Product Management Scenario- Based Questions and answers: Volume 2
As stated in volume 1 of this series, I noted that the types of questions you can expect to be asked in a Product Management interview are vast and varied. But in general, you’ll probably be asked some of these listed here.
Questions will vary depending on the type of Product Manager role, level, company, or industry, and the kinds of questions you’ll be asked will change as you move through the interview process.
So let’s jump right into it :
Pick a product/ feature you led and shared the following with us
In this segment, find a product you product managed and use this as your case study — I used www.onehealthng.com as my case study. I was the Head of products for OneHealth.
What was the process of defining the requirements?
Response :
#1: Ideate
Brainstorming: The team shares all of its innovative and new ideas.
#2: Research
The next step is validating the idea stage with potential users and reviewing competitive offerings.
#3: Documentation
The product requirements document is the very actionable step to defining a product being built is about to be created: The product requirement document outlines the product’s purpose, features, functionalities, and behavior.
#4: Analysis and Approval
Sharing the Product Requirement Document with various stakeholders and the technical teams who will help build, launch or market your product
What was the process of productizing the requirement?
Response :
Now that the PRD has been approved, we move into production. At this point, the development teams come into full action.
#1: Product Analysis
#2: Planning and Documentation
#3: Design
#4: Development
#5: Testing
#6: Approve everything after a thorough review of how it works and if it’s functional
#7: Set product price
#8: Setting Launch Plans and Goals
#9: Launch
#10: Update
#11: Repeat Steps 1- 7
Briefly describe the execution process, the timeline for product launch, challenges faced, and tracking of product launch progress.
Response :
Putting into use the entire Product Management Life Cycle implementation process:
- We launched an interim page that indicated “coming soon” to enable Marketing and Sales to start doing some online marketing and mini acquisition
- We spent about 2— 4 weeks planning brainstorming and ideating
- 4 weeks on design to build the initial basic User Interface design
- We spent the next eight weeks in the first phase of the engineering — broken into 4 sprints of 2 weeks each
- We spent the next one week on testing and took some of the MVP,back to design and engineering
- The modification took about one week to redesign and three weeks in engineering
- We had more tests and reviews — This time, it took two weeks to test
- And we launched after all prelaunch matrixes had been met
- Total Timeline too about: 28 weeks for MVP Product Launch
In a few words, what is the key to an exemplary user interface? Give reasons to back up your claim.
Response :
Essential qualities of User Interface Design are the following:
#1 Simplicity:
User Interface design should be simple. Few mouse clicks and keystrokes are required to accomplish this task. New features must only be added if there is a compelling need for them and they add significant value to the application.
#2 Consistency:
The user interface should have more consistency. Consistency also prevents online designers’ information chaos, ambiguity, and instability. We should apply typeface, style, and size convention consistently to all screen components, adding screen learning and improving screen readability. In this, we can provide permanent objects as unchanging reference points around which the user can navigate.
#3 Intuitiveness :
An essential quality of an exemplary user interface design is intuition.
Intuitive user interface design is easy to learn, so the user can pick it up quickly and easily. Icons and labels should be concise and persuasive. A transparent, unambiguous icon can help make the user interface intuitive and good practice is to make labels conform to the terminology that the application supports.
#4 Encouraging :
This quality can encourage users to use the software to a full extent.
Designers should provide users with a way out when users find themselves somewhere they should go.
#5 User Interface :
A graphic user interface design provides screen displays that create an operating environment for the user and form an explicit visual and functional context for the user’s actions.
How do you manage a new product launch? What tactics, strategies, and processes do you use?
Response:
#1 Strategic Marketing :
Being savvy about publicity. We no longer need traditional media to drive ideas, products, or messages — Spend time creating messages for buyers.
Conditioning our social media audience is critical. Constantly pushing them to “buy” creates fatigue, making them feel like a number. Build a relationship with your audience at least eight weeks in advance so they can learn your tone and rhythms. Then seek ways for them to interact with your product.
For all analysis, don’t forget to rely on “feelings.” Don’t abandon those moments away from the launch. Sell the journey in an empathic way to customers.
#2 Make a lot of Internet Buzz :
Going overboard with social media, emails, and maybe radio ads, you won’t get the necessary attention to succeed.
For example: creating 1,000+ tweets, many Tiktok and YouTube videos, 200+ emails, and countless Instagram and Facebook posts.
#3 Knowing the product’s audience:
Having a concise answer to” who your target audience is. “ Otherwise, there may be a problem. Also, get to know your stakeholders. Find out where they spend their free time and join them after work.
#4 Sponsoring an exclusive event mixer:
Events are great for getting your product into the community. Consider sponsoring a mixer at a local restaurant or wine bar to draw interest.
#5 Enable Hashtags:
We shouldn’t treat hashtags as an afterthought; they’re a powerful tool to grab a lot of attention. Use them intentionally.
#6 Use Influencers :
Ask a local celebrity, like the mayor, to do an on-camera interview.
Find ambassadors whose interests align with yours and bring them into your business family. Lastly, follow and engage with reporters on social media who can direct attention to the product.
#7 Major media outlets:
Attention is the currency of the internet. The average person consumes an excessive amount of information daily. To get attention, cut through the noise.
With the right strategy, you can land a significant media placement. Pitch yourself as an expert and target high-profile news outlets like Techcrunch, Forbes, CNBC, Techcabal, Bloomberg, Disrupt Africa, etc. Figure out what story segments they want. They are usually under pressure to book the right experts, so there’s a good chance they fill a gap.
#8 Understand Product fans:
Don’t jump into launching a product without first building a community of fans who’ll vouch for our product. You could start with conferences — Hunt for your target audience. Invite them to join a value-add Slack group or receive exclusive invitations to your events.
Product X currently does not have a product team. Tell me how you will go about building a product development team, integrating them into a product vision, and measuring the performance of team members.
Response :
A Product Development Team usually consists of Engineers, Designers, Quality Assurance, and Software Testers.
As soon as the product description, goals, and vision are well defined and approved for kickoff, the product development cost should be considered at the very start and incorporated as the product is designed.
#1 Hiring the Development Team and Involve team members early
Pre-hiring would involve defining the software engineering languages to best use the product, the system design, and a possible design look and feel. To avoid making changes after a product has been designed, assembling a development team as early in the product development process as possible is crucial. This would enable design cycle time and software engineering development synergy.
Involving team members early: #2: Include these members
A cross-functional team includes team members from different specialty areas. Rather than having a team full of design engineers, it’s helpful to include team members from production and support functions. This will help design the product and the processes required to produce the product. The team should be able to speak to factors such as marketability, producibility, cost, and testability so they feel part of the product vision and goals.
#3: Start Building
Team members should have experience working in a group environment. People who have never worked together before will undergo some adjustments regardless of how much team experience they have.
Teams must go through the same four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. No matter how experienced each team member is or how long they’ve worked at your company, everyone will take time to adjust to working as a team.
How do you know when a product is designed well?
Response :
A good product design is always a working solution as simple as possible in use and feel. We need several metrics to determine whether to rate a product as good or bad.
A prevalent saying in Product Design is :
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Six key metrics defining the quality of design
#1 Its Functionality:
This is one of the most critical features of well-designed products. Every one of us has been in situations when we had to deal with products that didn’t work correctly even though they looked excellent.
#2 Its Aesthetics:
This can be described as the first contact on the user-product line. This feature can “hijack” the consumer with an appearance that dazzles and excites them. It speaks in style and fascinates customers. It is on the way to evaluating a product. Intuition clearly defines the product function while allowing the product’s purpose to be read and correctly understood without recourse to an instruction manual. A product design that enables the user to use and understand the product is intuitive.
#3 Its Ease of use:
In its simplest form is one of the hardest things to achieve. It’s a complex and thoughtful process but still worth developing. While characteristic and memorable, products that fall within this category can also manipulate c and persuade customers to buy simple products even though they can be more expensive or the customers may not need them.
#4 Is it Customer-centred enough:
A project based on this idea can boost user attention and satisfaction. It’s a simple framework that can help you create optimal products dedicated to specific target groups.
#5 The Depth:
Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go deep. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
How do you prioritize features for an internal tool?
“You built an internal tool for various purposes (debugging systems, viewing/manipulating data/databases, access control, permissions, etc.). What do you think about prioritizing which features to implement?”
Prioritization in product management is evaluating the relative importance of work, ideas, and requests to eliminate wasteful practices and deliver customer value quickly, given various constraints.
Prioritization is about answering the question:
Which problems do we solve first, and in a software product team, what feature do we ship out first? In an internal product, the stakeholders are the staff/executives, and internal products aim to optimize the staff work and make work easier for someone else.
The first approach to prioritizing a feature is by taking a goal-first approach. We start by defining the goals we want this product to solve and, in this case, debugging systems, viewing/manipulating data/databases, access control, permissions, etc.
Asking the right questions on the impact of this product and if/how these products would assist in defining the product’s primary goal(s):
- How does this product Increase the efficiency of our processes?
- How does this product Increase ineffectiveness of the strategies?
- How does this product Increase effectiveness at work?
- How does this product Increase better use of data at work?
With the goals strategy implemented or considered, we would have brought better clarity to feature prioritization and, ideally, create a repeatable process that the entire product team can follow.
Next, we :
- Identify the process the product delivery affects.
- Measure the process with each new feature delivered.
- Measure the gain in efficiency or efficacy vs. the aging process.
- Prioritize between features based on the value of the impact.
After this, I would move to implement the prioritization strategy by
Review all submissions and requests from internal stakeholders and staff that align with everything measured.
For each idea that aligns with the goals and product strategy, we can then add it to our product backlog in order of priority. The backlog would serve as an inventory of features we want to pursue.
Lastly, Now that we have added items to the backlog and its features, it is time to go deeper in prioritization and organize the backlog in order of priority. Moving some things to the top, others to the bottom, etc.
To ensure that this is done correctly, we introduce scorecards,
“Scorecards are ideal because we can choose metrics, scales, and weightings to assign an objective value to each feature. In general, metrics should address impact, development effort, and implementation cost.”
- How will this benefit us as a team and solve an internal gap that may increase productivity?
- What kind of value does this feature add?
- Will this feature impact new users or existing users?
- How much will this optimize our workflow?
- How many hours will it take to implement?
- How much do these hours cost?
Keeping these scorecards as simple as possible and avoiding ambiguity is essential.
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