Mobile Product Marketing Interview Preparation Guide

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Typically, a mobile PM is hired when a mobile application startup reaches a certain size, where multiple projects or an increasingly complex product means that the founders do not have the capacity to be heads down in product related tasks or projects. This point of saturation is very much dependent on the company and its structure. A mobile PM can be involved in several areas, including deciding features, being involved in user interface decisions, planning project budgets and road-maps, some engineering, analytic, and also QA. A mobile PM can truly be a very versatile role, requiring a varied skill set.

Strategy questions require that you put aside product-level considerations and focus on the business and available market opportunities. This type of question is frequently amenable to a diagnostic approach which begins with an assessment of the current state, identifies gaps, and proposes a future state solution. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats analysis can be a good place to start. Focusing on financial metrics and broad market needs (versus individual user needs) will enable you to uplevel your answers. Competition and partnerships come into play more prominently in strategy questions than they may in product questions. A CEO will not be thinking of individual products and perhaps not even product lines. Overall company value proposition and market segment needs will be the right level to consider for this question.

The best hires are those based on mutual respect. The candidate should know more than you do in the chosen field, and be able to teach you to bridge the gap. You should feel comfortable taking instruction from your hire, within this sphere of influence. He in turn must respect your expertise and seek your advice when needed.

Good product managers crisply define the target, the "what" (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the "what." Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out the 'how'.

Last but not least, you do not want to hire someone who shows up simply because there was an advertisement in the news paper. It's important that your candidate not only knows something about the company and ideally the product he will be working on, but is excited about the prospect.

For a pricing question, Lin suggests triangulating between the customer's willingness to pay, competitive pricing, and cost-based pricing. Understanding the cost structure is a good basis, but won't get you all the way to the answer. Consider what alternatives the customer has and what type of demand and supply dynamics there are in the market. If you are targeting a heavily business-oriented product management role, you will need to have pricing frameworks in you back pocket so that you are not a deer in the headlights at the whiteboard.

You don't necessarily need to have all the same interests, or to laugh at the same jokes. But it helps. You should at least be able to chat with your new hire comfortably at the coffee maker/water cooler.

Just because competitors have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. If they obsess about competitor's features will permanently deliver yesterday's technology tomorrow and that is a really bad idea. However, making sure that they stay abreast on how the market is shifting and evaluating features and products, is an important part of the role.

Products are developed through a pipelines of tribes, each one seeking maximum say in the development process. Marketing, designers, developers and sales have their own culture code that do not allow them to develop complete or holistic product development view. As a PM its your responsibility to make them listen to each other in a constructive way and to understand the whole product. This means you have to be polymath or create a perception that your are. All in all this requires amazing amount of persuasive skills on PM's part.

If the candidate isn't working, I modify this to "tell me about your last role." If the candidate has never worked in product management and is looking to making a career change, I ask, "Tell me about your ideal role."

The point of this question is to surface their mental model about product management. Product managers come in many breeds. I want to know are you a data-driven optimizer, are you a visionary strategic thinker, are you an Agile product owner, are you a backlog manager? There is no right or wrong answer. In fact, what I'm looking for is always dependent on the type of role I'm trying to fill. But if there's a mismatch, there's no need to continue. So this is where I start.