My Interview Questions for Product Managers as a UX Designer

Thanks for asking, David! I’m going to answer as if I’m interviewing an Individual Contributor PM.

You’ve passed the phone interview and have now found yourself prepping for the dreaded panel interview (AKA being grilled for at least 3 hours by a string of your potential coworkers). How do you, as the product manager being interviewed, make sure you get one more Yes in there from the Product Designer? What are they looking for? Are they judging you by your Zoom background? (Probably, yes).

If you’ve ever been a part of these panels yourself, you know how it goes. You get a calendar invite and access to some generic pre-selected interview questions. You might be on this person’s direct cross-functional team, or you might just be someone they just threw into the mix. You don’t know the agenda of the person on the other side. The person on the other side may or may not feel they have a vested interest in you or if you actually get hired. So what do you do?

From dozens of PM interviews over the years as a UX designer, I can tell you that I frequently end up sticking up for a PM who got maybes from the rest of the team. When everyone discusses why they scored you the way they did, you want to make sure you have at least one person on the panel that will advocate for you. I’m here to tell you how to get the designer on your side.

Others will be judging your ability to perform as a PM. I want to know how you will affect my team’s life and, ultimately, the quality and usability of the product we produce together. Here are the questions I always ask Product Managers in interviews:

1. Describe your ideal process when collaborating with design.

I’m trying to figure out if I’m going to have to spend half my time managing you rather than actually designing. Things I’m primarily probing for:

• Are you going to be prescriptive? 

• Are you the type of PM who thinks they are a designer?

• Are you an asshole? 

• Do you seem to have a passable understanding of the design process and will it match up with how we do things at this particular company?

🚫 Wrong answer: I ask this question as a hypothetical rather than a “tell me a time” type question. Why? Because most places do not have an ideal process. I want to know what you think it should be, all things considered. Describing a waterfall process between Product and Design–“I do the requirements, then you design based on the specs”– is definitely the WRONG thing to say. I do not want to hear you say anything that implies you prefer to make decisions before including design.

✅ Right answer: I want to hear about how you love to collaborate with designers. Do you describe the natural push and pull of a PM and design relationship? Do you talk about letting designers run with problems? Do you discuss how you see the division between the PM and designer skillsets or do you have a parental tone in how you’re describing your process?

2. Tell me about a time when you had to balance UX needs and engineer pushback.

It should be clear to why I’m asking this question. Are you going to cave to engineering all the time? Do you take pride in the final output of work? What do you do when timelines inevitably hit the fan?

🚫 Wrong answer: The engineer won.

✅ Right answer: You’re talking to a designer; tell me a story that is design-centric. Show me that you care about the quality of UX in your products. Walk me through your thought process of weighing benefits and tradeoffs. Did you have the product’s best interests at heart? I’m listening for what you care about and what you think is a dealbreaker. I’m also listening for your technical understanding in how you describe the issues at play. Likely, the answer involves some compromise. Indexing too hard towards design will also tell me that you are full of bulls**t and telling me what you might think I want to hear.

3. Tell me about the best and worst design team you ever worked with.

This might feel like a trick question. It sort of is. This question tells me a lot about what you value in a design organization at large. There's less of a “wrong answer” than I want to make sure that this aligns with how we do design at this particular org. If you’re wildly off, I will let you know because I want you to understand what you are getting into.

🚫 Wrong answer: Cop out answers like “All designers have been great.” Another is to complain about one person or answer with contempt or blame in in any way.

✅ Right answer: Describe how schools of thought were different between the best and worst teams. What went right? What went wrong? You should also ask your interviewer how design works at their organization in return.

4. What have you worked on lately that made you excited?

I want to hear what you get excited about and what makes you light up. Is it a 0-1 project? Is it optimization? Is it getting into the weeds of data? Was it the woodworking project you did on the weekend?

🚫 Wrong answer: You haven’t worked on anything exciting recently. Or, mention something that is clearly not exciting because you couldn’t think of anything.

✅ Right answer: I am asking this because I want to hear how your brain works. This is a “getting to know you” question. I don’t really care if it's something work related or personal life related. This is also a great time for you to bring up your side hustle or hobby. Pro tip: designers love to hear about this. I am going to have to talk to you every single day. I want to know if that's going to make me want to hit my head into a wall.

5. Why do you want to work here?

If I am in your interview panel I probably care about the mission of this company. I want to know that you are here for the right reasons, that this interview was worth my time, and that you understand the problem space.

🚫 Wrong answer: Any rote or non-answer. I want to hear something that goes beyond reading the tagline on the marketing site. 

✅ Right answer: Again it's hard to have a really wrong answer here aside from not having an authentic one. I want to hear you talk about what you think are the challenges in the space and that you’ve done your homework well enough. You can learn an awful lot more than people think with this question. Similar to the question above, I want to see what makes you light up about what we do.