Design an elevator
  • Design a new computer keyboard

Product improvement

  • How would you improve Google Pay?
  • How would you improve Facebook groups?
  • How would you improve throughput at an airport?
  • How would you improve AirBnb?
  • How would you improve Dropbox?
  • How would you improve Netflix?
  • How would you improve Reddit?
  • How would you improve LinkedIn's user profile page?
  • How would you improve engagement in Trello?
  • How would you improve Google Home?
  • How would you improve Google Image search?
  • How would you improve the NYC transit system?

Favorite product

Consult our guides to answering product design, product improvement, and favorite product interview questions to best prepare yourself for this category.

14.3 Strategy interview questions (23%)

There are two types of strategy questions: Product strategy, estimation, and prioritization questions. 

Product strategy questions test your ability to develop a product vision and roadmap, while estimation questions require you to assess market sizes, revenue potential, the number of customers, etc., and prioritization questions assess if you can do it all in a logical order.

For each of these subcategories, it's not so much about getting to a specific answer; what’s more important is how you think through the problem, making assumptions and calculations.

Example questions: Strategy

Product strategy

  • How would you turn Facebook events around?
  • How would you monetize Facebook Messenger?
  • You're the CEO of Uber - what's your 10-year plan?
  • How would you bootstrap a product that helps people find apartments?
  • If you were a VC, would you be more bullish on AR or VR?
  • Why do you think Microsoft bought LinkedIn?
  • If you were the CEO of LEGO, what new product line would you come up with to increase revenue?
  • Imagine you’re a PM at a startup that works with big data from the NHL — what’s the first product you would ship?
  • How would you sell live plants at Amazon?
  • If you were the CEO of Facebook, what are the top three things you would do?
  • Imagine you’re the CEO of Apple — what product would you eliminate from the lineup?

Estimation

  • How much revenue does YouTube make per day?
  • What is the market size for driverless cars in 2025?
  • What is the market size for toilet paper in the US?
  • What is the storage space required to host all images on Google Street View?
  • What is the required internet bandwidth for an average college campus?
  • How much time do people spend at stop lights each year?
  • How many restaurant reviews are written on Google Reviews every month?
  • How many kindergarten teachers are there in the US?
  • How many millennials own homes in the US?
  • How much ad revenue does GMail make every year?
  • How many computers does Google own?
  • How many dentists are there in New York?
  • How many bicycles do you need to start a bike sharing service in New York?
  • How many passengers are in the air on a plane at any given time in the US?
  • What is the weight of the Empire State building?

Prioritization

  • How do you prioritize features?
  • How would you prioritize WhatsApp chat features?
  • How do you deal with trade-offs between opposing metrics, such as higher AoV but lower conversion rate?
  • Evaluate the trade-offs between enlarging posts on the Newsfeed versus showing more ads?
  • As the PM of Facebook Pages, what features would you prioritize?
  • How would you evaluate the trade-offs between boosting ad revenue and decreasing retention?

Consult our guides to answering product strategy and estimation interview questions to best prepare yourself for this category.

14.4 Analysis interview questions (12%)

There are two types of analysis questions, both based on metrics: Metric definition questions and Metric change questions. 

Metric definition questions focus on your ability to define metrics that provide clarity on the health of a product or feature, and  metric change questions test whether you know what to do when a key product metric (e.g. traffic, revenue, engagement, etc.) is going up or down without a clear cause.

Example questions: Analysis

Metric definition

  • Define YouTube success metrics
  • What metrics did you use to measure the successful launch of your product?
  • What metrics would you use to measure the success of Facebook’s “Save Item” feature?
  • How would you measure the success of the new YouTube Player UI?
  • What analysis would you use to understand if we should increase the price of an Amazon Prime Membership?
  • How would you determine the negative value of an abusive posting?
  • Imagine you are the PM of the Facebook Newsfeed — how would you measure retention?
  • How would you set goals for Instagram Reels?
  • Tell me what metrics you would look at as a product manager for Instagram ads
  • What are the things that Netflix should measure and analyze on a daily basis?
  • How would you measure the success of Apple's WWDC event?

Metric change

  • Engagement drops 10%. What do you do?
  • There's been a 15% drop in usage of Facebook Groups — how do you fix it?
  • You have just localized an ecommerce site in Spain and now see that traffic has reduced — what could be the reasons?
  • You are looking at YouTube’s Daily Active User data worldwide and notice a 10% jump compared to yesterday in Indonesia — what happened?
  • Users are no longer signing up for our email list — what would you do?
  • Reddit traffic went down 5% — how would you report this issue to the executive team?
  • The usage of Facebook Event’s “Yes I’m going” dropped 30% overnight — what data would you look at to try to isolate the issue?
  • You are the PM of Facebook 3rd Party Login, and you see your numbers are declining 2% week-on-week — what do you do?

Consult our guide to answering product metric interview questions to best prepare yourself for this category.

14.5 Technical interview questions (4%)

There are two types of technical questions: Technical explanation questions and Algorithm questions. Note that not all companies ask technical questions, or may only ask technical explanation questions. If you are unsure of what to expect, check in with your recruiter. 

Technical explanation questions assess the extent of your technical knowledge, and your ability to communicate that knowledge, while algorithm questions test your problem solving skills and ability to solve engineering problems with pseudocode (typically not production-level code).

Example questions: Technical

Technical explanation

  • How does Google Calendar work?
  • Explain recursion to your grandmother
  • What technologies would you use to build a live stream video service?
  • Explain the concept of "protocol" to a 4-year-old child
  • What is the difference between C++ and Java?
  • Explain what happens when executing mergesort
  • When are Bayesian methods more appropriate than "Artificial Intelligence" techniques for predictive analytics?
  • How would you most efficiently store large images in a database?
  • Explain the concept of big O notation
  • How would you get authentication to work across domains?

Algorithm

  • Design a method that removes every other node from a linked list
  • Write a program to randomly shuffle an array of numbers
  • How would you output a tree in column sequence from left to right?
  • Invert the words of a sentence in a string
  • Write a function that returns how many digits are in a number
  • Take in an unsorted array with duplicates and return it with no duplicates
  • Write a function that determines if an array of "chars" is a palindrome
  • How can you find and then remove the second to last element in an infinite list?

Consult our guide to answering technical interview questions to best prepare yourself for this category.

15. How to prepare for product management interviews

With a lot to cover, it’s best to take a systematic approach to make the most of your practice time. 

Below you’ll find links to free resources and three introductory steps that you can take to prepare your answers to typical PM interview questions.

You may also be able to find a specific interview guide for the company you're targeting in the list below:

15.1 Learn a consistent method for answering each type of question

In this article, we’ve provided a huge list of example questions that you can use to prepare for the main question types used in product manager interviews.

For each type of question, we've linked our guides which cover the basic steps for solving them as well as giving a detailed answer for one of the questions. We'd recommend that you begin by memorizing the method for solving a question type. 

After learning the basic method for a question type, you should try answering several sample questions on your own. This will help you to understand the structure of a good answer. 

Once you've learned the method for one question type, and after you've practiced with a few examples, then you should move onto the next type of question. Repeat this process until you've covered each question type that's used at your target company.

15.2 Practice by yourself or with peers

In our experience, practicing by yourself is a great way to prepare for PM interviews. You can start practicing alone, asking and answering questions out loud, to help you get a feel for the different types of PM interview questions. It will help you perfect your step-by-step approach for each question type. And it also gives you time to correct your early mistakes.

You can find free practice questions on articles like this one or on YouTube.

If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's a great option too. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with PM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process.

15.3 Practice with experienced PM interviewers

Finally, you should also try to practice product manager mock interviews with expert ex-interviewers, as they’ll be able to give you much more accurate feedback than friends and peers. If you know a Product Manager who can help you, that's fantastic! But for most of us, it's tough to find the right connections to make this happen. And it might also be difficult to practice multiple hours with that person unless you know them really well.

Here's the good news. We've already made the connections for you. We’ve created a coaching service where you can practice 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers from Google, Amazon, Uber, and other leading tech companies. Learn more and start scheduling sessions today.

 

Keep reading:

For more interview prep, check out the rest of our product manager interview articles.

If you're going for a very senior PM role or one that could be described as a product leader or product owner, you might want to check out our guide to product owner interview questions.

If you want to develop your product management skills, better tackle problems at work, or work out your next career step, consider booking a 1-to-1 product management coaching session with one of our expert PMs.