PO Interview - Behavioral Questions Flashcards
SBO method
Scenario - Challenge
Situation - Requirements were miscommunicated at the end of the development
Behavior -
Outcome - Explain the Outcome
Situation -
Behavior - Talk about your Behavior/ what you did
Outcome - Explain the Outcome
DIGS Method
Dramatize the situation
Indicate the alternatives
Go through what you did
Summarize your impact
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains.
Recently, I had to make a decision that I could automate a part of a process now and help the operations team reducing 9 hours of manual work to 60 minutes for one client. The second option was to fully automate the end to end process that would take 4 weeks of development, but fully automate the process and that could be rolled out across the board.
The process was to change the member’s paperless preference to paper when a sent email gets bounced 3 times in a row and inform her with a paper notice. Now, the whole process is manual, including bounced back members email Ids extraction from through reporting tool, track those members back, change the paperless preference, and create a notice with given verbiage. This is a weekly process and full-day work for an operation guy. I received a request to automate this process on priority because the operations team is resource-constrained and they couldn’t afford a day spent every week on a single process.
After having detailed requirements, I had a product discovery session with the lead developers and operations manager. Followed by efforts vs impact analysis(ROI), Option 1 - Short term solution was to automate the sending notice part of a process that involved less effort and will take a week of development time. Option 2 - a long-term solution was to fully automate the process that involved medium level efforts and will take 4 weeks of development efforts with high impact and scalability.
Option 2 with high ROI was the winner because that would solve end to end problem, besides that, I had to make sure that it would fulfill the operations team objective and got a go-ahead from them. In summary, I explained the problem which starts from having a manual process that was time-consuming and error-prone. Then I discovered two solutions followed by ROI analysis based on efforts vs impact. Finally, recommend the second option with a higher ROI than option 1.
Tell me about a time you convinced someone to change their mind.
A good answer is describing an experience where you either proposed something that was selected after discussion or an alternate approach was taken, or you disagreed with a decision and argued for something else, either successfully or not. A good answer would be you had cogent arguments, the decision went another way for some reason, and you then fully backed the decision (agree to disagree is another way of stating it). You did not take it personally and you fully committed to the decision, even though you felt it was not the best one.
This has to be specific and custom. A work example is best, a school or volunteer example is second best. If you have none of the above, use a personal example. If you’ve never had to convince somebody of something (really, you should have an example) then give an example of how you would do it.
Tell me about a time you faced a challenge at work and how did you resolved it
PO doesn’t have clear requirement written in the U.S, requirements were miscommunicated a lot at the beginning of development and found at testing stage as a bug.
My solution:
Suggest testers to be involved at the beginning of the development. Walk through test scenario with product owner and developers to reduce miscommunication and potential bugs.
