List of Product manager questions

1. One executive says that Feature A is more important and another executive says Feature B is more important. How do you choose which one to implement?
2. Talk about how you overcame product failures/challenges or poor feedback.
3. What’s the best way to work with executives?
4. How do you think product managers interact with engineers?
5. Tell me about a time when you had to build or motivate a team.
6. What is a product you currently use everyday, why and how would you improve it?
7. How do you know if a product is well designed?
8. Suggest a new feature for Amazon. What metrics would you use measure it’s success?
9. What metrics do you think would be important for us to track?
10. How many iPads are sold in the U.S. every year?
11. How do you think we came up with the price for _____ product?
12. How many windows are in New York City?
13. How many people are currently online in Europe?

How to answer behavioral questions?

 Why should we hire you?

1. To answer this questions, specify why are you a good fit to the role and the company. 
2. If you doing some volunteer activities and if it matches the responsibilities of the company then you can specify that. For example, I regularly volunteer at 'X' organization. It requires me to work on some many things at the same time like marketing, sales, event planning, people management, resource management. I enjoy doing all of these activities at once. This role requires me to handle people & marketing hence based on my volunteer experience, I believe I am a good fit!

Why are you leaving your current job?

1. To answer this question, don't specify that you are bored at your current organization. Instead specify something like this: After being there for 3 years, learning has slowed down. Company isn't growing that much and it is impacting my growth. 
2. If you are looking for stability then mention that. If you are looking for a role with specific skills then mention that. 
3. Always mention something along the line of what you want to do and how the current organization is not offering it!

What do you like to do in your spare time?

1. To answer such questions try to come across as someone who shows initiative & who is willing to try out multiple things. 
2. These days the roles are not one-dimensional. Instead they are multi-dimensional and expect people to have experience in wide variety of areas. So mention something like: 
1. Working on a side project
2. Volunteering
3. Online learning 
4. Hobbies
5. Working out, cooking, etc

Where do you want to see yourself in next five years?
Interviewers ask this to:

• Understand if you really want this job.
• See if you have any plan for the future! 
• Test your ambition. 
• Ensure the company can give you what you want. 

Answers can include that you want to be a Lead person of a growing department or organization within the company. You might want to be in a specific domain. So to answer this question always have a 2,3,5 year plan ready. If you are interviewing for a higher roles then have 10 year plan ready! 

Media Ad Concepts

Personalization concepts:

There are many categories of web personalization including

1. Behavioral
2. Contextual
3. Technical
4. Historic data
5. Collaboratively filtered

There are several camps in defining and executing web personalization. A few broad methods for web personalization may include:

1. Implicit
2. Explicit
3. Hybrid

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Media Ads Concepts

1. Ad inventory: The number of ad spaces available with the publisher. If a publisher has 100 spots, where s/he can display the ads then 100 is ad inventory.
1. It is valued in terms of the site traffic or ad views that can be delivered to the advertiser.
2. It is calculated in number of page impressions. If site A has 100 impressions/day and site B has 1000 impressions/day then site B can ask for more money from advertiser because site B can reach to many websites. 
2. An ad value can be calculated as page impressions X average number of ads on your website pages Although above formula is simplest of all. 
1. Moreover, it can be calculated by the location of the ad. Ads displayed at the top of the webpage demands for more money since it is the prime stop as compared to ads displayed at the bottom. 
3. Fill Rate: It shows how much of your ad space has been rented out and how much of it is empty. Higher the fill rate better are the chances since it means your website is in high demand.
4. Revenue: A website’s revenue can be calculated by number of leads or actions are performed after clicking on the ad or after cpm(cost per 1000 impressions)

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Metrics Concepts:

Here is the summary of articles on Product Metrics. Article: Only Metric that counts

Summary: 

1. Are people using the product? Once you find that out, find out:
   1. Why do they use your product? 
   2. How frequently? 
   3. What key actions they perform while using it? 
2. Answers to above questions will tell you who are core users, who:
1. Come directly
2. Return weekly/monthly
3. Share it with others
3. Reference:
1. https://news.greylock.com/the-only-metric-that-matters-now-with-fancy-slides-232474cf414c

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Ad Ecosystem:

This section will explain you the basics architecture of ad ecosystem. Definitions of different components and how those components work together to render ads:

Publisher:

1. Runs online business or websites that has user traffic.

Ad Network:

1. Aggregator of publisher ad inventory that is packaged by contextual channels, audience types or buying options(CPC, CPA, CPM). This inventory is sold. 
2. It is an entity/company/organization that connects advertisers to websites.

2.     It enables to deliver ads to consumers, perform targeting, tracking, and reporting of impressions.

3.     Inventory of online ads include:

a.     Blogs

b.     Rss feed

c.      Web pages

d.     Mobile pages

e.     Instant messages

f.      Mobile apps

g.     Adware Emails

h.     Other media

4.     A publisher(new york times) can integrate with an ad network. Ad network can then display certain ads

5.     Large publisher sells remnant(not sold = 10-60%) inventory through ad networks. Smaller ones sell everything through the ad networks.

6.     Large ad networks include:

a.     Search engines

b.     Media companies

c.      Tech vendors

Seller Side Platform:

1. Platform for publishers to manage ad inventory and enables routing to different ad exchanges

Ad Exchange:

1. Enables buying and selling of Media ads from multiple ad networks.A marketplace for buying and selling of ads. Ad inventory is auctioned to advertisers/agencies.
2. Handles Real time Bidding for publisher that includes:
3. -       Purchases inventory at individual impression level
4. -       Bidding in real time(milliseconds)
5. Ensures that publishers can maximize value of their inventory.
6. Ensure that advertisers purchase individual impressions at fair price.            

DSP:

1. Platform that enables media and audience buying for advertisers in real time on ad exchanges    
2. Evaluates and bids on each individual impression through RTB based on available user data.
3. Takes care of RTB for advertisers.
4. Centralized campaign management, reporting, optimization to meet advertiser’s objective.

RTB process:

1. Publisher puts the available inventory on the ad exchange
2. Ad exchange holds auction for each impression
3. DSP receives the bid from advertisers.
4. DSP evaluates the impression and calculate bid amount based on its value to advertiser. 
5. Ads from winning bid are shown on the publisher’s site.

Advertiser:

1. Spends on marketing to grow their business.

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More resources:

1. 5 things ad tech product managers should consider when planning their company's future
1. NOTES:
1. While contacting SSPs lot of information like user browsers, location, etc can be collected from requests & processed auctions.
2. User information can be collected via the DMP. They will have services that will provide you user information via cookie syncing services.
3. Consider inventory types like TVs or VRs where ad can be served in future. Product requirements should take care of such things. 
4. Consider use of machine learning algorithms to generate metrics that will help describe if correct data is collected and if right metrics are generate. 
5. TODO: Look at new video ads protocol
6. Make the product flexible to allow for change in trends
7. Cost of scale: Don't let technology costs kill the when scaling comes into picture.  
2. Confessions of an adtech product manager

Notes from a product conference

Recently I attended a product conference and here are my findings from several sessions that I attended. The sessions that I attended included:

1. Networking & how to build visibility

2. Relation building

3. Communication components

Below mentioned are the sections and the bits of advice that we got. This blog is in no way a complete picture of my experience but remnants of what I learnt throughout the session. And it gives some tips that experienced Product managers would love to share with new Product managers. So read on! 

1. Books to read:

1. Art of negotiation

2. Influence the psychology of Persusasion by Robert R Cioldini

2. To stay motivated use this motto

1. OMT: One more thing, One more time

3. For promotion

1. Act the role

2. Train your juniors

3. Invest in yourself

4. Step up & say yes if possible

5. Be an infinite learner

6. Even if you are 60% ready, go and ask for promotion.

7. Be a leader everyday if not then yearly once.

4. Importance of networking:

1. 85% of job reqs are filled by networking.

5. For every communication have:

1. Objectives

2. Key Results

6. For vision start defining the narratives by asking these questions:

1. What are the problems?

2. What are the opportunities?

7. While execution: 

1. Ensure customer satisfaction curve while implementation of the product.

8. How to build Visibility:

1. Look at the industry

2. Have a connection in Sales

3. Balance between execution & strategy

4. Work on relationship building

5. Build your Linkedin Public Profile by starting to like & comment.

Pricing the product

Product managers are usually require to evaluate costs of multiple options/solutions while building their product. Or they need to decide cost of their product offerings. Either ways below mentioned strategies help to understand the pricing concepts that help with day to day execution.

Strategies to Pricing the product

Cost-Plus Pricing:

1. Identify the type of product: Online or Physical
2. Identify the cost of the product: Base price and all the indirect price like marketing, customer acquisition, etc
3. Once you have a rough idea of the product pricing then price is above the cost price so that you can generate some profit out of it.
4. Final goal should be: Generate profit from the selling the product or acquire a customer who will buy another product if you sell them this one for free.

Value based pricing:

Identify what value is the product providing to the customer. If it is of high value then high price can be added. For ex: If a meditation app helps someone to avoid a doctor in the long run then you can price it as $7/month or $60/year.

Competitive pricing:

Pricing the product similar to the competitor. If a competitor lowers than price then you should also consider it.

1. However don’t lower it below your cost price to avoid incurring losses.
2. Don’t lower it very much as customers will doubt the product quality.

Experimental pricing:

Start with lower price and go higher if the demand is higher. Even while starting with lower price cover your base costs to incur the profit.

1. If the demand is not high then don’t be afraid to lower your prices.
2. Find the soft spot where customers are willing to pay for your product without you incurring any losses.
   

Pricing models

Free, Ad-Supported:

You can launch your app for free. Or put content on websites for free.

1. You cover the operating costs by running ads on it.

Pros

1. You don’t need to worry about integrating with payment systems as you are not selling anything on the site/app.
   

Cons:

1. Your business pretty much is in hands of ad providers(direct or indirect)
2. High valued Customers might not like your site due to ads. 
3. If by mistake inappropriate ads are shown on your site then your app/website loses reputation.
   

Freemium:

1. Basic version is free.
2. Advanced features can be unlocked upon payment.
3. If there are a lot of basic version users then your operating costs are going to be higher.
4. You should strive for conversion from free to paid users.
   

Tiered:

1. Multiple tiers for different volumes and features. For ex:
1. $1000/month for upto 10k transactions
2. $10k/month for upto 1.5M transactions

Subscription:

1. Charge the user monthly/yearly.
2. Many online services do this like Netflix charges per month. Amazon charges monthly and yearly.

Free trial: 

Provides users with free trial to attract them into becoming paid customers.

Razor-Blade model: 

Sell a component for a lower price and ensure customers buy add-ons at market or higher price thereby covering the costs.