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smoovej/PM_Engineer_Questions.md

Last active August 29, 2015 14:27
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Questions for a Product Manager to ask an Engineer
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PM_Engineer_Questions.md

Questions for a Product Manager to ask an Engineer

Group Dynamics: Tell me about a group project you have worked on with many contrasting opinions involved.

  • This is a softball, and a great opener.  Listen to how they talk about the group, the issues that arise, and how they assisted in the resolution.
  • One of the greatest areas of deficiency in engineers candidates is their ability to manage group dynamics effectively. While in the perfect world we would all be building products happily and harmoniously, people are inherently flawed and there are typically personality conflicts, personal challenges, and all sorts of other "people" stuff involved with a successful launch.

Prioritization: Pick a simple mobile app (e.g. a music player) and pick 5 features you want to include (e.g. social sharing of the song they are listening to, a 5-star rating system). I then ask them to prioritize which gets built first and why.

  • The engineers will have them write code, so this question should focus on how they plan and project manage the implementation. This should lead into many interesting discussions about who the customer is, how to use market data (if at all), and how to leverage those around you to make good decisions.

Be your own QA: Give the candidate a laptop pointed at QA and tell them to find as many bugs as they can in 10 minutes.  Each time they find one, ask how to reproduce and what the expected behavior is.

  • My most memorable PM test interview was at Microsoft for a PowerPoint team, and I will never forget it. The Director PM gave me his laptop and an unstable build of PowerPoint. He said, "Find as many bugs as you can in 10 minutes." Each time I encountered a bug, he asked to enumerate the steps to reproduce it and the expected behavior. If you can, running an equivalent test of your own product will be a fun and enlightening exercise.

Process: Think of a project that had terrible process.  Describe the process.  What did you do to help improve it?  Now think of a project you’ve worked on that had a great software development process.  What made it so good?

  • We’re looking for a few things here:
    • The ability to tell the difference b/t good process and bad
    • An example of how the candidate made things better (or at least tried) when it was bad
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