Mobile Product Manager

► Which is the best Product feature that you have built in your present/past company and why?

► How much time do you spend on Analytics?

► How do you build the product roadmap?

► Do you like to work as an individual or in a group?

► Tell me about a failed product/feature that you had built.

► What comes to you first: business or customer?

► What is your favourite site and why? How will you improve it?

► How do you keep track of competition?

► How can you improve our (the recruiting company) website/business?

► How do you test the demand for a new product?

► How comfortable are you with coding?

► Do you sit with engineers and tell them how to code?

► How do you convince other people?

► Who does give the final sign up for product release?

► Will you make a responsive site or mobile site or mobile app first?

► Assignment: How will you improve the conversion rate of this page?

► Assignment: Which of these 2 landing pages will work better and why?

► Guestimates: How many people left New Delhi via flight today?

► Guestimates: What is the total no of Product Managers in India?

► Math: Revenue break even related problems.

► How do you prioritize among competing features?

► How do you say no to people?

► What is your favorite (software) product and why? How would you improve it?

► Tell me about how use data to make decisions.

► How would you describe our product to someone?

► How do you know if a product is well designed?

► What is one of the best ideas you have ever had?

► What is the worst idea you have ever had?

► What aspects of Product Management do you find the least interesting?

► What are some of the challenges working with development teams to create software?

► How would you explain Product Management to a 5 year old?

► What is your current role on your team: who else do you work with and in what capacity?

► How do you decide what to build?

► How do you interact with your users?

► 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).

► Provide a number of products (websites) that you think are particularly well-designed.

► Suggest how you would improve the targeted company's product/site

► Talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges/poor feedback

► What metrics do you think are important to track for our products?

► What would you measure to tell if a new feature was successful or not?

► Give an example of a well executed product. How would you improve it?

► What are the roles and responsibilities of a product manager?

► Describe what happens when you type a URL into your browser and press Enter.

► Give an example of a product lifecycle. Specify stages such as market research, development, documentation, mass production, launching, marketing, branding, services, etc.

► Take me through how you've defined and managed a product from start to finish.

► Describe a new product market research. Go through its value proposition, target customers, and competitive analysis, to the product's positioning strategy.

► How do you measure product success?

► How do you decide on the product pricing strategy? What are the factors you consider the most?

► Would you change product pricing according to market needs, competitors, or profits/losses?

► How would you increase clients' satisfaction?

► Give an example of an innovative idea/solution you've identified and implemented.

► Would you modify/correct business priorities for a product (features, marketing, etc.) for any new condition that arises that you haven't considered before?

► What are the differences between Waterfall and Agile development techniques?

► Have you had a situation in which a product went over its budget and timeline? How have you handled this case and what did you learn?

► Tell us the steps you take to obtain feedback from clients and integrate relevant requirements into the company's products.

This to me is the heart of product management. You may have said a lot of great things, but if you don't have a great answer to this question, we are done. There are lots of good answers. But I'm looking for a mix of things. First and foremost, have you put thought into this. If you just ramble off an unrelated list of things, we are done. Second, I want to understand how you balance all the competing inputs: user feedback, business needs, the CEO's pet feature, engineering favorites, time to build, cost, market needs, and so on.

This is a great question for gauging how well someone understands the business context in which they work and the market in which their product sits. It's also a good measure of critical thinking. If you want to move on to an in-person interview, you better nail this one.

This is a common variation of the strategy question. Case study questions can be tricky. To prepare, research the market that your target company is in, as well as adjacent markets and competitors. Review recent tech business stories and analysis to understand current business strategies in play and what issues tech leaders are grappling with. If you are caught off-guard, you will at least have some analogs you can draw upon.

Like the product design questions, start your answer with stating your assumptions about the current business strategy and goals of the company in question. Common case study questions involve new market entry-Michael Porter's Five Forces framework can be a good starting point.

Discuss how the new market or segment fits with the company's core business and complementary business opportunities. Understanding the company's underlying value proposition can help put a seemingly unrelated business opportunity into context.

Easiest way to earn your team's trust and support as PM is to develop intimate customer & market understanding. Having a well developed spidery sense is not only a huge plus but an requirement. On various occasions you have prove that you know and care about customer more then anyone in the organisation. This can be tricky thing to accomplish as many PM rely on others for market & customer information. In other cases PM job description may fail to communicate your responsibility as customer evangelist clearly. Keeping all this in mind ability to filter noise from signal and developing strong intuition about market becomes the most critical skill for PM's survival.

Now coming back to interviewing questions I think any question that help you gauge a candidate on above skill parameters is a good question.

Moreover I believe organisations as well as products go through an evolutionary life cycle and each stage requires different attitude and temperament from new PM. It would be better if you keep your organisation and product goals transparent in the interviewing process. Let the candidate evaluate product path and if it'd not fit into your organisation goals communicate your desired product trajectory to him so that he can answer your question according to new expectations.

Product design questions test the applicant's ability to think on their feet and create a full product or feature. New product design questions can be very high level ("design a lamp"). Start with identifying the goal of the product-if the interviewer won't tell you, state your assumptions so that you have something to build on. Decide which metric or business driver you will impact most. From there, identify the possible users for the new product or feature. Select the one that seems most relevant.

You won't have time to cover everything in the answer. Once the user is selected, move on to use cases, goals, and scenarios for that user. The use cases should naturally result in a set of features for your new product. Prioritize these and close by linking back to the goal of the product, the business strategy, and the user needs you are meeting. Show you aren't afraid to color outside the box by including a range of features in the product or tackle a novel problem. Present a range of ideas ranging from mundane to outlandish and demonstrate that you can generate a broad range of ideas and decide among them quickly.