My Product Manager interview with an e-commerce company
… answers & templates included
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This is a furniture e-commerce company and I had an interview for a product manager role. Here are the questions from the first round. The first round is with HR however the questions are very much PM related.
He spoke about the interview flow, and how the interview was going to go and then started asking questions.
The first question is the most obvious:
Question-1
Tell me about yourself
A mistake that we all do is by giving a high-level walk-through of our resume. But in one of the conversations with the CEO of my company, he told me that it is the most boring and ineffective introduction he will ever want to know.
An effective self-introduction would be built around the impact you made in your work experience.
Something like …
I’m Ram I’m currently a product manager with Plotly. I’m currently working on 2 product portfolios — 1st one is to increase our inbound leads by 10x by implementing a free trial feature and the 2nd one is to reduce the installation friction of our dash tool by 30% thereby leading to better customer onboarding. Before Plotly, I was a PM with SP Global working to deliver a new generation “data loader” tool to xxxx+ clients which include banks and financial institutions.
… things like that!
Irrespective of how much experience you have (0, 1, 2, or 5 or more) you can always frame your intro that way.
Question-2
Tell me about the project that you led end to end
You can talk about any project that you handled end to end. If you have product management experience that’s great. If not that’s fine, you can always convert your development or sales or marketing or analyst experience into a product management experience and then frame the answer.
You can start with
- what’s the problem or problems your org or team is facing.
- how you found out the right problem in the list of problems. As a product manager finding out the right problem is the most…
