Product Manager Interview questions in Hyderabad, India
Often considered the "CEO" of their product area, product managers oversee the strategy, production and implementation of a particular product. Because product management teams include members from different backgrounds such as engineering, design and data design, product managers must have strong communication skills and excel in cross-functional work environments. Expect to answer questions about your management abilities, prioritisation skills and experience working in product. Although not required, technical backgrounds are advantageous, particularly when applying for roles at tech companies.
Top Product Manager Interview Questions & How to Answer
Here are three top product manager interview questions and tips on how to answer them:
Question No. 1: What are your preferred management frameworks?
How to answer: Describe which management frameworks you prefer to use when managing teams and products, and explain why you like them. Outline any limitations of the frameworks and how you overcome them. If possible, research which frameworks the company currently uses and discuss how your own methodology can work within those frameworks.
Question No. 2: How do you prioritise between the different needs of your users?
How to answer: Product managers need to make tough decisions that balance the needs of different users while keeping in mind the resources of the team and the general cost-benefit analysis for the company. Explain the process you use to make those decisions, including what research you do. Outline how you communicate your decisions to internal and external stakeholders, how you manage expectations and how you deal with any negative reactions.
Question No. 3: What is your strategy for onboarding yourself to a new product?
How to answer: A product manager is expected to know everything about a product, such as how clients use it, the business model and the roadmap for further development. Outline who you plan to talk with to learn about the product and its users, how those conversations will happen and what you hope to learn. This is a good opportunity to show your enthusiasm for the future of the product and its possibilities as well as any research you have already done.
you are on a biz trip and travelling from one city to another. you have a stack of unsorted flight boarding passes. only departure city and destination city are on the boarding pass. how do you find the first departure city and your final destination city
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Your current location is your departure city. Your final destination is the city whose name occurs only once among all the city names minus your departure city. Less
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Why wouldn't you just look at all of the cities listed on the documents and the two which don't ever repeat are your departure and destination city. (For the two that don't repeat, one will only be listed as a departure and the other one will be the one that is only listed as a destination.) Less
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Assume this is a acyclic graph (a city is not visited again once you leave it). Now, arrange the boarding passes and note the number of times a city appears in departure as well as arrival. For all intermediate cities this number will be the same. For the initial city the arrival-departure = -1 and for the destination arrival-departure = +1. Now, you start traversing from there. Form a table where you take each node and note the next node. For cyclic graphs it is more complex. You will still find the initial and destination city the same way but the traversal will be hard. Less
The manager of component 'A' says his functionality is more important than that of component 'B.' The manager of component 'B' says his is more important than that of component 'A.' You can only implement one A or B, but not both - which do you choose to implement.
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The key question to ask is definition of "IMPORTANT". Is it important to the managers (ego equation), important to the end consumer or important for Amazon. The first one needs to be thrown out immediately and the others must be quantified based on achievability, impact on end user and ROI. Less
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I would say whichever is more valuable to customer & gives competitive advantage to Amazon. Less
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Agreed. Need to drill into what "important" means. Great catch My guess is that Amazon was looking to quantify/define "important" from the customer perspective. Less
What is the marginal cost of a gigabyte in gmail?
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Here's my guess at what they're looking for. Marginal cost - this is the additional cost for adding a user. It doesn't need to take in to account the software development effort, but it should take out the atomized cost for everything else. You need to price out the the cost of the enterprise HD/GB. We can call it $1 by GB. Then you need to realize that there needs to be redundancy, so at the lest we need to double that number, if they put a super high value on data retention triple it. Then you need to think about server cost and divide that out, server rack space cost and physical rack area...etc. So if it's $1 for the actual HD space it's probably more like $2.50-$3.50 for the total marginal cost. I don't work for google, but my guess is that they're looking at the though process. What will change with a marginal user increase and what will not. If you only think of the cost of the HD then you're not getting a job with google. Less
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The marginal cost of adding a gigabyte is either zero or thousands of dollars.. Either the gigabyte is already physically in existence or you would have to build a new server. The marginal cost is not averaged across all gigabytes. There might be a minor increase in energy consumption due to this extra gigabyte, but who will notice that? If your goal is to stand out in an interview, I would suggest going the Thousands of Dollars answer. For those non computer guys out there, let's relate this question to something physical.. What is the marginal cost of adding one more person to an airline flight.. Their are two situations, the plane in not already full so we can essentially neglect the cost of the additional passenger since it is so low.. (The extra energy to move the 200 pounds, when the plane is already moving hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the 25 cents for a soda..) But if the plane is already full, then the marginal cost of one extra passenger is the cost to fly a second plane.. Thousands of dollars... Less
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Isn't marginal cost the cost to produce an additional unit? So costs like designing the user interface, maintaining the webpage (which would have to be done no matter the gigabyte capacity) shouldn't be accounted for. Less
What's the probability of pulling four of a kind from a deck of cards in five tries.
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It has been a long time since I last studied this, so I would welcome any corrections. I think Shrenik's last paragraph isn't totally accurate. I think the answer is: 1 - (1 - 3/51 * 2/50 * 1/49)^5 While Shrenik is right that the odds at each attempt are independent of the previous attempt, the overall odds do improve if you know in advance there will be many attempts. An easier example to explain is: what are the odds that you will get a '6' at least once when tossing a die 5 times. The answer is NOT 1/6. The answer is also not 5/6. It's one minus the chance that in 5 consecutive attempts you will NOT get a '6': 1 - ( 1 - 1/6 )^5. The more attempts you know you'll have, the closer you get to 1, but you're never 100% guaranteed. Less
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Here's how Im thinking about it- Since you are given 5 tries, any of the following possibilities counts as success: 1) 1,2,3,4 are the same, 5 is different. Probability = 1*(3/51)*(2/50)*(1*49) 2) 1,3,4,5 are the same, 2 is different Probability = 1*(48/51)*(3/50)*(2/49)*(1/48) 3) 1,2, 4,5 are the same, 3 is different Probability = 1*(3/51)*(48/50)*(2/49)*(3/48) 4) 1,2,3,5 are the same, 4 is different Probability = 1*(3/51)*(2/50)*(48/49)*(1/48) 5.) 2,3,4,5 are the same, 1 is different Probability = 1*1*(3/50)*(2/49)*(1/48) The final probability is the same of all these individual probabilites. Less
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The answer is 0.0240%, which is the probability of drawing "4 of a kind" in 5-card poker. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability Less
What would you do to double the revenue for an existing Google product in the next 12 months?
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I would ask the interviewer to clarify the question by: - what specific product - what are the current focused segment of the product - to increase revenue, you need to either find other focused segment (i.e.,e adjacent market) or increase market share in the current focused segment - if you already have large mkt share, then it is best to focus on creating solution for other focused segments Less
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Or just add free stuff to the value of the excising product. This will positively impact top line (gross revenue) and the interviewer apparently didn’t ask about bottom line (net margin) at all Less
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Another approach for clarifying questions could be. A) are all avenues of growth of revenue open for consideration, I.e. 1) M&A, 2) Marketing spend, 3) Breakthrough Innovation, 4) Grow demand via leveraging an existing Google product as a means to the end. 5) Expand to un penetrated geographies via political liaison B) which products have the least market penetration If both clarifying questions are answered then it’s fairly simple to proceed to next steps as a mix of B) & One of A) If not one has to assume B and then assume which one of A will be a good fit. Less
How many calories are in a grocery store?
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My local grocery store (supermarket) has 10 checkouts operating during busy times. Assume on average it takes 2 minutes to service each customer. That's 30 customers per hours x 10 checkouts = 300 customers per hour. Assume the store is busy 4 hours per day, that's 1,200 customers and that accounts for 80% of the store's turnover so 1,500 customers per day. Assume on average each customer is buying enough food for 2 people, that's 3,000 people. People on average consume 2,000 calories per day but not all of it comes from the grocery store, let's say 75% does that's 1,500 calories. Putting it all together 3,000 people * 1,500 calories = 4,500,000 calories per day ... but wait there's more. If the store turns over stock on average every 5 days that means there's 5 days of calories on the shelves, that's 22,500,000 calories. Lots of assumptions but the answer seems reasonable Less
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Perhaps breaking up the grocery store into it's main categories and estimating the caloric density of each type of food may be the way to go? E.g. Frozen foods (high density), meats (medium), junk food and soda (high), veggies (low), non-food items (none), dairy (high), packaged foods (medium). Then estimate how space is typically allocated on these categories (10%, 20%, etc.). Then estimate how many such items can fit in, say a 10 ft area that has 3 positions (top, middle, bottom). Scale up the estimate as needed. Assign values to caloric density and at the least, you have solved the problem. Probably not the most elegant solution but it's what comes to mind immediately. Less
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A calorie is defined as: the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1 °C. The average grocery store is 4000m^2. Assuming average energy density of 200 calories/m^2 (Calories in a medium pizza) there should be 800000 calories in a grocery store. Less
How do you code integer division without using divider ('/')
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You iteratively perform subtractions, which is all that division is. If there is a remainder, you multiply it by 10 and repeat your iterative subtractions. The number of times you need to subtract is represented in a counter, which becomes the digits within the result. Less
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exp(log(a)-log(b))
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You can do division with shifts and subtracts...
Every single interviewer asked a puzzle question. The most complex was: You're standing in a boat in a reservoir of water that is filled to the brim. There is a brick sitting on the bottom of the boat. If you pick up the brick and throw it into the reservoir, will the water overflow?
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This is a fun question! Assuming that a) by being filled to the brim they mean that the reservoir is filled with water in such a way that the viscosity of water is pushed to the limit (that is that the bubble lip which forms at the edge is to the brim) b) the brick has a mass which is non-negligible Then the simple act of lifting up the brick off the bottom of the boat will cause the water to overflow. You'll be exerting an increased force on the bottom of the boat, which will result in the boat temporarily displacing more water, which will cause an overflow. Less
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Hint: When the brick is sitting in the boat, the amount of water displaced is relative to the mass of the brick. When the brick is in the water, the amount of water displaced is relative to the volume of the brick. The question then is, which is greater? Less
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Well the clue is in the question. If you "throw" the brick in an upward fashion, then you will exert downward force onto the boat you are standing on which will be greater than the previous pressure of just you, boat + brick, and hence momentarily, the water (ignoring friction, water tension etc etc) will overflow over the side of the reservoir. If you pick up the brick and "drop" it into the water ( ignoring waves and surface tension), then the water will not overflow. Less
You have a ladder of N steps (rungs). You can go up the ladder by taking either 1 step or two steps at a time, in any combination. How many different routes are there (combinations of 1 steps or 2 steps) to make it up the ladder?
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You don't need to be familiar with the Fibonacci series. Simply test the first few cases manually and you can deduce that there's a pattern. A ladder with 2 rungs (that is, the floor, rung #1 and rung#2): 2 ways to climb. 1+1, 2. A ladder with 3 rungs: 3 ways to climb. 1+1+1, 1+2, 2+1. A ladder with 4 rungs: 5 ways to climb. Think of it as climbing 1 rung and then you're at a 3-rung ladder (3 ways to climb) or climbing 2 rungs and then you're at a 2 rungs ladder (2 ways to climb). Overall you have 3+2 ways. A ladder with 5 rungs: like the previous case, you climb 1 and reach a 4-rungs ladder, or climb 2 and reach a 3-rungs ladder. overall 5+3, or 8 ways. .. .. .. A ladder with N rungs: sum of climbing (N-1) ladder and climbing (N-2) ladder: Ways(N) = Ways(N-1) + Ways (N-2). this can be solved with recursion or brute force. Less
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And how in the hell does this question relate to being a Product Manager if you do not know the formula? Less
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Speculating here, but I think the point is to be able to derive some sort of formula. Saying "it's a Fibonacci sequence!" should only get you points if your interviewer is a dweeb. Less
How would I design the elevators for a new 40 story office building that had an average of 100 people per floor to most efficiently fill and empty the building given a standard 9-5 workday and traffic conditions in my city? The answer needed to be completely detailed, including expected passengers per car, time per stop, average floors stops per trip at various hours, etc.
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1) The first advice that I've read is to ask some questions before you start answering. It will show that you are strategic & don't jump to random assumptions. So I will probably ask questions like: Is the efficiency goal focused only at the start & end of day & not in between (i.e. lunch time, breaks)? How many elevators are there? What is the capacity of each elevator? 2) Assuming that everything is average, i.e. 6 elevators, 15 people per elevator, and focus only on start and end date, then the sample data should follow a normal distribution. 730-8 - 2% 8-830 - 14% 830-9 - 34% 9-930 - 34% 930-10 - 14% 10-1030 - 2% 3) I will break this down & solve the worst case scenario first. This means, 34 people x 40 floors = 1360 people to be transported by 6 elevator x 15 = total 90 capacity during 830-9 or 9-930 am. 4) Focusing on this more manageable problem, 1360 / 90 means each elevator will make 15 full cycles (lobby to highest floor and back) 5) Since we want to minimize the cycle time for each elevator, we assign one elevator per subset of 40/6 consecutive floors. This should address the issue on minimizing time per stop. 6) That means, the final design should be a load balancing of the elevators by minimizing the travel time --- Elevator A - 1st to 7th floor, B - 8th to 14th floor, and so forth. Do you guys see anything wrong with this line of thinking? Less
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The idea is to "learn" from user behavior. Start with a blank slate where the elevators assume that all floors, except the first floor, have the same probability at all times. Then, based on user behavior, alter the probabilities. If the elevators can talk with the users' phones, via bluetooth, and identify to which floor this user goes, when he/she comes to and leaves work, how often does this person take the elevator to go to other floors or out on lunch, then improve the efficiency based on the aspects learnt. Less
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A simple algorithm would be to note that there will be more people during the morning going up and slowly taper this down as the day progresses. For example, during the noon-afternoon period, the frequency and number of people going up or down would be almost the same. So have a priority for the ground floor during the morning hours. Move the elevators as soon as possible to the higher floors. Mandate that people get in regardless of whether the elevator is going up or down, once the elevator reaches the highest floor, it would reverse and go non-stop to the bottom floor. Increase the priority for people for the floors that have the buttons pressed as time passes. Less