Mock Behavioral Interview for Product Managers!

hi everyone elisa here and in this video i am going to do a mock behavioral interview for a product manager position so if you saw my last video i gave some tips on how to do a great behavioral interview for a product manager position but i wanted to actually put that advice into practice and show you what a behavioral interview could look like so let's dive into the interview all right so usually in behavioral interviews you start out the call with maybe a minute or two of small talk and then oftentimes you do introductions and that's where the interviewer will ask you the tell me about yourself question and then generally after that first bit that's when you dive into the behavioral questions so in this video we're going to skip through all that intro stuff and dive right into behavioral questions and in my responses i am going to respond using the nugget plus sar methodology so uh stay tuned and let's see how it goes all right so can you talk me through one of the projects you led from start to finish sure uh let me tell you about a time where i was able to build a solution for a prospect that had a feature request for us so this was when i was working at company xyz which is a fintech company where i was the product manager and at this time i was building out a brand new product that was set to be announced at our upcoming user conference so um i was working hard on that new product and then one week at our team meeting the cpo mentioned that there was a key prospect um that was willing to sign on with us and pay an additional lump sum if we were to build a custom feature for them so at that point the cpo wasn't convinced that that was something we definitely should build but i realized that because we were working on this brand new architecture that was really configurable and flexible i knew that we could leverage a lot of the architecture of this new product to build out a feature for this customer and i had a hunch that we could build it in a relatively short amount of time so after the product meeting i met with the engineering lead on my team to see if we could use our configurable architecture to build out this new feature and after talking it through with him he thought that we would only need about three weeks to build out the ui for this feature so once i spoke to him about that i then spoke with some of our customer success managers to see if there were customers that could benefit from this feature and after speaking with them it was really clear that customers would be really excited about the feature and they would gain a lot of value from it so after the discussions with the engineering team and with the success managers i met with my product director and then the cpo and told them how i could build this new feature in a matter of weeks and that we could actually even pitch this new feature as a brand new feature for all customers to have at the upcoming user conference so it would be a huge win for our customers because it'd be a free feature and it would be a really big win for the engineering team who was working on this brand new architecture so we ended up doing some prioritization adjustments in our roadmap and we spent the next few weeks building out this feature for the customer they were able to build it in three weeks just as the team estimated and we were able to close the deal with the prospect and collect our lump sum so later that year we then announced the feature at our conference and turned on feature for all customers the feature had really high adoption and customers were really excited about it i got to lead a few sessions at our user conference specifically about this feature and also the engineering team was really excited about this feature because it really validated this future architecture that they were working on now from my experience interviewers will generally dig into how you prioritized your work in that scenario something like this yeah that's really interesting so your team had to take three weeks to build up this new feature what did you have to de-prioritize in order to deliver this feature in time for the user conference and how did you make that prioritization decision yeah that's a great question um so before even doing any work on this feature i again made sure to validate that this functionality would be valuable to our customers not just to this one prospect so i did that by speaking with our customer success team who very clearly indicated that many customers would be excited to have this feature so at that point i assessed all of my team's work for the upcoming quarter and did a re-prioritization and i wanted to go through all the initiatives that they had and see what the value to customers was as well as the time to value for each of their initiatives so i had two engineering teams at the time and one was working on um finishing this new product that we were set to announce at the upcoming user conference and so that kind of core team really wasn't able to de-prioritize any of their work for this new feature however when i prioritize the work of my second team i was able to slot this new feature above some of their other features that they were doing so this second team was working on revamping a grid view of one of our more legacy products um this was definitely valuable to customers but there was a lot less urgency there because it wasn't a highlight at our upcoming user conference so i reprioritized this second team's work so that first they would work on this new feature and then they would return back to improving that grid view for the legacy product so again almost every product manager behavioral interview you'll have to talk about prioritization and a lot of times interviewers will also dig in to see how engineers reacted to that reprioritization because it can be really tough for engineers to be working on something and dedicating all their time to something only to realize that their work is getting de-prioritized okay and how did your second team feel about the re-prioritization of work yeah they were actually really excited about it i talked through the reason why this feature was important and i even shared some of my recorded conversations that i had with the customer success team um i also told them that this would be an announcement at our user conference which really conveyed the fact that this was high priority and it was also a high visibility project i was also really clear that the grid work was not unimportant i didn't want them to feel like they were doing unimportant work at all um and so i made sure it was clear that they would be picking that work back up as soon as this new feature was complete now oftentimes in a behavioral interview you have about 30 to 45 minutes total and the way that generally breaks down is you'll have about 10 minutes of introductions and the tell me about yourself question then you'll have maybe 20 minutes in the middle to talk about behavioral questions and then you'll have some time at the end where the candidate can actually ask the interviewer questions so a lot of times you'll have maybe two to three different behavioral questions that are asked throughout the course of your behavioral interview so let's dive into one more question that often comes up during a product manager behavioral interview awesome thanks for sharing so just to switch gears uh quickly can you tell me about a time where you made a mistake or or failed definitely uh i'll tell you about a time where i released a product feature that did not really solve customer needs and actually introduced some new friction for our customers so um this was when i was working at company abc where i was a product manager um so for many months we as a company had heard from customers that the experience of creating a new document was really challenging and confusing in our product and this is kind of a core functionality of the product so it should be something we're really good at uh at the time i owned the document creation experience and so i dug into this issue by watching a lot of full story sessions speaking with our customer facing teams and then conducting a lot of customer interviews so that so that i could fully understand the challenges that customers were experiencing uh i ended up identifying a few core parts of the document creation process that were particularly hard for customers and those friction points were also points of drop off so people would start creating a document they would get frustrated and then they just stop even trying so as with most projects i brought the problem to the engineering and ux teams and i defined the problem in the scenario we wanted to solve for and then the team did an ideation session that i facilitated so unfortunately what i failed to do during this ideation session was to put in proper guardrails so i let the team do a very open-ended ideation session and after brainstorming the ux designer came up with a full redesign for the document creation process i thought the designs looked really cool and so did the engineering team and also the engineering team didn't expect it to be a huge amount of work to do this redesign so the engineering team kind of worked on breaking down the project and the designer and i did some customer interviews though in retrospect during our customer interviews we asked very leading questions that led to polite and validating responses from customers so we weren't getting a lot of good information from those customer interviews and i'll circle back to that in a bit so as time went on the project ended up taking much longer to build than expected as you would expect with any redesigned project and when we finally released the project customers were pretty unhappy they did not like that we completely changed the user experience and it actually added a lot more friction to our customers especially experienced customers instead of making it easier to use okay i have to jump in here even though i'm in the middle of that uh mock behavioral interview i keep using the word we in this answer and sometimes in product you are working as a team and it really does feel like we is the appropriate word however if i were to redo this mock behavioral interview i would really focus on what i specifically was doing so that the interviewer knows exactly what my personal contributions were as opposed to what the total contributions of the full team were anyway let's let's go back to the video so we did thank goodness implement a widget in app that asked for feedback on the redesign and we reached out to all of the people who left poor reviews we received hundreds of reviews overall and were able to get in touch with about half of the customers who left those reviews and after a month of fast follow releases we are finally able to make the experience better and started receiving about 70 positive feedback from customers and we finally noticed that the time it actually took to create a document and finalize it was uh finally decreasing so although it was okay after a month of fast follows the project did end up taking much longer than expected and then we had to even add on another month of fast follows to fix what we felt we had broken although we could remedy the situation there are a few things i learned from this experience now although it feels kind of uncomfortable to talk about your failures or mistakes it's really important for a product manager to be able to talk about those experiences and maybe even more importantly talk about the learnings that you got from that experience and how you carry those learnings forward so whenever i'm asked that question i like to make sure that i end with a bulleted list of learnings that i have from the experience and then talk through how i carried those learnings forward in all of my product initiatives after that there are a few things i learned from this experience so first of all i always need to put in guard rails for ideation sessions with the engineering team so instead of leaving something very open-ended i always make it a point to tell the team how much time we want to invest into an initiative and i also indicate what parts of the product we really want to focus on second i always keep in mind that change is really hard for customers so anytime i'm doing a redesign it's really important to keep in mind that change is hard and it's really easy to introduce new friction and frustration for existing customers when something completely change and changes in a product they're familiar with um third i learned that it's really critical to be objective in customer interviews so it's okay and actually a good thing if you're getting bad feedback up front because that means you won't invest a ton of time into an initiative that isn't actually providing value and then last but not least whenever possible especially with these redesign type projects it's really helpful to try and break down those major projects to um into digestible chunks so that risk is a little bit reduced for your releases and this isn't always possible in redesign initiatives or in other major initiatives but it's important to at least assess if there's a possibility to break down that work is there anything else you'd like to learn about my product experiences uh to be honest i don't think so um you know i you know i think you he knocked this out of the park and uh is a great uh behavioral interview and i think you're i think we're gonna hire you so great job awesome now obviously that's not exactly how your behavioral interviews will end uh you can expect them to end with maybe five to ten minutes where you as the candidate can ask the interviewer some questions uh and then the call will likely wrap up so i hope this was a good example for you of how a behavioral interview is conducted and i hope it exemplified just how important it is to follow a methodology like the tsar methodology or the nugget plus sar methodology when you're answering questions so there you have it that's an example of a couple behavioral interview questions that you might be asked when you're interviewing for a product manager position so i hope this video was helpful for you and if you have a behavioral interview coming up i hope you're able to use this as an example of how you can answer your behavioral questions thank you so much for listening if you like this video please give it a thumbs up i would really really appreciate it and if you want to hear more content from me please subscribe thank you so much and happy interviewing bye friends [Music]

Channel: Alisa Works

Views: 12,095

Keywords: product manager, product manager interview, cracking the product manager interview, product manager mock interview, mock behavioral interview, mock behavioral product manager interview, mock product manager interview, product management interview, product management, how to become a product manager, product management interview questions

Id: B2ueq1DRhE0

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021