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2019-06-15 00:00:00 +0000

Interview Questions

List of questions asked in interviews for product management role

Motivation

I have had several opportunities to attend interviews as a candidate and received very interesting questions / experiences. This article is to document the questions I was asked in those interviews. Also, it was fun to look back once in a while.

Background

I’ve been working under the title “Product Manager” (mainly with e-commerce and logistics products) for a while. Each PM job exposes me to a different variation of PM. Overtime, I become more selective of what variations I like. With this knowledge, interviewing becomes more fun as I try to decipher what PM variations the company practices.

General questions

Usually asked during HR round and/or get-to-know section

  1. What do you like about Product Management?
  2. What skills do you think a PM should have?
  3. Share a failed project and/or a successful project that you were involved
  4. Tell me some projects that you did in your previous companies
  5. Why are you looking out for opportunities?
  6. What is your product cycle (How do you run a product end-to-end)? This usually includes prioritisation, expectation management, managing development, roll out and results monitoring.
  7. What is your thought process in prioritising issues?

Property listing company: 4 interviewers (Head of Product, Senior PM and 2 PMs)

  1. Case study (take-home assignment): Question list here.
  2. Case study presentation + Follow up questions: Usually, the interviewer would give feedback/ challenge your work.

Financial product listing: 4 interviewers (Head of Product, 2 Senior PMs and CTO)

  1. Case study (take-home assignment): Question list here.
  2. Case study presentation + Follow-up questions: Similar to previous one

Logistic operations software: 2 interviews

  1. What makes you think you’re the right fit for this company?

CRM software: Remote working

  1. Screening questions here

Vehicle (PMD) sharing software: 3 interviewers (Head of Product, CTO and 1 senior engineer)

  1. Logic question: Everyday, the company has to deploy the vehicles to multiple parking locations in Singapore. How do you optimise the number of vehicles per location?
  2. Logic question: Facebook has a birthday feature (i.e. user got notified that their friend’s birthday is today and suggested to comment on their friend’s feed). What do you think is the success metric of this feature?
  3. Logic question: This vehicle type requires daily charge so we need to hire part-timers / freelancers to charge them. What factors are involved in calculating the cost of hiring part-timers?

Logistic operations: 4 interviewers (PM team and 1 VP of Engineering)

  1. Case study: Question list here
  2. Case study presentation + Follow-up Questions

Logistics aggregator software

  1. Tell me about a project that you did and what technology (programming language / framework / service) that the team used.

Digital telco

  1. Logic question: The company allows customers to buy SIM online, get it delivered to their preferred address at preferred timing and get updated on the tracking status. Now, the company’s plan is to expand to multiple markets quickly. For each market, they need to collaborate with a logistic partner and inventory partner to handle operations. With those context in mind, what do you think should be the overview technical architecture?
  2. Logic question:Let’s say you work for a ride-hailing company. And you find that there’s an issue with ETA (driver) accuracy. What can contribute to the root cause? What are the metric you look at?

What are they testing:

  1. Reasoning skill
  2. Persuasion skill
  3. Feedback acceptance