Behavioral Interviews for Product Managers

Your success as a product manager hinges on your ability to work well with others. Because product management is an extremely cross-functional role, you can bet interviewers will assess your attitude, behavior, and thought processes just as thoroughly as your product design, strategic thinking, and analytical skill. The most common way to do this is with behavioral interviews.

What do behavioral interviews assess?

Generally speaking, companies want to hire candidates who:

• Can do the job at hand.
• Can learn and grow in a collaborative environment.
• Fit in, given company culture and values.

Domain-specific or technical interviews assess whether you can do the job, and behavioral questions tell interviewers whether you're a cultural fit. If you're new to interviewing, or haven't interviewed in awhile, this may seem unimportant, especially if you've got strong technical skills. Remember, though, that you won't work in a vacuum. You'll be expected to collaborate, communicate, learn, and embody company values. Given the cost and time it takes for a company to interview, hire, and train new employees, your interviewers want to make sure they're making the right choice investing in you.

What kind of behavioral questions should I prepare for?

There are two general formats you should practice. These are experiential and hypothetical.

Experiential questions will probably be most familar. They probe your past experience to get a sense of what you've done professionally and how you respond to common workplace challenges.

Here are a few popular behavioral questions recently asked in tech and beyond:

• "Tell me about yourself."
• "Describe a time when you made a mistake at work."
• "Give me an example of a time when you took on a leadership role."

Hypotheticals deal in "what ifs." Your intuition, your values, and your ability to apply past learnings are being assessed. These questions can be challenging as they're unpredictable, but the key is to tie them back to concrete experiences. Practice helps immensely here. We'll practice a few shortly.

The variations are endless, but most hypotheticals are variations on questions such as these, recently asked at FAANG.

• "How would you respond if a coworker disagreed with you?"
• "Imagine an important deadline has been moved up. How would you respond?"
• "If you were given multiple responsibilities to manage simultaneously, how would you respond?

"Why do you want to work here?"

Remember that companies are testing you for culture fit throughout the behavioral interview. They'll be looking for evidence that you embody company values as you talk through your past experience, but they'll almost certainly ask you directly when they ask "Why do you want to work here?"

Tip: We all know it's easy to get distracted when answering behavioral questions. One trick that works particularly well is to infuse a bit of "why you want to work here" into each answer, even if no one asked. Keeping this in mind will help you position yourself as a cultural fit while focusing your answers. For example, when you're asked "tell me about yourself" don't forget to include why you're excited to step into this specific role at your chosen company.

We'll walk you through how to prepare for the values-assessment piece of behavioral interviews shortly, but begin to mentally prepare your "elevator pitch" now. It'll help you focus your prep, and narrow down the stories you'll develop in your story bank, coming up next.

Popular questions recently asked at FAANG:

Notice any patterns?

• "Tell me about a decision you made based on your instincts."
• "Tell me about a time you improved a complex process."
• "Give me an example of a calculated risk that you have taken where speed was critical."
• "Tell me about a time when you had to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains."
• "Tell me about a time when an idea you proposed was not agreed on."
• "Tell me about a time you convinced someone to change their mind."
• "Tell me about a time when your project failed."
• "Tell me about a time when you delivered on your project, despite lacking resources."
• "Tell me about a time when one of your team members had difficulty performing a task."
• "Describe an experience working in a cross-functional team."
• "How do you prioritize your work?"
• "Imagine there's a bug with your product on the release date. What would you do?"
• "Tell me about a time when you solved a problem innovatively."
• "How do you earn the trust of your teammates?"
• "Give an example of a critical piece of feedback you received and how you handled it."
• "What are you most proud of in your career?"

We observe a fair mix of experiential and hypothetical questions that assess how you react to common (and often stressful) workplace scenarios. They're all quite vague, so there's opportunity to take them in the direction you want to go. With a bit of prep and practice, you'll nail these.

Try a few now, then check out our interview question database. You'll find experts and peers offering their answers, and you can post your own to get feedback.

How can I prepare?

Authenticity is key to acing behavioral interviews, but that doesn't mean that you should just wing it. Taking the time to map your experience to your target company's culture and values before you practice will help you communicate effectively without sacrificing authenticity.

In the next lesson, we'll teach you to create a story bank mapped to company values. Then, we'll practice answering behavioral questions with the help of a framework designed to keep your answer short, focused, and showcase your talents in the best light.