Interviewing Product Managers

Hiring a Product Manager? Features don't tell you how they think. Trade-offs do.

“Design me a feature” is lazy. It rewards idea factories. It skips the messy bit. The hard decisions, the real trade-offs, the collaboration across disciplines. And most of the time, it's work for a designer, not a PM.

Great PMs don't need to be idea machines. They need to place good bets. People who know when to push, when to pause and how to build energy across a team. Idea generation is cheap. Execution is expensive.

Want to spot a great PM? Don't ask them to invent. Ask them to reflect. Go deep on their past work. Not the polished version - the messy one. What did they ship and why? What changed because of it? How did they shape the outcome, not just follow instructions?

The best answers come from the hard parts - the tension and the feedback loops. The trade-offs and the moments when things weren't obvious. When the path wasn't clear but they still found a way forward. That's where the gold is. Not in ideas but in impact.

Real product work looks like wrestling with constraints, aligning the team, managing pressure and holding context across functions. It's pushing through ambiguity without defaulting to consensus. It's saying no more than yes. And it's knowing which bets matter and which don't.

PMs don't just ship features. They see through noise. They narrow scope. They frame decisions and move the team with clarity. Don't test them on what they can dream up. Test them on what they've already done.