1

Question 1

Why is it difficult to find a good definiton of product manager?

Answer 1

Beacuse the role is different accross industries and companies.

Question 2

What is a reason that you as a product manager don’t have people reporting directly to you?

Answer 2

It could help promote honesty and openness.

Question 3

What does a product manager do (one sentence)?

Answer 3

Act as a communication hub and enabler for everyone else.

Question 4

What is the product manager responsible for?

Answer 4

The success of the product.

Question 5

What are examples of a “product”?

Answer 5

Could be any thing, but also what you would think of as features. For example the photos feature, user profile, new feed etc. in Facebook would be the responsibilities of different product managers. Actually, the news feed has multiple product teams or product teams (ranking algorithm, ads, etc). Models used in other companies could be Android vs iOS.

Question 6

What are 3 types of PMs?

Answer 6

B2B PM, B2C PM, Internal PM.

Question 7

Why do you want to become a product manager?

Answer 7

• Most fun position in a company.
• Jacks of all trade
• Affect every part of the business

Question 8

What are the 4 major phases of product lifecycle?

Answer 8

Introduction, Growth (product has been accepted in the market and starting create revenue probably), Maturity (sales will reach the pinnacle, more competition in the market), Decline (sales start to diminish).

Question 9

What are the 7 stages of product development?

Answer 9

Conceive, plan, develop, iterate, launch, steady state, maintain / kill.

Question 10

What are activities of the conceive stage?

Answer 10

Collect user stories, brain storm solutions, identify focus areas.

Question 11

What are activities of the planning stage?

Answer 11

Market research on identified ideas, customer interviews, creating viable roadmaps.

Question 12

What are activities of the development stage?

Answer 12

Talking to engineers to determine how much time and effort is required to develop features. Create user stories. Create a set of requirements that should not be changed significantly before the MVP is ready.

Question 13

What are activities of the iterate stage?

Answer 13

Test assumptions for original idea with the MVP with users. Ensure that you’re heading in the right direction before the product is launched.

Question 14

What are activities of the launch stage?

Answer 14

Work with the PR team and the marketing team.

Question 15

What are activities of the steady state stage?

Answer 15

Use your metrics to try to maximize and understand how to move forward.

Question 16

What is Lean all about?

Answer 16

Building a product or business without wasting resources.

Question 17

What is Agile in a nutshell?

Answer 17

Lean methodology applied to SW development. Project management framework for developing SW. Iterative approach.

Question 18

What are Scrum and Kanban?

Answer 18

Guides to developing SW in an agile way.

Question 19

What are the 4 major components of Scrum?

Answer 19

Scrum: 1) Spring planning meeting (backlog to tickets) 2) 1 - 4 week sprints usually 3) Stand Up meetings 4) Retrospective (what went well, not well and what questions do you have).

Question 20

What is the main difference between Scrum and Kanban?

Answer 20

More relaxed way of agile development. Does not use estimations of time/effort. Kanban does not use sprints. Also a less “strict” framework. Maybe better for customer service teams.

Question 21

Where do ideas come from (EMUC)

Answer 21

Employees, metrics, user feedback, clients (applies primarily to B2B, where end user and client are different). I would also add: Competitors is a good source of ideas.

Question 22

What is the first thing to ask yourself when presented with an idea for a feature?

Answer 22

Is this actually solving a problem or just a symptom of a problem?

Question 23

What is a good example of detrimental consequences by adding a new feature (hint: Twitter)?

Answer 23

If twitter added ability to filter out re-tweets, that could lead to people disabling retweets and then eventually stop people from retweeting. That in turn would result in a loss of data for which posts are actually popular, which is intergral to Twitters business model.

Question 24

What’s probably the easiest way to get to the real reason behind a request?

Answer 24

Ask why.