Four Key Skills of Great Product Managers with Sample Interview Questions to Uncover the Best

Product Management is a highly cross-functional role that requires leadership skills in order to be effective. Product Managers who lead work hard to engage and rally teams behind solving well-defined customer problems. They bring focus on problems to solve with inputs that are vivid, actionable and testable. They may be required to perform other important skills in data analysis, user experience, product marketing, product launch readiness, pricing, product adoption, etc. Their actual responsibilities and accountabilities may vary from company to company, however, in all cases, these leaders need to have empathy for customers, strong leadership skills, adaptability and be able to learn fast.

I contend that these four skills, namely empathy, leadership, adaptability and the ability to learn fast, are much more important and should be prioritized over prior industry experience and a computer science degree. The ins-and-outs of an industry can be learned and a computer science degree is a great asset but should not be required unless the product manager needs to code (most don’t). There might be one exception to this “rule” which is when the product is very specialized and sold to a technical end-user. In this case, a technical degree may be required to do the job effectively. However, in all other cases, as long as the Product Manager can demonstrate some knowledge of the software development process and the technology stack, a technical degree should not be needed to be effective.

Here are some questions Hiring Managers should ask to find out if a Product Manager has acquired the following top skills:

• Empathy
• Leadership
• Adaptability
• Ability to learn fast

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Product Managers need to fully understand their customers’ main goals, pains, needs and desires. They should spend a significant amount of time in the discovery phase gathering evidence by talking to customers as well as partners and stakeholders. Product Managers need great listening skills, curiosity, humility, and of course, they need to be prepared by having done their research in order to ask great questions based on thought through hypotheses.

As a Hiring Manager, when asking the following questions, listen for empathy cues such as how the Product Manager would use and integrate their knowledge of the target customer group (not just one customer) to make decisions:

• How do you know that a feature is worth building?
• How have you prioritized stories?
• How have you approached customers?
• What would you say to a large customer who asks for a feature to be delivered urgently and that is out of scope?

Leadership

Good leaders have high Emotional Intelligence (EI). Product Managers should be leaders as they need to communicate and align various teams in the organization to the problems and outcomes they are seeking. Their role is highly cross-functional; it requires clear communication and the courage to push through solving tough problems by seeking input and asking for help. Product Managers with low EI may severely affect teams and their progress. On the other hand, those with high EI will coach, educate, engage and align teams with coming up with solutions, then empower teams to execute to achieve the right outcomes.

To check for leadership skills, here are some sample questions:

• How do you engage others in your organization to help solve problems?
• How would you deal with a developer on your team who does not agree that a feature is worth building?
• Tell me about a time when you have coached someone
• Talk to me about a time when your worked in a team and things didn’t go so well or failed.
• For distributed environments: How would you engage developers in a distributed environment?

Adaptability

Adaptability is the acceptance that our environment is constantly changing, that we must look at the world with an open mind and that sometimes we must accept to do things differently in order to remain competitive.

We live in a time where change is the new normal. This Forbes article says it best:

“In a world of constant change, non-adaptive behavior is the killer problem.”  

Great Product Managers should be resourceful, flexible, adaptable and seek to grow in the face of change. Let’s face it, the technical and industry knowledge of today will be obsolete tomorrow.

Here are sample questions to uncover how adaptabile a candidate may be:

• Tell me about a time when you felt outside your comfort zone and what you did about it.
• Tell me about a big change in a past job and  how you worked through this change?
• Explain how you overcame a major challenge you've faced?
• Have you ever had to work with someone or a group that worked completely different from you and how did that go?
• Talk to me about a time when you failed terribly.

Ability to Learn Fast

Product Managers should demonstrate how they’ve learned in the past and what they would do to get up to speed in a new industry.  It is not necessary to already know the industry, the market and how the business operates before taking on a new job. All this can be learned.

To find out how invested a Product Manager is in their own personal growth and whether they continuously seek new opportunities to learn, here are some sample questions:

• Talk to me about a book or article that you have read recently and what you learned from it?
• In researching this organization to prepare for this interview, what have you learned?
• How did you get up to speed in your previous role?
• What do you do to continuously develop as a Product Manager?
• Tell me about a time where you struggled to understand the technical requirements for a feature. How did you deal with that?

So what about “Technical” knowledge?

Great product organizations hire the best developers, architects and data scientists. As such, they already have a pool of technical talent. Product managers can be technical  but in most cases they don’t need to be. However, they do need to have the ability to connect others to the problems, engage and lead so that technical employees are supported and empowered to create the solutions that will truly make a difference in customer’s lives and generate value for the business.

[In addition to reading this article, I strongly encourage you to read “So what exactly is software product management” by Saeed Khan. Saeed does a great job of bringing clarity to the role and explaining the required skill set.]