Hi, I’m Sam! I have been a product manager for years and now I work as an industry mentor for the product, strategy, and operations track at Pathrise, where I help people land their dream job. Check out this list of product manager interview questions from top tech companies!
Updated in 2021
So, you have an onsite interview coming up and you are getting ready to wow them so that you can land your dream job. How can you make sure that you nail the onsite and turn that interview into an offer?
We created a list of 130 product manager interview questions, including questions from top tech companies, so you can prepare for your interview and ace it with confidence.
- Personal taste/experience
- Operations/strategy
- Design
- Technical
- Metrics
- Market sizing/estimation
- Situational
Product manager interview questions
Personal taste/experience
- Pick and product that you like/dislike. Why? What would you change about the product?
- Box question – Describe how you used one of your greatest strengths in your job
- Apple question – What’s your favorite Apple product?
- Tell me a time where you had to make a decision in the midst of a lot of ambiguity?
- Autodesk question – Do you have experience estimating and managing a project budget? If so, can you describe how you managed a project’s cost?
- FICO question – What experience do you have in writing product requirements and what product management methodology was used?
- How do you decide which features are the best for a product?
- eBay question – Describe a challenging situation you faced as PM recently.
- Cisco question – How do you work with engineering?
- Explain a process within your role that you learned or developed at your previous job which you feel is valuable enough to take with you to future position.
- Facebook question – As a PM on the Facebook Birthdays team, how would you make it better?
- Choose a technology you are particularly excited about and explain why.
- Google question – Tell us about your 3 favorite unknown android applications. Why?
More personal taste/experience
- LinkedIn question – If you were a VC, are you more bullish on AR or VR? What app would you build and what would be your killer feature?
- HubSpot question – What is your product development process? Do you utilize experimentation?
- Teradata question – What specific domain experience do you have?
- Intuit question – How have you had to deal with customer expectations in the past?
- What are your 2 main product management principles?
- Workday question – How do you engage customers in the product development process?
- Rakuten question – Which stage of product management are you most excited to contribute to?
- TripAdvisor question – What websites do you use everyday and how would you incorporate their user experiences into your product?
Operations/strategy
- If you have a disagreement with an engineer about what should be built, how do you go about solving that?
- Cisco question – How do you prioritize your backlog?
- Pretend you know nothing about Amazon Prime. How would you price it?
- Amazon question – Should Amazon enter into selling contact lenses?
- We know that 10% of the time a customer will enter a product into our search feature and it will return a “no item found” message. What are some of the possible reasons and how can we fix it?
- Apple question – There is an assembly line and all of a sudden it stops working. No one is around, how will you handle it?
- NetApp question – Talk about the future trend of storage management.
- Expedia question – The marketing team asked you to take down your feature from the landing page because it caused a lower conversion rate in Italy. What would you do?
- Dropbox question – How do you align stakeholders that have different options when you get into a project?
- Pinterest question – Currently Pinterest helps people store ideas via pins. How do you motivate them to take action, i.e. buy?
- eBay question – How do you decide which features are the best for a product?
- Show me your individual process to prioritize a product roadmap and its stories.
- Facebook question – How do you prioritize competing features?
- Intel question – What is your vision of the industry and what strategy do you suggest?
- Intuit question – What technological trend do you see Intuit taking on in the future and how will it apply it to its growth?
- Facebook question – Pick an industry that will be different in 10 years and how can Facebook be a part of that?
Design
- Microsoft question – Design a novel remote control that has only one button to control the TV. Write the binary search.
- Uber question – Design an airport to optimize for luggage pickup
- Adobe question – What are some of your favorite product? Why? If you were the PM on this product what would you improve and why?
- Design a system to advise drivers how many spots in the parking lot are free
- Box question – Tell me about a feature you designed. How did you come up with this feature? What metrics will you use to track the success of the feature?
- Cisco question – How would you create a minivan?
- Intel question – How do you see Intel’s recent market challenge? How do you design a product to overcome that challenge?
- Microsoft question – Design an airport traffic control system
- Salesforce question – How would you design a platform to encourage users to use new tools or other existing tools/features that they don’t use often?
Technical
- VMWare question – What is a virtual machine? What are all the advantages of a virtual machine?
- Dell question – What does cloud computing mean?
- HubSpot question – Talk about the most technical project you’ve worked on and the successes and failures within it.
- Docusign question – How familiar are you with APIs?
- What considerations would you take to develop a mobile app?
- Groupon question – How would you design a Sudoku game for mobile device?
- Google question – When are Bayesian methods more appropriate than “Artificial Intelligence” techniques for predictive analytics?
- Expedia question – Explain how an object is passed to the results page and what is included.
- Microsoft question – Are there any complications in C when you try to typecast an Integer to an enum?
- Google question – How much storage space do you need to store all the info from Google Maps
More technical
- InterSystems question – Learn a logic system and produce resulting code to implement
- VMWare question – What is the difference between public and private clouds? What is a hybrid cloud?
- Microsoft question – How do you output a tree in column sequence from left to right?
- Oracle question – How do you calculate the sum of integers in a randomly chosen rectangle within a finite grid of numbers?
- Design a method that removes every other node from a linked list.
- Slack question – What would you build as an MVP for a 3D printer that can print any type of pharmaceutical?
- How would you get authentication to work across domains?
- Rakuten question – How would you optimize an API?
- Salesforce question – How would you integrate video into Chatter?
- SAP question – Tell me how HANA works.
- Spotify question – What does continuous integration mean?
- What is spaghetti code?
Metrics
- Amazon question – Describe a customer feedback recommendation that you implemented
- Box question – How do you measure effectiveness of your user interface?
- eBay question – How would you design a better metric for measuring seller success?
- LinkedIn question – How would you get sales professionals to post more links on LinkedIn? What metrics would you look at?
- How would you, as a PM, track what your client selected in their itinerary?
- Booking question – What metrics did you use to measure the success of a product you were involved recently?
- Expedia question – Talk about a time you used data to make a product decision.
- Facebook question – You are the PM of the Facebook timeline, how would you measure retention?
- Slack question – Aggregate prints per household dipped but the marketing campaign was a success and unit sales increased. Explain why this happened.
- LinkedIn question – What are some main KPIs for project X? Be able to talk at length about metrics and KPIs.
- Pinterest question – Choose an Ad at a given point of time from a pool of promoted pins from all advertisers and make sure every advertiser’s daily budget needs are met.
- Facebook question – How would you determine the negative value of an abusive posting?
- Intuit question – Describe some of the best practices/strategies you use for marketing data analysis and the different methodologies for devising marketing analysis plans.
- LinkedIn question – A/B testing – how would you test a certain LinkedIn feature? (Ex: ‘people you may know’ feature). How would you initially think about it when you don’t have any data to base the decision off of?
- How would you determine the success of a specific feature?
More metrics
- Slack question – What is the most important metric for Slack and why?
- TripAdvisor question – Review data of consumer conversion between pages in an Excel spreadsheet. Derive insights on the conversion data.
- Stripe question – Define a north star metric for a given product, how do you move the metric, how do you set goals, metric x is going up/down, why?
- Facebook question – How would you determine how to rank posts in the news feed?
- Twitter question – How would you increase engagement of users with analytics features in Twitter?
- Snap question – Give an example of a data analysis process to change a feature or price of a product.
- Uber question – There is a data point that indicates that there are more Uber drop-offs at the airport than pick-ups from the airport. Why is this the case and what would you do within the product to change that?
Market sizing/estimation
- Amazon question – How did you size the market for your product? What metrics did you use to measure the product success? What would you go back and change in your product
- Google question – The NBA championships are about to happen and you are the producer of merchandise showcasing the winning team–but, you don’t know which team that will be. What do you produce and how much do you produce to dress the stadium visitors with merchandise?
- Facebook question – How would you calculate the number of daily registrations that Facebook has?
- Let’s say you wanted to build the world’s most popular mobile messaging product, and you needed to estimate how much network bandwidth would be used in a year. How would you go about doing this?
- Google question – What will be the impact of self-driving cars?
- Choose a city and estimate how many Piano Tuners operate there.
- Microsoft question – How many ping pong balls can you fit into a warehouse?
- Dell question – Can you analyze current market trends and opportunities for Dell for a Product X?
- Twitter question – How many logins are there in a day into Gmail?
- What is the market size of toilet paper in Canada?
- Microsoft question – How would you calculate the market value of the Segway market in the United States of America?
Situational
- Accenture question – What are the use cases you worked on?
- Adobe question – What do you do when a team stops working on the product and is only working on innovations and not listening to the needs of our customers and the business?
- Are you concerned about any features? What did we do right, what did we get wrong?
- FIS question – How would you handle a situation where a vendor is not meeting a deadline, which in turn is delaying your deadline with the customer?
- Talk about a project you started and pushed through engineering – what data did you look at, what did you consider, what problem did you see, how did you resolve it?
- Amazon question – Think of a new product or business for Amazon, and describe how you would decide to create the product and launch it? How would you choose which features to implement and which are most important to our customers?
- Esri question – How do you translate a business need into requirements?
- What are the variable costs associated with sending physical products to customers?
- Apple question – Walk me through the components needed to build a data processing and reporting system.
- Cisco question – Can you explain market transitions and technology transitions?
- eBay question – How would you explain what the Internet is to aliens?
- Facebook question – How would you build Facebook for blind people?
- How would you bootstrap a product that helps people find apartments and how would you differentiate it from existing competitors?
- FICO question – Give me some examples of what you see as emerging credit trends.
- Airbnb question – How would you drive supply-side growth for certain markets?
- GE Healthcare question – How do you manage if you have conflict with your team member?
More situational
- IBM question – How do you convince non-designers of your decisions?
- Slack question – What holds Slack back as you think of unreleased feature x? What would you build in the short term? What would you build in the long term?
- Google question – If you were the product manager of (unnamed product), how would you improve the functionality 10x of what it is now?
- Intuit question – Design an experiment for Quickbooks Online.
- Microsoft question – How would you market the Windows 8 pre-packaged product?
- LinkedIn question – What is a product you would improve? (Be ready to talk at length about why your improvement is important and how you could market it).
- McKesson question – Stakeholder A wants to build Feature 1 on product X and stakeholder B wants to build Feature 2 on product Y. You only have the budget and IT bandwidth to build 1 feature for 1 product. IT resources are shared across products. Walk me through your approach and your decision.
- How else could you market ping pong balls if ping pong itself became obsolete? (List many, then pick one and go into detail)
Final situational
- TripAdvisor question – What are the top features you would add to our site and why?
- NetApp question – A client makes a request for modifying the storage software. The client is insistent but the development team is busy on other work and is unable to dedicate time to the client request. Also, you are not sure if making an investment in modifying the software will be useful for other clients. What would you do in this situation?
- Slack question – How would you drive adoption of apps from Slack’s app directory?
- Twitter question – If Twitter were to get into payments, how should they do it?
- Uber question – Name the most recent large concert, sports game, or event you attended. Based on your observations, what were some complications with ridesharing during the event, and how could we improve?
Our advisors meet with so many smart product managers who still find that they have difficulty with their onsite technical interviews. So, we also wanted to provide some tips for you to keep in mind to nail your onsite interview.
Always start with clarifying questions
Sometimes, interviewers make a question intentionally vague. Always take about 15-30 seconds to think about clarifying questions, like “Can I wireframe this out first?” or “Can I take notes with a pen & paper?”
Proactively show positive signal
Take the time to show that you know what you’re doing. This is a strong tactic used by candidates who want to reduce the amount of opportunities to show negative signal. In general 30 second “tidbits” of knowledge bodes well. Give background information as you go.
Keep context in the forefront
Context statements let the interviewer know that you know what you are doing. By providing the reasoning before doing something, you can change how you are interpreted for the better.
Know how to get help
Most of the time, it’s ok to ask for help. But, it’s important to know that some interviewers really hate the word, “hint.” A better approach would be to say, “my assumptions are X and Y, I’m thinking of doing Z. But I’m struggling with solving [problem].” You can also ask collaborative questions like,
- I was wondering if you had any thoughts.
- Do you think I’m going down the right direction?
- Do you think my assumptions are incorrect?
With these questions & tips in your back pocket, you should be more than prepared for your next technical onsite interview. For more steps on how to become a product manager, check out our guide.
About Pathrise
Pathrise is a career accelerator that works with students and young professionals 1-on-1 so they can land their dream job in tech. With these tips and guidance, our fellows have seen their interview performance scores double.
If you want to work with any of our advisors 1-on-1 to get help with your product manager interviews or with any other aspect of the job search, become a Pathrise fellow.
Apply today.
