PM Job Interview: Common Behavioral Questions

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Congratulations, you’ve made it to the next big step in landing the product manager role. Your interview is coming up, and you know there are some tricky questions in your future, but what exactly can you expect?

One thing to expect is a long list of behavioral questions. Major tech companies such as Amazon will load their interviews with behavioral questions. These questions are designed to get a feel for how you will interact with people, whether they are your employees or another team member. PM Exercises collected thousands of real-world interview questions – including behavioral questions – that you could be asked in a product manager interview. For the purposes of this article, we’ve narrowed it down to a few of the most common ones.

Read on to learn more!  

How do you keep the engineering team motivated? 

The most important thing to target when an engineering team is not motivated is to figure out what the main problem is. The most common problems with an engineering team are fixed solely by clarifying the issue, talking about it, and planning to build the right technologies and products together. 

Demonstrate your knowledge by going over the different ways that an engineering team can become unmotivated. If you can address each one properly in the interview and describe how you will solve each specific issue, you’ll nail the question. 

The main reasons for lack of motivation in an engineering team are:

1. Not knowing what you are working on

Solved by: Proper and collaborative planning

2. Not knowing why you are working on it

Solved by: Clarifying goals

3. Not knowing what the impact is

Solved by: Describing impact and the desired outcome

4. Being shifted from one project to another

Solved by: Context Switching

5. Feelings of failure

Solved by: Reassurance and simple tasks

6. Boredom

Solved by: Providing new and engaging tasks

You can find more in-depth answers to encouraging and pushing motivation for an engineering team. Note: To view this content you will need to upgrade your plan to a premium account.

How do you deal with low-performing employees?

Confrontation with low-performing employees is debatably one of the most difficult aspects of a product manager’s position. It is, however, an issue that must be addressed, and must be addressed on time. Answering this question and actually dealing with low-performing employees can be tough. Luckily, we’ve been there and have a huge amount of insight into the ways in which you want to answer this question appropriately. 

Before heading into your interview, pay close attention to this video. It has every answer that you want to give to this question. This is a question you are guaranteed to come across. 

Note: To view this content you will need to upgrade your plan to a premium account.

Other Behavioral Questions to Expect

There are many variations of behavioral interview questions you can expect to come up in an interview, and PM Exercises’ introduction to behavioral questions (a premium account is required to view this page) is the perfect place to start when you’re preparing. We’ve also compiled a brief list of other behavioral interview questions you could expect during your product manager interview like:  

The STAR Method

The STAR method is a well-renowned way of performing at your best during a job interview. It helps you build a clearly-defined path that your answers can follow. It allows you to draw from real-world experience and bring it around to a direct answer to the question. Every single behavioral question that is asked in an interview can be answered in this format. 

Situation: Describing what was going on in your real-world experience that relates to the question that was asked

Task: Talk about your role in the situation and what your responsibilities were

Action: Step-by-step, you will describe what you did in order to address the issue at hand

Result: What outcomes did you achieve?

Having this format down and remembering the acronym is a great thing to fall back on during a job interview. Remember to keep the answer straightforward and avoid long tangents that don’t relate to the question at hand. 

The STAR method allows you to be direct and to-the-point. Interviewers want to know that their product managers won’t fill every explanation with too much fluff for their employees to understand. 

Final Thoughts

It’s time for you to take these steps and bring them out into the world. Take what you’ve learned here and bring it together with your experience to get out there and nail your next job interview. Good luck in your next role as a product manager!