Product Leadership Interviews (GPM, Director, VP): How to Succeed
What makes product leader interviews different than PM interviews — and how to nail the subtle nuances so you don't get down-leveled
👋 Hi, there. Aakash here. No one is going to stay at a job forever. So we continue our ‘Getting a PM Job’ series this week. You can manage which series within Product Growth you receive here.
The product leadership interview is not the same as the PM interview.
When’s the last time you fired someone?
Who is the best person you’ve ever hired, and why?
What types of product rituals do you establish on your teams?
There’s another level of leadership-related questions that come into the picture.
On top of that, the bar for craftsmanship and senior aperture in normal questions is absurdly high.
Product leadership interviews are tough.
Probably the most common hurdle in today’s tough job market is being able to snag IC PM roles, but then struggling at the leadership stage.
Since we’ve covered everything from behavioral to product sense interviews already in this newsletter…
We move on to one of our most requested topics yet.
Today’s Deep-Dive
Words: 8,925 | Est. Reading Time: 41 minutes
Top 100 Questions
The Rubric by Level
Demonstrating Seniority
The Format of the Process
Mock Interview Examples
Most Common Disqualifiers
My Recommended Prep Strategy
Questions for you to Ask at the End
Deeply Discussing the Top 10 Questions
Next 100 Best Questions to Continue Practice
1. Top 100 Questions
Product leadership interviews are like Amusement Parks. There’s tons of different pockets within. Each has its own interesting side quests.
There are at least 10 different categories you might get in a product leadership interview.
So let’s walk through the most iconic questions across each.
I’ve bolded my favorite in each one, so that you can see what I like to ask. We’ll cover each of those in-depth in section 7.
Category 1 - Behavioral
~10% of questions: These are the basic behavioral questions you could see in any interview for any role, but they’re quite common.
Tell me about yourself.
Teach me something you don’t think I know
What are your superpowers? And their shadows?
Fast forward three years, what is different about you then?
When I go ask people you’ve worked with about you, what will I hear?
During your career, what has been your greatest achievement and why?
Among the people you’ve worked with, who do you admire most and why?
At this stage in your career, what have you learned about yourself? How are you different from other people?
For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?
Who is the person whom you’ve had the most difficulty working with? Why was it difficult, and how did you work through it? What would they say about you today?
Category 2 - Leadership
~13% of questions: These are the basic leadership-style questions that you might see for any managerial or leadership role. You’ll definitely get some.
What’s your managerial style?
When’s the last time you fired someone?
Who’s the best hire you’ve ever made and why?
How do you help your team to learn and develop?
How do you earn trust and respect from your team?
How do you say no to the CEO? When’s the last time you did?
How do you approach diversity and inclusion within your team?
How have you dealt with negative or static mindsets within your teams?
Give an example of a time when you had to deliver bad news to your team.
What’s the most negative feedback you’ve received from someone on your team?
Tell me about a time when you coached or mentored someone in your team. What was the effect on their career?
What's one part of your previous company’s culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find?
Tell me about a time when your team didn’t gel. What was the issue, and how did you deal with it? Has this happened on other teams you’ve been on?
Category 3 - Product Basics
~10% of questions: These are the questions you might get in any PM interview, focused on the basic stories from your product past.
Tell me about a time when you identified a hidden or unaddressed user need. How did you discover it and how did it influence your product strategy?
Can you discuss a product decision you made that went against prevailing trends or industry wisdom? What was the rationale and the result?
What’s the most important or impactful product you shipped? What made it so important or impactful?
Take me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?
How do you think PMs should interact with engineers and designers? What’s the role of a PM?
How do you balance insights that come from data against those that come from intuition?
Describe a time when you had to pivot your product strategy based on market changes.
What’s your favorite product and why? How would you improve it?
What launch in the last year are you most proud of and why?
Give me an example of a time your product failed and why.
Category 4 - Product-Specific
~10% of questions: These are the questions specific to the product and company you applied to, and they are quite common.
Given our current product, if you had unlimited resources but also a tight deadline to achieve a significant impact, what bold steps would you take?
Analyze a major failure or setback our product had in the past. With hindsight, how would you have approached it differently?
Based on what you know now, what would be your strategy for our product?
How much have you used our product? What research have you done on it?
How would you assess the current market positioning of our product?
What user personas do you think we are not fully targeting enough?
What key features do you think are missing from our product?
How would you force-rank our customer segments?
What should we do with AI in our product?
How big should our product team be?
Category 5 - Product Leadership
~18% of questions: These are by far the most common questions, and they focus on your craft of product leadership.
Discuss a time when you had to make a tough prioritization call that impacted your product roadmap significantly. What was at stake and how did you decide?
Share an experience where you had to champion a product vision that was not immediately embraced by your team or stakeholders. How did you gain buy-in?
Share an experience where you turned around a disengaged or underperforming product team. What specific actions did you take and what was the result?
Describe a scenario where you had to balance strong leadership with team empowerment, especially in a high-stakes product decision.
Based on your experience, where do you think product management is optimally situated in the organization? Why?
How do you stay informed and connected on market trends, new platforms, the evolution of product teams, etc.?
How do you handle budgeting and resource allocation for product development?
What’s the biggest one-way-door product decision you’ve ever had to make?
Walk me through the most complex design issue you faced in your last job.
What metric goals did you have in your last role, and did you meet them?
How do you build and maintain a high-performance product team?
What types of product rituals do you establish on your teams?
Can you teach someone to be a good product manager? How?
How do you teach someone to say “no” effectively?
Describe an experience handling a product crisis.
What’s your point of view on Product Ops?
How do you structure your product teams?
How do you decide what to work on?
Category 6 - Non-Product Collaboration and Impact
~7% of questions: These test your ability to impact functions outside of product management, and extend into the other parts of the company.
How have you leveraged insights from customer support or user feedback loops to redefine product strategy? Provide a specific example.
How do you enhance the relationship between go-to-market, design, and engineering?
What’s been the worst relationship with engineering you’ve had in your career?
What's your approach to handling conflicts between product and sales teams?
Describe a time when you had to negotiate resources from other departments.
How have you worked with Sales/ Marketing/ Customer Support in the past?
How did you work with the Senior Leadership Team in your last role?
Category 7 - Product Design
~8% of questions: These are the classical product design questions from PM interviews and still come up in leadership searches, believe it or not.
What innovative design elements would you add to a ride-sharing app?
How would you approach designing an educational app for children?
How would you improve product X (eg, Google Maps)?
Design product X for Y (eg, fitness app for kids)
What is a product you think is poorly designed?
Why did product X fail? (eg, Google Domains)
Redesign the city public park experience.
What makes a product well designed?
Category 8 - Product Strategy
~14% of questions: These are the classical hypotheticals from PM interviews, but in a product leadership context.
Should X buy Y?
Why did Microsoft buy Activision?
Should X partner with Y?
Why did Netflix partner with the WWE?
Should X go into Z market?
Should Amazon compete with ChatGPT?
What should X build in the next 5 years?
You’re the CEO of X. What do you build next?
You’re the CEO of our biggest competitor. What do you do?
How would you assess and act upon potential international expansion for a product?
Describe a strategic pivot you had to execute. What drove this change, and how did it align with the overall business strategy?
Can you talk about a time when you had to make a long-term strategic sacrifice for a short-term gain, or vice versa? What was the situation and outcome?
How do you help your organization get past the fear of talking to customers? What systems and tools do you think need to be in place to be customer-centric?
Tell me about a time where you’ve had to propose a radical shift in the product strategy (or create one from scratch.) What did you draw on to develop it? Who did you partner with to get buy-in? What ultimately happened with it?
Category 9 - Craft & Execution
~8% of questions: These are the bread & butter questions to understand whether you could really help PMs on your team above and beyond their current knowledge.
Share a time when you had to rapidly iterate on a product feature due to initial poor performance. How did you manage the process and measure success?
Discuss a complex technical challenge you faced during product execution. How did you navigate it, and what was the impact on the final product?
Pick a project you’re proud of that took 3-9 months. Walk me through it from beginning to end. I’ll ask questions along the way.
How would you address a significant drop in user engagement for a key feature?
Describe your process for prioritizing bug fixes and feature requests.
How would you measure success for Facebook Events?
What’s the worst tech debt you’ve had to deal with?
How do you decide when to build vs buy?
Category 10 - Estimation
~2% of questions: These bamboozlers from the 90s still show up in leadership interviews, when folks want to have fun.
Estimate the market size for smart home devices in North America.
How much data is generated online every minute?
Cheat Sheet Summary
Here’s all that summarized in one easy doc (all cheat sheets here):
2. The Rubric by Level
Before we get to fully opening up the rubric, let’s understand what prompts it in the first place.
The 3 Principles of Hiring Product Leaders
Let’s peek inside the head of our interviewers, shall we?
“If I hire a bad product leader, my own job will be at huge risk because an entire product area may struggle”
Our interviewers are fundamentally looking to de-risk their decision. They have skin in the game.
If you make a bunch of mid-wit decisions, it can come back and take a bite out of their own careers.
So as you progress in seniority, they want to de-risk your ability to do the job.
That’s principle 1.
“If I hire at too high of a level, my own stars at lower levels will be under-whelmed by our leadership and question their own level”
Our interviewers want to avoid giving us too high of a level, because it hurts the rest of their team.
If you come in and demonstrate basic PM craftsmanship that isn’t a step above what the whole product org was doing before, then you will not have been a bar-raising hire.
So as you interview, they want to understand how you will raise the bar.
That’s principle 2.
“If I hire someone better than me and they own their area, I can go focus on the problem areas and get promoted.”
Our interviewers want to hire that product leader who has the skillset to do the job now.
It’s very rare to find the interviewer willing to take a bet on an external leader who might grow into the role.
So as you interview, make sure they hear the comforting stories of coalface in the role.
That’s Principle 3.
They want to know you’ve actually made it through the growing pains of the job.
These 3 principles apply across levels, but help give context for what you’re about to see.
What changes as you get more senior in PM interviews?
Quite a lot.
Across just about every variable, the expectations at each ascending level grow exponentially.
That's because team size, compensation, and timeline of focus grow exponentially.
Let's take the example of a Unicorn Startup.
These will be the expectations:
Lead Product Manager (LPM):
Team Size: 1
Compensation: $300K
Timeline of Focus: 6 months
Group Product Manager (GPM):
Team Size: 3
Compensation: $400K
Timeline of Focus: 12 months
Director (DIR):
Team Size: 10
Compensation: $525K
Timeline of Focus: 12 months
Vice President (VP):
Team Size: 25
Compensation: $650K
Timeline of Focus: 12 months
Chief Product Officer (CPO):
Team Size: 100
Compensation: $1.2M
Timeline of Focus: 24+ months
It’s clearly a lot to think about.
The 4 Main Dimensions of Change
To distill it down, I think of it as 4 major dimensions of change:
Track record requirement increases
Aperture increases
Non-Product Impact increases
Strategy Increases
1. Track record requirement increases
Flip side: potential matters less
We all know this, but every company want sto see slightly more experienced PMs at each level.
This doesn’t necessarily mean age. But this does mean track record. Especially track record in a PM/ GM leadership position shipping products.
If all of a company’s Directors have 10 year long track records shipping successful products, they’re going to be wary of hiring you with 7 years.
2. Aperture increases
Flip side: Fine details of granularity decrease
As I shared in the PM Career Ladder, your aperture increases by level:
Many of you have asked: “What is Aperture?”
Or challenged further: “But even more junior PMs need to have a longer Aperture.”
What I refer to as aperture here is the timeframe where you uniquely add value.
The most junior PMs add the most value in 0-3 months because they are closes to what is being shipped next.
On the other hand, CPOs add the most value on what’s shipped years from now.
It’s about the timeline where your level is uniquely adding the most value.
3. Non-Product Impact increases
Flip side: Product Impact decreases
As you move up the product leadership rungs, they want to see more and more impact outside of the product management function.
For the most part, in the LPM and GPM stages, those functions are design and engineering.
But as you get to Director, that includes your go-to-market functions.
As you hit VP, it includes your support & ops functions.
And in the C-suite, it’s every function.
You have to show the skills, mastery, and ability to add impact to those other functions in your interview — or other candidates will shine brighter.
4. Strategy Increases
Flip side: Execution Decreases
Can you think big? That’s what’s on the mind of interviewers. And it’s on their mind more, the higher up you go.
At the Director and VP level, it’s a mistake to just focus on product roadmaps that can be completed in a few months.
You need to talk about developing strategies that were enduring for multiple planning cycles.
3. The Format of the Process
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