The Eternal Truths of Product Interviews
From startups to tech giants, how to communicate your story
It’s a great time to be a product person: Small teams are in, and leaders are hungry for the top tier, high-agency product manager who can blaze trails and build businesses.
And because of how competitive it is out there now, I’ve talked with many seasoned product managers who are looking for their next opportunity for the first time in a few years — overwhelmed with prep, buried in blog posts, anxiously rehearsing responses. “How have PM interviews changed?” “What types of case studies are in now?”
Listen product friends, while much has changed over the past few years — technology, the market, even the role — consider this a reminder that the fundamentals remain:
Great product people think deeply, execute quickly, and communicate clearly.
This is not “How to pass a PM interview at Meta.”
This is me opening up my playbook and sharing the rough scaffolding I’ve used to build the interview processes at companies of all sorts — mature companies like Atlassian and H-E-B, growth companies like FullStory, and even seed-stage while advising the team at Enterpret.
While the details change, the themes have been consistent. Use this to get anchored in the eternal truths of product interviewing.
Tell your builder story.
Product Interview Themes
Theme: Product Leadership
Focus: Curiosity, goal setting, strategy, pricing, vision casting, empathy.
Questions in this theme lean towards the philosophical, backed up by tactical examples. I’m expecting to learn the candidate’s POV on product. The process they use to author and influence strategy. How they think about the DNA of great products. And most of all, how effective they can communicate it all.
You might get questions like:
What are the three most important characteristics of a product manager? (Which one are you strongest in?)
What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve learned from a customer?
How would you describe bad product strategy?
How would you go about sizing up the total market for our product?
Describe your current product strategy and how that strategy came to be.
What’s the most delightful customer experience you’ve had lately?
You can only ship one thing this year. What’s your process?
Describe a time when you had to make a counterintuitive product decision. What was your reasoning?
Tell me about a time you failed to lead the way you should have.
What's your method for quickly validating new ideas?
With many of the more theoretical questions — like “Size our total market” — the most productive dialogue occurs when the candidate worries less about an accurate answer, and instead focuses on their thought process, the series of steps they would try to get an answer, and what they’ve done in the past (and how those steps might be different in another environment).
With many of the more practical questions — especially questions around their current strategy and product vision, like “Describe your current product strategy” — the path to success is (unsurprisingly) through crisp, clear communication. The best conversations occur when the candidate is efficient at helping me understand their business, challenges, priorities, and ultimately, how they’ve created shared understanding amongst teams towards a common goal.
Conversely, a rambling regurgitation of words disguised as “strategy” tell me two things: The candidate’s perception of strategy and the candidate’s level of communication maturity are both insufficient.
A few memorable exchanges with candidates:
A candidate described bad product strategy as “spending a ton of time writing words that don’t help anyone do anything differently.” Agree! A good start! We went on to unpack the candidate’s role in their company’s strategy drafting process (which, as it turned out, was relatively passive). And, this is where the red flag went up: This candidate was unable to articulate any action they took to help remedy the problems they were so eager to diagnose, nor did they have a sense of what “good” looked like. They inherited what they considered bad strategy, and took few steps beyond complaining and judging. It’s easy to criticize from the sidelines, especially when it comes to product leadership.
Great product people love talking about great product experiences. A candidate shared a story about a delightful experience from an exchange with the customer service team at Patagonia. The candidate was set to go on a trip when they realized their bag strap was broken. Patagonia didn’t make the bag anymore, but on a whim, the candidate reached out to Patagonia. What happened? New strap in two days! Unexpected, pure delight that’s led to continued customer loyalty. Strong lessons to apply to product: Customer service is the product. Deliver the unexpected.
Theme: Product Execution
Focus: Prioritization, planning, creativity, analysis, discovery, decision making, shipping, go-to-market, operating like a founder.
Questions here complement the section above — they are practical, tactical, and deep to understand what the candidate has done and why. The best strategy is nothing without brilliant execution.
Historically, I’ve found the most rich dialogue kicks off with just a single question:
Pick a recent [product, feature, service, app] that you shipped. I’d like to go super deep — walk me through it, from start to finish.
Throughout that conversation, I expect to learn how the candidate:
Aligned teams around a shared goal
Connected the team with the customer
Validated or experimented towards a V1
Balanced driving the team vs burning them out
Determined when to ignore the data
Communicated progress vertically and horizontally
Handled blockers and made the hard calls
Measured success, ultimately to continue to invest vs divest
Pick a good example! The candidate needs to tell a story about a meaningful arc of work where they played a significant role that’s ripe with specific actions and outcomes.
Specificity matters. Get into the details, and use the Minto principle for a progressive conversation. “I wrote a user research plan” VS “Based on the riskiest assumptions for V1, I wrote a set of learning goals and partnered with Research to write a script that mapped to those learning goals to unlock our MVP. Would you like a few examples?”
Leave the team behind. In this moment, it’s all about the candidate and the impact they made through their actions. When I hear “we” did something, 100% of the time, I will interrupt with, “and what specifically was your role in that?” I admire the team mentality, but in this context, it dilutes the message.
Perfect projects don’t exist. At a minimum, projects always involve people — teammates and customers — and people aren’t perfect! Stories where everything goes perfectly = red flag. The job is adapting and overcoming, so tell that story.
Spurs or reins? I heard this saying from a friend recently, and it resonated. One of the focus areas mentioned above is, “operating like a founder,” which means to move with speed and ownership when it comes to product execution, from start to finish. If anything, the high agency product person might need reins, but never spurs.
Theme: Collaboration
Focus: Humility, design intuition, technical skills, conflict management, accountability.
This often is when the candidate might meet the extended team, like a UX and Eng Lead. The conversation here is geared towards understanding how the candidate works within a team, how they engage with other crafts, and their level of competence across those crafts.
You might get questions like:
Engineers say your idea is impossible. Now what?
When is consensus “good?”
How technical does a PM need to be?
What are you unwilling to tolerate from teammates?
Can you share a bit about the tech stack your team is working across right now?
Share an example of a time when you adapted your communication style to different audiences.
Tell me about a teammate who you thought was challenging to work with. What would that teammate say about you?
How do you know when a project is going off the rails? How do you get it back on track?
Tell me about a time when you missed a deadline, and how you rallied the team.
What products do you see taking a big swing around user experience?
The most successful conversations in this realm paint a picture of a product person who can listen with an open mind, lead with conviction, and prioritize the endless list of priorities with pragmatism and transparency.
High caliber PMs are, at a minimum, able to speak with authority on the tech stack and design decisions in their current role, as it relates to the customer or priorities that led to those decisions.
The questions and emphasis here varies widely across companies and roles.
Theme: Motivation & Self-Awareness
This theme might be woven throughout earlier sessions. The aim is to get an understanding of the candidate’s goals and gauge their self-awareness — easily one of the most crucial ingredients of a successful product person.
You might get questions like:
What are you solving for in your next move?
Looking back at the last 6 months, what are you most proud of?
How do you go about gathering constructive feedback from teammates?
Tell me about a time that you were asked to lead an arc of work that didn’t make sense.
If you could reshape your current/last role, what would you change?
What’s a common misconception your team might have about you professionally?
What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself at your current company?
What’s the hardest piece of feedback you received? Why? What did you do?
Describe a time that you had to advocate for an unpopular but necessary decision.
What’s your biggest concern about this opportunity?
If there is a section to really invest in mock interviews, this is it.
I had the privilege of working with the great communication coach Nancy Graves many years ago. One of the many tools she’s emphasizes is “verbal drafting,” which is the practice of getting reps in out loud, rather than just thinking through a response. I do this constantly, and it’s become a habit. Get a few reps in out loud (maybe recorded, or with someone else), fine tune, edit, repeat. And then muscle memory kicks in during the actual interview. A particularly helpful tactic here because these questions all revolve around things the candidate knows already (rather than hypotheticals) — why they’re looking, their motivations, and how they’ve grown.
Wrapping Up
Challenges and Case Studies
I’ve done everything from writing exercises to live case studies. From what I can tell, companies are still all over the map here. Regardless of the specific exercise, showcase your process and how you think on your toes; worry less about getting it “right.”
And then get curious: What does their process tell you about the company?
Ask Hard Questions
Lastly — Please ask hard questions. Be ready! There’s nothing more baffling than a candidate who has no questions. It’s a part of the interview. A product person who isn’t curious has no business solving customer problems.
Thank you for reading. My hope is that this helps to spark some ideas on how you might shape your story.
Anchor in the fundamentals: Great product people think deeply, execute quickly, and communicate clearly.
Good luck. ✌️