Interviewing for Product Roles

From a PO to a CPO, the interview process focuses on the core of product–how the person will design and deliver to make the product fit (and hence make $).  I find there are five areas to explore at every level. 

Strategy 

Design the product path is core to any product role.  Questions like “How would define the first release of our new X app?” or “When setting the vision for the product team, what do you find to be the key elements of a vision statement?”   or “Tell me how you would increase usage of our Z app.” 

Execution 

How does this person measure success?  You can ask this in various ways like “Our new product is meant to engage remote workers, how would measure success of the launch within the first 30 days?”  or  “How do you design measurements to help your product teams know they have product market fit?”   

Product insight 

My favorite here is “What is one of your favorite products and why?”  I don’t mind if the answer is a coffee maker or stock tracking app, what I am curious about is their passion in the answer coupled with a few key points on the why.  Product people can quickly hit the three areas of the product that solve or do something for that in a way that delights them.  If they can articulate this well, you know they will focus on your products in the same way. 

Control

Some people call this estimation, but I like to look for a broader area of control where I see that they can estimate under contraints. Many people ask the classic “how many pingpong balls fit in a 747?” to get to estimation but I like to ask higher level product roles the following.  “Given you have 6 months of capital to deploy, how would you go about designing a product and bringing it to market?”   Notice I don’t give them an amount or any steer on product type.   What I am looking for is an answer like “Since I don’t have specifics, I will make an assumption that this is an app and I have only $250K to spend.  First I would ….”     For less senior roles, I use “Estimate how many people in the US use a banking app on a daily basis.”   Here I am not looking for a right number, but the process of guessing the population, the number of people that have a bank account, the usage of such an app (unlikely it is daily like social media), etc. to see how they think about sizing. 

Behavior

Last, I cover specific behavioral areas.  Already during the questions above you learn about the person’s personality and thinking process so you have developed an opinion of culture fit, but definitely try to hone that opinion with questions on risk or difficulty. Classic one “Tell me about a product failure.”  I leave the question there to see if they not only tell me the mechanics of the failure, but also the learning or adaptation they took from this.  

Depending on the level of the role you will adapt these questions between tactical with proposed answer to leadership and experience driven responses. The outcome should give you an idea of how the person approaches design, difficulty, team work, and the fly wheel of product launch, iterate, measure, and adapt.