Top 9 Behavioral Interview Questions for Product Managers Flashcards
Tell me about time when you had to overcome a challenge? What did you do?
Situation: In the first 30 days that I started with my current company
Task: I quickly realized they had a very different way of managing their roadmap.
Action: In the next 2 and half weeks, I decided to spend some time with a few of the stakeholders I worked with on a daily basis to better understand the logic behind madness.
Result: As a result, I was able to help our team increase productivity.
Tell me about a time you were under a lot of pressure. What was going on, and how did you get through it?
Situation: In the first 30 days that I started with my current company
Task: I was under a lot of pressure, because their previous product manager had taken a new position and I was basically thrown into the fire with very little onboarding
Action: I spent the next two weeks and weekends prioritizing our my most urgent and important deliverables and learning how these deliverables needed to be delegated with my engineer lead
Result: As a result, I was able to ensure as little deviation as possible to how things used to be done
Describe a time when your team/company was undergoing some changes. How did that impact you, how did you adapt?
Situation: During the first 30 days after the lockdown
Task: I had a strange feeling we weren’t going back into the office anytime soon
Action: I knew then that we needed to implement new processes such as adding loom videos to our Asana tasks to clearly articulate requirements, since we didn’t have the luxury of talking to each other in the office for the foreseeable future
Result: As a result of using looming videos, this reduced a lot of time we were going to spend going back and forth.
Tell me about a time you failed. How did you deal with the situation? (Trick Question)
Off the top of my head, I can’t really recall any major failures in my career
I find that the best way to avoid failure is…
Open and structured communication with all team members
Having well defined roadmaps that the entire team is bought into
Having a effective weekly or bi-weekly 1 on 1 sessions with my key stakeholders to ensure we are on schedule and on budget and everybody has what they need to do their job effectively
Give me an example of a time when you had to think on your feet to avoid a difficult or awkward situation. (Trick Question)
I recently had to give a presentation
Unfortunately, somebody had accidentally deleted my presentation deck
Luckily for me I saved my Google slides onto my hard drive AND discovered the deck was missing early in the morning (I freak out about these types of things happening :))
This would have been a really awkward situation for everybody
Talk about a time when you had to work closely with someone whose personality was very different from yours.
Situation: I have worked with difficult people at every position I ever held.
Task: I believe the key to winning difficult people over is to understand first who they are as a person, what’s important to them, and what communication styles they resonate with
Action: In order to do so you have spend some time with that person outside of the office and you also have to set a deadline of no more than 2 to 3 weeks.
Result: I truly view working with difficult people as an opportunity to strengthen my empathy skills and as a result my company usually designates me as the go to person to dealing with difficult people both internally and externally.
Describe a time when you struggled to build a relationship with someone important. How did you overcome the obstacle?
This is something that I never really struggled with
I have gotten along with pretty much everyone in every position I held
I also understand though that this doesn’t always come easy for everybody
Therefore, I always make an effort to identify the members on the team that struggle building relationships, and try my best to help them.
Tell me about a time you needed to get information from someone who wasn’t very responsive. What did you do?
Situation: I have always been able to get the information I needed, or help, or even a response from everyone that I reached out to.
Task: There have been times when I have learned that this is not the case for everybody.
Action: This is why in my weekly 1 on 1’s with my key stakeholders, I always try to uncover what is “their” relationship like with other team members
Result: As a result, people that I have worked with in the past might have be gather information from other for them; instead of reaching out directly to another team member that is usually less responsive to them.
How Do You Manage, Resolve, or Handle Conflict Between 2 Stakeholders?
Is there a protocol or standard operating procedure you guys follow here for resolving conflict, because in my experience what works well with one company or even one team within the same company MIGHT NOT be as effective with another company or team?
Without knowing the stakeholders (depends a lot on the position) personally or having prior knowledge of the frequency or the severity of the conflict … here’s what I would do
If this was a problem thrown in front of me at, say; 1 PM in the afternoon after I had lunch, what I would do is talk to each person SEPARATELY, because everybody has their own side of the story (chuckle) … good old he said she said right
I would then bring both parties together and find a resolution (ie process update)
