How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
How do you decide what not to build?
Is consensus always a good thing?
What's the difference between management and leadership?
What kinds of people do you like to work with? hat are frequently asked questions in product manager interviews?
I am looking to interview at Bay Area tech companies (Google, Facebook, Zynga, etc.) as a product manager. It's been a while since I have interviewed for these things and would love your input on the FAQs that I should have good answers to right off the bat. Thanks!
Want Answers690
ANSWER WIKI
1. How do you prioritize among competing features?
2. How do you say no to people?
3. What is your favorite online product and why? How would you improve it?
Similar question but explicitly for a non-software/web product.
4. Tell me about how use data to make decisions.
5. How would you describe our product to someone?
6. How do you know if a product is well designed?
7. What is one of the best ideas you have ever had?
8. What is the worst idea you have ever had?
9. What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting?
10. What are some of the challenges working with development teams to create software?
11. How would you explain Product Management to a 5 year old?
12. What is your current role on your team: who else do you work with and in what capacity?
13. How do you decide what to build?
14. How do you interact with your users?
15. Tell me about an application you are very familiar with; what drives you nuts about it, how would you fix it; what would your next release look like (tell me the theme/top features).
16. provide a number of products (websites) that you think are particularly well designed
17. suggest how you would improve the targeted company's product/site
18. talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges/poor feedback
19. What metrics do you think are important to track for our products?
20. What would you measure to tell if a new feature was successful or not?
21. Give an example of a well executed product. How would you improve it?
22. What are the roles and responsibilities of a product manager?
23. How do you prioritize features for a release?
17 ANSWERS
Rakesh Agrawal, Managing Web and mobile produc... (more)
119 upvotes by Charlie Cheever, Pete Mauro, Marc Bodnick, (more)
1. How do you prioritize among competing features?
2. How do you say no to people?
3. What is your favorite online product and why? How would you improve it?
Similar question but explicitly for a non-software/web product.
4. Tell me about how use data to make decisions.
5. How would you describe our product to someone? Updated 30 Mar, 2013. 24,423 views.
Did you find this answer helpful? Yes • No
Comments4+
More Answers Below.
Related Questions

What are useful interview questions for product managers?

What are some good answers to Rakesh Agrawal's response in: What are frequently asked questions in product manager interviews?

What are some product management interview questions that get asked during a Palantir interview? Are PMs expected to know how to code, and if ... (continue)
Pete Mauro, Consumer Product Manager for 1... (more)
25 upvotes by Quora User, Chris Combs, Quora User, (more)
Rakesh nailed the top 5 most important questions. Here are some secondaryquestions:
1. How do you know if a product is well designed?
2. What is one of the best ideas you have ever had?
3. What is the worst idea you have ever had?
4. What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting?
5. What are some of the challenges working with development teams to create software? Written 3 Jun, 2011. 7,523 views.
Did you find this answer helpful? Yes • No
Comment
Karthik Srinivasan, Product Manager, Mobile Services
19 upvotes by Satpal Parmar, Brian Anderson, Srikanth Bhakthan, (more)
I have found the list here to be comprehensive:

How to hire a product manager http://www.kennethnorton.com/ess... Written 2