How to Answer the “Favorite Product” Question

"What's your favorite product?" is one of the most commonly asked questions in PM interviews.

It’s a simple question, but it serves multiple purposes. It's a gentle introduction to the interview process, it offers insight into how you think, and it’s a fun opportunity for your interviewer to get to know you.

What to expect

Some variant of “What’s your favorite product?” is often the first real question you’ll get. Think of it as a warm-up. It's meant to be short — expect to give your answer and a short explanation in three to seven minutes, leaving another three to five for follow-ups.

“Favorite product” questions demonstrate how you think about products. What makes them good or bad, how well they fulfill their purpose, and why they're designed the way they are. Usually, the interviewer is looking for you to answer as a user, but it’s possible they want your perspective as a PM analyzing the product.

Common variants of “What’s your favorite product?”

Some interviewers will add conditions to avoid canned answers, such as:

• “What's your favorite Google product?” (in a Google interview)
• “What's your favorite non-tech product?”
• “What's your favorite app?”
• “What are your three favorite products?”

Some interviewers may even ask for different takes on products, such as:

• “What's a product you hate that others love?”
• “What's a product that you think is interesting but hasn't reached its full potential?”

Let’s explore some strategies for answering the favorite product question.

How to choose a product

Choose a product that you’re genuinely interested in and familiar enough with to speak about in depth. You want to be able to describe how your favorite product fits into your life and meets your needs. We recommend choosing something that allows you to demonstrate what we call the “Three P’s”:

• Passion: Choose a product you’re passionate about.
• Perspective: Choose a product that you can share a nuanced perspective on.
• Personality: Your favorite product should help reveal aspects of your personality. How does your favorite product make you unique as a product manager?

There’s not much to optimize in this decision beyond your ability and willingness to talk about the product. Don’t overthink it. Addressing a few common concerns specifically:

• It’s okay to choose something popular, just make sure you have an opinion that goes beyond the obvious.
• It’s okay to choose something obscure, but be aware you’ll have to provide more explanation on how the product works.
• You don’t have to choose a product from the company you’re interviewing for.

There are a few things you should avoid. Specifically:

• Products that are very simple can be hard to talk about at length. You may like your number two pencil, but do you have enough thoughts on it to fill a ten minute discussion?
• Don’t choose a product from a direct competitor to your interviewing company. It’s not forbidden, but it may be off putting to tell a Lyft PM why you love Uber.

A framework for answering favorite product questions

Let’s assume you’ve been asked "Tell me about your favorite product."

Keep the usual product skills in mind — user empathy, design sense, etc. — but recall that this question is significantly more casual than in-depth product design questions, and it’s more likely that the expectation is that you'll have a friendly discussion with your interviewer. Keep your description of product attributes short, and answer genuinely as a user.

Step 1: Name and explain the product

First, tell the interviewer what your favorite product is and briefly describe it.

If it’s popular, you probably won’t have to share much detail, but if there are aspects of the product that are important to you, mention them specifically. If you’ve chosen a more obscure product, be sure to share a few sentences on what the product is and what it does.

Let’s assume you chose Notion as your favorite product.

Step 2: Describe how the product fits your needs

Next, paint a picture vivid picture for your interviewer. What do you care about? Why do you use the product? Are you in a particular user segment? Do you have interesting needs? Explain how the product fits your needs and, importantly, what choices the designers made that support them.

Don’t forget to talk about the product’s characteristics. For example, if your favorite product is Gmail, an answer that focuses on Gmail’s usefulness because it stores your emails would be weaker than an answer that went into detail about how a certain UI makes email organization easy and intuitive.

Continuing the Notion example, you might say to your interviewer:

“Personally, I try to be pretty organized. I like to do things like make a table of books I’m reading and make a notes doc for each book to track my thoughts and questions as I read. Notion makes it really easy to create and link these different document formats, and importantly, it lets me keep relevant information connected regardless of format. I used to use Google Drive to keep that sort of information, but I always felt like an individual Google Doc or Google Sheet is meant to be a standalone container, and it’s hard to link things together.”

Step 3: Answer follow-up questions

Expect follow-up questions about the product once you finish your answer. The interviewer could take the discussion in many directions, for example:

• Analytical: "How would you measure the success of the product?"
• Product: "How would Google build a smart version of this product?"
• Strategy: "If you were CEO of the company, how would you grow the product?"

The most common follow-up is “How would you change the product?” It’s a good idea to consider how you’d change your favorite product as you’re preparing for PM interviews. This is also good practice for more in-depth product design rounds.

Identify a specific pain point or something you don't like about the product, then explaining how you'd want it fixed. Continuing our Notion example, if you were asked how you’d change Notion, you might say:

“One annoying thing with Notion is that it can be difficult to index information across different pages. Search also doesn’t work well. It would be great if there was a way to automatically collect information together, say by using hashtags. For instance, if a few different books each had a good point about the economy, I could write a note and tag it #econ, and then I could view all the hashtag results together on one page.”