Introduction to Analytical Questions

Analytical PM interview questions are squarely left-brain-type exercises.

They’re designed to test your ability to break down problems, set goals, think about data, and use logical reasoning. For these questions especially, having a clear structure and solid justifications for your decisions is crucial.

Interviewers want to see you apply these skills within a larger context that reflects the on-the-job experience of a PM, so a great answer will incorporate product sense or strategic understanding as well.

What to expect

Common types of analytical questions include the following:

Metrics questions

Metrics can tell you whether you’re on or off-track as a PM — but only if you choose the right ones for the situation at hand. Metrics questions test your ability to reason about and apply metrics. They are the most common type of analytical question. Example questions include:

• “If you were PM for Lyft, what metrics would you use to track the health of the app?”
• “Define a north star metric for Airbnb.”
• “How do you define success metrics?”

This module includes a brief review of common metrics and a walk-through of the GAME framework for answering these questions.

A/B testing questions

Experimentation is a large part of a PM’s job, and A/B tests are invaluable for gaining insights into user behavior. A/B testing interview questions assess your ability to design and run experiments, interpret the results, and make data-driven decisions.

Example questions include:

• “What experiments would you run on Google’s homepage to increase search queries?”
• “Devise an A/B test to improve user frustration with Google Maps.”
• “How would you A/B test a dynamic pricing model for Lyft?”

We’ll cover an approach to answering A/B testing questions that’ll help you design an experiment, choose the right metrics to track, interpret the results, and identify next steps with ease.

Estimation questions

Estimation questions assess your ability to break down ambiguous problems, make reasonable assumptions, and get a general sense of scale. Not every company asks estimation questions, but even if you won’t face them, estimation is a valuable skill to practice and use as a tool in other interviews and on the job — for instance, when sizing a market opportunity you identified in a product strategy question. Example estimation questions include:

• “Estimate the market size for driverless cars in 2025.”
• “What’s the TAM of Slack?”
• “How much does it cost to run YouTube for a day?”

Execution questions

Execution questions assess your ability to solve problems. These questions vary significantly from company to company, and they rarely come up in analytical interviews, though Meta is notorious for asking analytical/execution questions like “Friend requests on Facebook are down 10%. What would you do?” Other example questions include:

• “As the PM for Facebook Messenger, you’ve noticed that DAU has gone down significantly. How would you diagnose this issue?”
• “You’re the PM at a food delivery company and delivery time has increased. What would you do?”
• “As a PM at Stripe, one of the merchants is noticing an increase in fraud. How would you solve this problem?”