Jimbi

Recently, I gave interviews for a product manager and I realized most of the heads of organizations don’t understand what is going to the role of a product manager. I am not going to provide full disclosure here but only the wrong way in which a product manager is interviewed in internet or mobile company in India.

Once, you clear the HR, Tech round, then phone interview happens and once you clear that, you have face to face meeting at company’s office.

All goes fine till here. Now, from here onward blunder starts.

The organization heads don’t know that ‘product manager marketing’ and ‘product manager development’ are two different roles. In tech companies, Product manager – development roles are in demand, however, department heads seem to confuse these roles. During interview, Interviewers expect the product manager to have a deep understanding of the user of their domains, which is fine as long as people from competition apply to their company. In most of the cases, they will end up in interviewing someone who is not from competition but has good exposure to other domains. So, their focus should be on how this person understands the products, what are his previous achievements and can this person deliver the results? Instead, what they ask – we are trying to build feature X, what’s your take on this? Product Manager, who is from another domain answers this question to best of his abilities, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t understand users from other domains unless he has developed products for them and understood the user needs closely. At the best, the answer given at this point of time is full of assumptions. It can be right of wrong.

The right question should be this one – We have Y set of users with these characteristics/demographics/life styles and developing feature X, why do you think this feature will be best suited for this set of users?

Next, they want instant solutions to their products. Interviewer may ask you, what could be the new product/feature for us? Again, you give the answer based on your experience. It could be right or wrong. They hardly test, what you already know about your domain and your methodology to come up with solutions, the innovations you can bring.

Though, my point is not to criticize anyone for their hiring skills but the point is, why test a candidate for the newer areas? Why not test the candidate for the areas where he/she is good and give some challenging assignment around that? Won’t that help evaluation better?

Related posts:

1. Product Management vs. Project Management