Product Owner and Manager Interview

Screening process usually takes a few rounds:

HR initial do-you-fit part

This is something like let’s get to know each other better, i.e. do we like you and do you like us. We’ll tell you something about the company, and you’ll share something about you. More-less, you’re walking them through your resume. And, they are checking your (conversational) knowledge of the required language.

Peer review

This is where you talk about your every day activities, as well as periodical ones. You’re trying to explain: 

• How do you run the business (generally) – explanation of your request workflow?
• How do you cooperate with your team? 
• Do you follow agile methodology? 
• How long does your sprint last (Product Owner only)?
• How do you lead your daily scrum sessions (Product Owner only)?
• How do you prepare and execute you grooming, planning and review sessions (Product Owner only)?
• How do you organize and demonstrate new features?
• Who do you interact the most with and how (scrum master, software architect, business analyst, UI/UX designer, developers, QAs, doc writers, DevOps, clients…)?
• Level of JIRA (or any other tool) expertise?
• How do you compose road map strategy and how do you present it (to whom)?
• How do you collect info for your road map strategy?
• How do you decide what should go into your backlog and into your sprint (Product Owner only)?
• What kind of backlogs do you keep (based on timeline) (Product Owner only)?
• How do you see story points, what do they mean to you (Product Owner only)?

Assignment

You receive a short explanation of imaginary company, product and requirements. Based on that, you need to fulfil following assignments. 

• They usually ask for an example of the user story. You may be asked to create a few user stories to cover administrative part of the online shop (imagine that’s the product you are working on).
• Another assignment could be to create couple of UML diagrams relating to the given product in various ways (use cases, market positioning…).
• Also, they could include in the equation an already existing product (as your competitor) so you need to demonstrate product differentiation (in some feature or service).
• They could ask for a wireframing based on some client’s requirements (either you use some tool or simply create design with paper and pencil).
• They ask for an estimation of certain tasks and elaboration.
• Feature Grid (Product Manager only).
• Market Map (Product Manager only).
• Prepare go-to-market strategy (Business Case, Release Plan -MVP, Marketing Strategy, Pricing Strategy, Sales Strategy, Success Metrics, Budget) (Product Manager only). .
• Customer Support Plan (Product Manager only).
• Elevator Pitch or Deck Pitch (Product Manager only).

Manager review

Manager generally collects comments from your previous interviews and goes through some of them if he/she finds it necessary to clarify. 

Usually you need to answer some how-do-you-solve-this-situation part:

• Example of late delivery: what happened, why and how did you manage stakeholders expectations?
• Negotiation between quality and quantity, how do you see that?
• Would you rather deliver something on time unfinished/not-working the way it should, or break the deadline and deliver complete and accurate feature? You also need to elaborate reason(s).
• Most challenging part of your role?
• Best part of your job?
• How do you track if everything is going as planned or the team is facing some obstacle(s)?
• How frequently do you interact with your team?

Then, you’ll probably discus a bit about your position within the team and what is expected from you in the following 3-6-9 months to 1 year. Also, you get to hear what company is committed to provide within the same timeframe.