Best Questions On Mobile Product Marketing For Interview
Q – 1 Tell me about detailed documentation projects in the past?
Ans- Pay attention to how detailed their response is and their aptitude for creating robust specs.
Q – 2 How to lead without authority?
Ans- While most of the leadership roles (CXO/VP) in any organisation comes with some kind of explicit or implicit authority or veto powers, Product Manger (PM) role are generally not bestowed with any of such rights. PM have to earn team’s trust and respect over a period of time. It create all kind of leadership challenges for PM from perception of his role in team & organisation to his ability to say ‘No’.
Q – 3 Tell me how do you decide what to build?
Ans- 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.
Q – 4 What methods do you use to get the info you need to make decisions?
Ans- One of the most important things that a product manager does is listen to needs of stakeholders and understand the motivation behind those needs. If that person doesn’t have a well thought-out process for collecting information to make good decisions they will never be successful in the role. Having a pre-determined information gathering process also demonstrates their organization and process skills, which are paramount.
Q – 5 Is Mobile Product Manager a jerk, to put it nicely?
Ans- The candidate’s attitude can be a key consideration. Obviously a mobile PM has to be at least somewhat a type A personality, in order to get results. However, if the candidate disrespects his past co-workers, monopolizes conversation within the interview, interrupts constantly, or more, these can definitely be red flags in the hiring process.
Q – 6 How would Facebook enter the mobile handset market?
Ans- 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.
Q – 7 What are the difficulties in writing direction for engineers?
Ans- Many product managers can be too prescriptive in ‘how’ things are done while not allowing for flexibility as development highlights difficult areas of execution along the way. Good product managers know how to make concessions in certain areas which allows for the balance of development time and covering core needs of the user. Specifications should be written with this in mind.
Q – 8 How to develop infectious customer, market & product intimacy?
Ans- 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.
Q – 9 How would you design a to do list?
Ans- 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.
Q – 10 What is the most effective way to involve your customer in product direction?
Ans- If they have a process for pulling customer insights, and mention market research tools and how they have used them in the past, they most likely understand generating customer feedback is important to inspire good products.
Q – 11 What is one thing you would change on your favorite product and why?
Ans- There’s no ‘right’ answer for this one, but depending on the answer, it should show how detailed and analytical they are.
Q – 12 Tell us about how you interact with customers / users?
Ans- If we’ve gotten this far and you haven’t talked about being the voice of the customer, getting out and talking to users, doing any type of user research, I’m already concerned. This is your last chance to convince me you can be the voice of the customer.
If throughout the call, you’ve been talking about this all along, then we are in good shape. Now I want to dive into the details. Do you know how to find users or does someone do that for you? Do you know how to ask questions that aren’t leading? Do you share the research with the rest of your team? Are you able to turn your learnings into actionable next steps?
Q – 13 Can Mobile Product Manager analyze competitive environment and utilize resources to his advantage?
Ans- A strong part of on-the-job success is to be able to identify key differentiators in a competitive marketplace. If the key differentiator is not yet there for a particular industry or marketplace, the job is to put it there. This means understanding the resources available to you, as well as understanding the needs of clients and users, and more importantly, understanding what the competition is offering, in order to produce what they are not.
Q – 14 If you were given two products to build from scratch, but only had the time and resources to build one, how would you decide which to build?
Ans- Product strategy means saying no from time to time. Product managers should prioritize by cherry-picking the project that’s likely to generate 80% of the impact and forecast what that impact is, as well as the SWAG cost in resources, money and other scarce resources before they decide to build.
This framework forces a product manager to really think through themes, create a plan, allocate resources, eliminate the need to prioritize different projects against each other, and model/forecast the impact.
Q – 15 Tell me about your role on your team, who else you work with, and how you work with them?
Ans- Usually, the first question elicits a broad, far-ranging response that nobody could accomplish all on their own. So I follow up with this question. I want to know how well you play with others. How well do you interact with engineers? You said you ran a usability study, did you recruit the participants, did you conduct the study, did you tabulate the results, or did you work with a user researcher to do these things? Do you work with sales and marketing to get in front of the customer? Do you work with senior management? And so on.
Again, there are no right or wrong answers here. It all depends on the role I’m trying to fill. But again, who you work with most, how you work with them, what challenges you encounter, who you forget to mention, these all tell me what you value, where your strengths are, and whether or not you are the right person for the role.
Q – 16 Can Mobile Product Manager come up with a convincing strategy to win for a different market?
Ans- The ideal candidate should be able to identify key product features for individual markets, whether this be a separate industry, or a separate culture. He should be able to prioritize these features in order to answer the needs of the industry or culture, and promote these features accordingly.
Q – 17 Tell me about your current role on your team, or previous role? Who else did you work with and how did you work with them?
Ans- Good product managers will talk about working with analysts, UX designers and engineers (both front and back end). Listen for words that indicate they follow a continuing regular and flexible feedback loop with all parties.
Q – 22 How would you improve our product?
Ans- This common product management interview question is meant to test your ability to propose impactful changes to an existing product. Weak answers will either be one obvious improvement or a rambling set of changes which do not move any metrics. A strong answer starts with identifying the goals of the product and the target customers. A key metric or metrics should be identified by which to measure the improvement.
From there, a set of use cases can be identified which will lead to a set of alternatives for product improvements. An important skill to demonstrate when answering this question is the ability to prioritize. From the set of possible personas, use cases, and improvements, select the ones that most closely meet the goals and metrics identified at the outset.
Presenting several alternatives at each level is a great opportunity to show creativity and your ability to think outside the box. In some cases, linking to product strategy will be critical to providing an on target answer.
Answering this question without building the links between strategy, business metrics, and user needs will result in a random response that will likely miss the mark.
Q – 23 Tell me about your current role?
Ans- If the candidate isn’t working, I modify this to “tell me about your last role.” If the candidate has never worked in product management and is looking to making a career change, I ask, “Tell me about your ideal role.”
The point of this question is to surface their mental model about product management. Product managers come in many breeds. I want to know are you a data-driven optimizer, are you a visionary strategic thinker, are you an Agile product owner, are you a backlog manager? There is no right or wrong answer.
In fact, what I’m looking for is always dependent on the type of role I’m trying to fill. But if there’s a mismatch, there’s no need to continue. So this is where I start.
Q – 24 How to communicate well?
Ans- Products are developed through a pipelines of tribes, each one seeking maximum say in the development process. Marketing, designers, developers and sales have their own culture code that do not allow them to develop complete or holistic product development view. As a PM its your responsibility to make them listen to each other in a constructive way and to understand the whole product.
This means you have to be polymath or create a perception that your are. All in all this requires amazing amount of persuasive skills on PM’s part.
Q – 25 What role does your competitor or market have in driving product decisions?
Ans- Just because competitors have it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. If they obsess about competitor’s features will permanently deliver yesterday’s technology tomorrow and that is a really bad idea. However, making sure that they stay abreast on how the market is shifting and evaluating features and products, is an important part of the role.
Q – 26 Would you want to work with Mobile Product Manager?
Ans- You don’t necessarily need to have all the same interests, or to laugh at the same jokes. But it helps. You should at least be able to chat with your new hire comfortably at the coffee maker/water cooler.
Q – 27 How would you determine the price for piece of wearable technology?
Ans- For a pricing question, Lin suggests triangulating between the customer’s willingness to pay, competitive pricing, and cost-based pricing. Understanding the cost structure is a good basis, but won’t get you all the way to the answer. Consider what alternatives the customer has and what type of demand and supply dynamics there are in the market.
If you are targeting a heavily business-oriented product management role, you will need to have pricing frameworks in you back pocket so that you are not a deer in the headlights at the whiteboard.
Q – 28 Is Mobile Product Manager passionate about the product and can he identify himself with the vision?
Ans- Last but not least, you do not want to hire someone who shows up simply because there was an advertisement in the news paper. It’s important that your candidate not only knows something about the company and ideally the product he will be working on, but is excited about the prospect.
Q – 29 How do you define product success?
Ans- Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out the ‘how’.
Q – 30 Would you learn from Mobile Product Manager?
Ans- The best hires are those based on mutual respect. The candidate should know more than you do in the chosen field, and be able to teach you to bridge the gap. You should feel comfortable taking instruction from your hire, within this sphere of influence. He in turn must respect your expertise and seek your advice when needed.
Q – 31 You are the CEO of Research In Motion. What would you do?
Ans- Strategy questions require that you put aside product-level considerations and focus on the business and available market opportunities. This type of question is frequently amenable to a diagnostic approach which begins with an assessment of the current state, identifies gaps, and proposes a future state solution. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats analysis can be a good place to start.
Focusing on financial metrics and broad market needs (versus individual user needs) will enable you to uplevel your answers. Competition and partnerships come into play more prominently in strategy questions than they may in product questions. A CEO will not be thinking of individual products and perhaps not even product lines. Overall company value proposition and market segment needs will be the right level to consider for this question.
Q – 32 What are some of the tasks for Mobile Project Managers?
Ans- Typically, a mobile PM is hired when a mobile application startup reaches a certain size, where multiple projects or an increasingly complex product means that the founders do not have the capacity to be heads down in product related tasks or projects.
This point of saturation is very much dependent on the company and its structure. A mobile PM can be involved in several areas, including deciding features, being involved in user interface decisions, planning project budgets and road-maps, some engineering, analytic, and also QA. A mobile PM can truly be a very versatile role, requiring a varied skill set.