Question list for Product Management Interviews

Behavioral questions list:

1. How you got into computer science?
2. What kind of technical publications (print or online) do you read on a regular basis?
3. What was the last book you read?
4. If you could recommend one resource (book, web site, etc.) to a new software developer just out of school, what would it be?
5. What was the most interesting project that you worked on?
6. What was the most challenging project that you worked on?
7. If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
8. Tell me about your favorite project 
9. Tell me about a something you did that was unsuccessful, a project or class that didn't go well.
10. Do you prefer a structured or unstructured working environment?
11. How do you prioritize multiple projects?
12. Tell me about previous jobs?
13. What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
14. Tell us about yourself.
15. Where would you like to be in five years?
16. How do you see yourself fitting in to this company?
17. Do you have any questions for me?
18. Why did you leave your last job?
19. Did you finance your own education?
20. Are you good with people?
21. Have you experience working on a group project?
22. What did you find hardest when working with others in a project?
23. What is a tool or system that you learned on your own? 
24. How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You don't know how exactly the books are organized beforehand).
25. Tradeoff between time spent in testing a product and getting into the market first.
26. What to test for given that there isn't enough time to test everything you want to?
27. Why do you think you are smart?
28. Do you want to know any thing about the company.( Try to ask some relevant and interesting question).
29. How long do u want to stay in USA and why?
30. What are your geographical preference?
31. What are your expectations from the job? 

Product Management Interview Questions List: 

1. Favorite product and how you would improve it. 
2. Favorite non-technical product
3. Make an app that has 10x increase in downloads
4. Estimate number of lightbulbs in US
5. Estimate the revenue of XYZ company
6. Estimate the bandwidth needed if you built an optical fiber connection to a colony on Mars
7. Here's a data set. Something changed and here's the new data set. Explain what happened.
8. What's your favorite product? How can you improve it?
9. How would you got about building a startup that does XYZ
10. If you could start a company with $1,000,000 right now what would it be? and why?  
11. Tell me about a product you like
12. Why do you like it?
1. how would you improve it?
2. how would you monetize it?
13. Tell me about a time you used data to solve an ambiguous problem  
14. Tell me what you would improve about Toothpaste
15. Tell me about the most exciting project you've worked on in the past, and why it was the most exciting for you.
16. Design scenario: The alarm clock industry is really waning as of late. What could you do to curb this trend?
17. How many hotels are their in the US  
18. Tell me about your background
19. Asked what is one of my favorite products and how I'd improve it.
20. You are the PM for a steaming video service. You come into the office and see that one key metric has dropped by 80%. What will you do?
21. How many balloons fit inside of San Francisco?  
22. Pick your favorite gadget or piece of technology. How would you market that product now? (Marketing)
23. How many pairs of skis do you think there are in Austria? (Because the guy was from UK)
24. How many people run a marathon every year? 
25. How much money spent in USA per year on GAS
26. Design an app for a community of Celiac's disease patients. Talk about a product you hate.  
27. How will you measure the improvement?

Common themes of product management interview questions:

1. Product, Estimation, Vision for the common
2. Estimation, Coding, Product questions
3. Lot of behavioral and fit questions
4. Analytical skills(How would you do this? How you will solve that problem)
5. Business acumen
6. Some Tech
7. Probability questions
8. Permutation and combinations
9. Product Design
10. Metrics
11. System design 
12. Google Products
13. Strategy
14. Approaches
15. Thinking out of the box
16. Personality 

Source: Glassdoor.com

Google product management Interview questions from Glassdoor.com

1. How many polynomials can you fit in 3 dimensions and then once you figure that out extrapolate in n dimensions.
2. How would you improve XYZ Google product?
3. Given unlimited resources, how you fix XYZ company
4. What's wrong with XYZ? If you were the CEO, how would you fix it?
5. Estimate the rate of revolution of Earth
6. Favorite Google product and why?
7. How would you increase adoption of Google's Fiber to the Home product?
8. Now let's imagine you are PM of that product. And you launch a new feature (of the feature sets suggested above). Day after launch usage drop dramatically. How do you go about inquiring what happened?
9. What do you think about the Android vs. iOs ?
10. Optimize search algorithm to create an ordered list
11. You have a ladder of N steps (rungs). You can go up the ladder by taking either 1 step or two steps at a time, in any combination. How many different routes are there (combinations of 1 steps or 2 steps) to make it up the ladder?
12. Fibonacci series
13. Why Google?
14. Design scenario: Let's say you have a tv remote with 3 buttons, mute, vol up, vol down. What would you expect to happen if a user hits vol up button when its muted? Talk through the scenarios and what the user is trying to do. What would you expect to happen if you hit vol down button when it's muted?
15. Lets design an X, who would you improve product Y).There were a few questions designed to measure mental horsepower (Estimation, Puzzles).
16. Case study to test the feasibility of a new service box that communicated over HTTP and used JSON requests(2012)
17. How would you find a snippet of text in a webpage. Code it in any language you like.(2012)
18. Build a better gmail
19. Asked about my favorite Google Apps and how to make them better.
20. Asked about a hypothetical product and how I'd leverage its capabilities for launch.
21. You are the PM of Facebook's New feed. How will you select things that are to be shown to any user? (Lots of follow up questions)
22. Let's say Google is able to develop self-driving cars. What are some of the businesses you could start with that technology?
23. You work in Google's e-commerce business. The team is planning to enter into the hotel vending machine business. How will you design the product? (Used the CIRCLES framework to build the product design)
24. You are the PM of an enterprise analytics product. Your team just launched a product at end of Q4 and everyone is very exhausted from all the work that went into launching the product. Soon after the launch, the sales lead makes a request for a big feature based on customer feedback. The operations support person also circles back with a request to fix a bug. Given that you only have 2 weeks before your team goes on leave for the new year, what will you priority between the two: build new feature or fix bug? Engineering team just reported that both the actions will take 2 weeks.
25. You are the PM for Google Cloud developer series. Which customer will you focus on: Cloud Natives (Companies built entirely on cloud - start-ups / individuals etc.) or Legacy Enterprise (companies interested in moving to cloud)
26. Google wants to build a robot lawnmower. How will you do it?
27. Which Google product you do not like? Why? How will you improve it? Let's say you are the PM for that product. What will be your three roadmap like?
28. Google recently developed a technology that can detect human emotions in a 2 X 2 dimension (energy level and body movement). What are some of the products you can build using that technology? I listed 7-8 ideas and then I was asked to choose one and do the product design for that idea.
29. Questions focus on general cognitive ability, marketing strategy knowledge and experience, leadership skills, and Googleyness (cultural fit). Expect a mix of behavioral, hypothetical/case (e.g., "build a marketing plan for X"), and fit questions.
30. Challenges in previous jobs, optimal work environment I thrive in, initiatives I personally led to success
31. Mix of behavioral and marketing focused situational questions. Understand strategy in creating marketing campaigns for various Google products. Swipe to Unlock, Rise Above the Noise, and Decode and Conquer were helpful books to read as I was preparing! Show your passion, and have examples as to why you're a creative and analytical person.
32. Why google?
33. Name your top 5 favorite mobile apps, why do you like them? Who should Google acquire?
34. Take a grocery app - what would be the features you would suggest?
35. Choose a city and estimate how many Piano Tuners operate a business there.
36. How many buildings are built in California etc.

Source: Glassdoor.com

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Find product of all numbers in an array except self

It is a commonly asked interview question during onsite or phone interview. So the question is given an array, how will you find a product at all locations of an array without its own location.

Background:
If you are given an array: 1,2,3,4 then you are required to provide a product of all locations expect self. In this case, your response will be a,b,c,d. a will be calculated by taking product of b,c, and d. b will be calculated by taking product of a,c,d. Similarly here are other calculations:
c = a * b * d
d = a * b * c.

Brute force approach is iterate through all the locations and calculate the product skipping its own location. It can be implemented using 2 for loops and its complexity will be O(N*N). But there is a better way to do it and its mentioned in following algorithm. Idea of the algo is:

1. calculate the product of all locations before hand. 
2. Iterate through the array and divide the product with the value provided at its location.

Algorithm:

1. First find the product of the all the values in the array. 
2. If product is not equal to zero then proceed to step 3 or else end. 
3. At every array location, divide the product with the number at array location. That will return the product of all locations of array expect self. 

Implementation: 

public class Test  {
    static int a[] = {1,2,3,4};

    public static void calculateProductExpectSelf() {
        int product = 1;
        for(int i=0; i<a.length; i++) {
            product *= a[i];
        }

        if(product != 0) {
           int b[] = new int[4];
            for(int i=0;i<a.length;i++) {
               if(a[i] != 0) {
                   b[i] = product/a[i];
                   System.out.println("\t" + b[i]);
               }
            }
        } else {

                  System.out.println("Product is zero"]);
     }

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        calculateProductExpectSelf();
    }
}

Dry Run: 

array = a[] = {1,2,3,4}

Product = 1*2*3*4 = 24

In first iteration, the program will print: 24/1 = 24. 
In second iteration, the program will print: 24/2 = 12.
In third iteration, the program will print: 24/3 = 8.
In fourth iteration, the program will print: 24/4 = 6. 

Complexity:

O(N)