Perhaps you are an Engineer considering a lateral move into Product Marketing and watching out for opportunities within your company. Perhaps you’ve gone through an MBA and are anxiously awaiting interviews on campus.
Whatever the situation, your first interview for a Product Marketing role can be an intense experience, especially if your past interviews have been all about technology.
While each interview can spring some surprises, here are some often asked questions at Product Marketing interviews that you should prepare for.
What product in the recent past do you think was marketed well/poorly?
This question is not meant to check your knowledge of revenues or market share in a particular industry. Interviewers ask this question to see if you have a good grasp of product marketing strategies and how they work in practice. There is no one right or wrong answer here, but you need to be able to discuss a specific strategy that a product adopted, and explain why you believe it worked/did not work.
If your product faced Problem X, what would you do?
Case-style questions like these are popular at Product Marketing interviews because it gives interviewers an opportunity to test two things; one, it tells them how you approach a problem – whether you are good at asking the right questions and understand the root cause of the problem. Two, you can also show them how you would work towards a solution without complete data – and in real life, most problems need to be solved using an incomplete amount of information.
Some examples of case-style questions are:
- “Product sales are low in the last 6 months. What problems should Marketing seek to fix?”
- “If your product could use any of these 5 potential channels, which ones would you use?”
- “Lead quality from our current website is poor. What would you change?”
Mike Volpe, the CEO of Hubspot mentions in a blog post that he uses these extensively, and gives some more examples.
Case-style questions involve using marketing principles but thinking on your feet. It is a good idea to get some practice doing this!
Give us an example of how you would think of a new product idea.
Relax – the interviewer is not expecting you to come up with the next billion dollar idea right away! Since being the voice of the customer lies at the heart of the Product Manager/Marketing role, this question is meant to help the interviewer gauge your customer awareness.
Are you excited about learning from the market and customers? Can you draw the linkages between what customers need and what a new product should deliver? Do you have an understanding of how to learn what customers need?
This question is really meant for the interviewer to find out of you are a Marketer at heart – whether you are passionate about creating products that will delight customers and make them reach for their wallets.
At the same time, it also gives you a chance to showcase your communication skills, since the interviewer sets you free to talk about an idea of your choice. With communication skills being an essential asset for a Product Marketer, that’s something interviewers watch out for as well.
What were some of the questions you faced in your first Product Marketing interview? Do share in the comments below.
This article first appeared on www.confianzys.com/blog. Confianzys is India’s leading product business consulting firm.