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Introduction to Strategy Questions

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As a PM, you’ll weigh in on a variety of strategic decisions such as how to price products, whether to enter new markets, or how to address competitive threats.

Product strategy questions ask you to analyze the market and competitive landscape, assess a company’s strengths and weaknesses, and build a strategy that supports that company’s long-term vision. They’re especially important in senior PM interview loops, but you’ll likely face at least one regardless of your level of experience.

What to expect

Product strategy questions tend to be broad and open-ended. There are many different types including:

  • Strategic Analysis: “What’s the biggest threat to YouTube?”
  • Go-to-Market: “As the PM launching Spotify’s Podcast product, how would you acquire users?”
  • Pricing: “You’re a PM working for a beverage company. How would you price a new line of high-end, mineral water bottles for the US market?”
  • Growth: “Imagine you’re a PM at Bing. How would you double your market share in the next three years?”
  • Monetization: “How would you monetize WhatsApp?”
  • Market Entry: “Should Amazon start selling live plants?”
  • New Technology: “Google has developed teleportation technology. How would you monetize it?”

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to strategy questions, but this module includes a general interview framework that you can use to approach any situation that requires strategic product thinking.

This framework will help you clarify the problem, define goals, establish guiding principles, make decisions, and recap your answer. We’ll also cover the most common strategy question variants including go-to-market, pricing, and growth questions in later lessons.

What interviewers are looking for

Interviewers ask strategy questions to assess your ability to:

  • Make sense of the company, product, and industry to build a coherent landscape for decision-making
  • Understand and utilize company and product goals to make decisions
  • Build a set of viable options
  • Make the best choice given limited information
  • Focus on long-term success

Depending on the exact question, you’ll also want to demonstrate specific, relevant skills, such as your ability to make sense of pricing models or reason about growth levers.

“Okay” vs. “good” vs. “great” answers

  • An okay answer includes a reasonable summary of the product, company, and industry, resulting in a viable path for the company to take.
  • A good answer dives deeper into the context to identify what’s most important to the company, which is then factored into a strategic decision that can actively drive toward company goals.
  • A great answer provides an incisive understanding of the product, company, and industry landscape, and synthesizes it all into new insights. These insights are used to build a strategy that solves the current challenge and opens up future possibilities. The answer might also include discussion around what would be done differently given more information, risk mitigation, or how the long-term vision would evolve.
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