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Product Owner Interview Guide: The Product Mindset
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TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions: The Product Mindset
If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 82 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the product mindset .
The questions are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients. So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
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The Role of the Product Owner According to the Scrum Guide
According to the Scrum Guide, Product Owners have a vital role in the value creation process of the Scrum team:
Page 5: The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals. Page 6: The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal. Page 6: The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items. Page 6: The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes ordering Product Backlog items.
Source : Scrum Guide 2020 . (The aggregation is taken from the Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered .)
There is a reason why some refer to the Product Owner role as the “Achilles heel” of the Scrum team or the “single wringable neck.” Take out the Product Owner—by organizational design or choosing the wrong candidate—and Scrum mutates into a pretty solid waterfall 2.0 process.
Download the 82 Product Owner Interview Questions Ebook
The free 82 Product Owner Interview Questions ebook is not merely listing the questions, but also contains background information on:
- Why the questions are useful in the process, and…
- A range of appropriate answers.
Two to three questions from each category will provide more than enough ground for an engaging initial 60 minute-long conversation with candidates.
PO Interview Questions Set 8: The Product Mindset
Becoming an agile, learning organization focused on creating customer value is about developing a product mindset everywhere, from the individual to the C-level. Employing Scrum can be a major stepping stone on this journey when the management empowers Product Owners and is not merely regarding Scrum as a delivery means to ship more features, products, and services within the constraints of the iron (project) triangle.
Again, a fully formed and empowered Product Owner is crucial for a transformation success at that level. The following set of questions regarding the product mindset is designed to better understand a candidate’s perspective: Do they probably have what it takes to fill the shoes of the Product Owner role?
Q 77: First Principles of the Product Mindset
Looking back at your professional experience, can you name some first principles of a Product Owner with a product mindset?
This question allows the Product Owner candidate to reflect on their core beliefs of product management in general and the Product Owner role in particular. My top three choices of the first principles of the product mindset are:
- A successful Product Owner is an agile product manager at heart.
- Product Ownership is a leadership position in the first place. It is not about churning out deliverables at an ever-increasing speed to maximize the output of the Scrum team. Great Scrum teams abandon the feature factory early.
- Stakeholder collaboration is essential to becoming a successful Product Owner. Having the final say on the composition and ordering of the Product Backlog does not mean monopolizing the decision-making process. Successful Product Owners learn to lead and delegate early.
Q 78: The Product Focus of Successful Product Owners
You have worked with Product Owners (and product managers) in the past. How did the successful ones master the challenges of the role? Moreover, where did the less successful ones fail?
In my experience, successful Product Owners manage to split their time between different responsibilities and stakeholders without getting lost in details or failing to communicate appropriately while guiding everyone in the right direction: Accomplishing the product vision.
The key to achieving this level of alignment among the critical stakeholders is that they know how to delegate decisions while being transparent about the underlying system. Moreover, they include everyone at a meaningful level in the subsequent communication and collaboration, respectively, using the “vision, validation, value” approach.
A less successful PO typically fails to have a product mindset and act as a team player. They fail at being product leaders. Instead, they are typically stuck in the scribe mode, refusing to delegate work that others can perfectly handle for them. For example, there is no reason why a PO would create and write all Product Backlog items themselves. In my experience, Developers can author PBi very well.
Also, they tend to shield the rest of the Scrum team from communicating with stakeholders, namely customers and users. Establishing these team-internal functional silos — Developers develop and do not talk to customers — often lowers innovation and productivity. Generally, they tend to create a bubble for themselves where falling victim to confirmation bias is not uncommon. They start loving their solution instead of the customers’ problem.
Additionally, less successful Product Owners also tend to invest less in creating a product mindset throughout the organization. For example, they rely less on joined work sessions with stakeholders like user story mapping, value stream mapping, or impact mapping. Also, they are less transparent about the status quo and where the Scrum team is heading.
Q 79: The Product Mindset in a Quickly Growing Organization
Your new product proves to be very desirable in the market, and your organization—and hence the number of Scrum teams and stakeholders—is increasing rapidly in size. So, how do you preserve a product mindset as the responsible Product Owner?
Here, the candidate should point at the importance of embracing empiricism, self-management, and autonomy to deliver value to customers within the constraints of the organization while creating a sustainable return on investment for the latter:
- Embrace self-management as a good way to cope with increasing demands regarding the Product Owner’s contributions.
- Delegate work to other Scrum team members, particularly regarding Product Backlog management and refinement.
- Create a transparent system to structure product discovery by including stakeholders.
- Be transparent about the upcoming work and artifacts to allow for inspection and adaptation.
- Go the extra mile with stakeholders (internal and external) to ensure their active participation in Scrum events.
- Generally, foster alignment and collaboration among stakeholders and Scrum team members.
- Set up and support a training program for stakeholders to understand the needs and opportunities of the product department better.
Q 80: Growing the Product Mindset as a Product Owner in Your Organization
In what ways can you support your personal growth as a Product Owner if your organization is still stuck in the old ways and far from developing a product mindset?
Even the longest journey starts with the first steps. If the “Product Owner” position is currently that of a glorified scribe taking requirements from stakeholders, and you aim to move to the entrepreneur level, I would at least explore the following steps:
- Convince the organization that becoming a learning organization by applying Scrum in a complex environment is not just a hiring technique but a sound business decision. Achieving business agility will pay dividends for everyone.
- The best way to do so is to succeed as a Scrum team within the given constraints.
- Consequently, support your Scrum team on its path to fully embrace Scrum, namely self-management, as the entrepreneur level is focused on product leadership. The groundwork, such as Product Backlog item creation and refinement, will need to be handled by others.
- Invest in networking within the organization by including stakeholders in the Scrum team’s work, for example, regarding product discovery. The further towards the entrepreneur level a PO moves, the more support they need from the C-level.
- Be transparent in everything you do. Moreover, be unbiased and non-corruptible at the same time.
- Be generous in supporting stakeholders in whatever form is necessary, for example, by offering training classes, authoring internal newsletters, or promoting Scrum events within the organization.
Q 81: Spreading the Product Focus among Scrum Teammates
How can you help other Scrum team members, namely the Developers, develop a product mindset?
Speaking with John Doerr, you want missionaries, not mercenaries on your team . To achieve that state, I would recommend taking the following steps:
- Encourage Product Backlog management by Developers, for example, by ensuring that Developers fully understand the big picture, starting with the ‘Why.’
- Possible other Scrum team activities are collaboratively working on Product Goals, customer and user personas, impact maps, user story maps, prototypes, marketing strategies, business plans and models, stakeholder maps/radars, etc.
- Involve Developers in product discovery activities, for example, user research. (Having Developers observe or talk to customers and users is highly beneficial in my experience.)
- Encourage everyone on the team to regularly work in customer care to better understand everyday issues our product or service causes.
Please note that not all Developers feel comfortable with the idea of investing much time in communicating or collaboration with stakeholders while neglecting to build the product or service. (Some just like to solve puzzles all day long — which is okay as you cannot force people to get involved in these activities.)
Q 82: Engaging with Stakeholders to Further the Product Focus
So, embracing a “customer problem first” perspective, thus developing a product mindset throughout the organization, seems to be a good bet to create value for everyone. How would you engage with different groups of stakeholders in the process? How have you done so successfully in the past?
The question is designed to provide the Product Owner candidate with room to share their experience and shine. Also, it is about understanding whether they have a holistic approach to stakeholder communication and what drives a stakeholder to interact with a Scrum team. Interacting comes in many different forms, from exercising control to pursuing goals (probably also personal agendas) to being kept in the loop. The candidate should have explored some of the following approaches to stakeholder engagement:
Engaging with users:
- Invest in continuous user research, including all Scrum team members.
- Invite users to Sprint Reviews.
- Invite users to collaborative exercises, for example, user story mapping, etc.
- Encourage Scrum team members to work in customer care to understand better user needs regularly.
- Create a transparent system to support continuous product discovery and invite your users.
Engaging with providers:
- Apply the same rules to providers and contractors that apply to everyone on the team or within the organization.
- Make providers and contractors “full” team members, down to the level of email addresses.
- Consequently, do not privilege internal team members over external ones if not mandated for legal or governance reasons.
Engaging with governance people:
- Understand the constraint they are working under; try walking in their shoes.
- Include the governance people as early as possible in the Scrum team’s work, for example, regarding creating a Definition of Done.
- Align with them on roadmaps, Product Goals, and other near- and mid-term planning exercises.
- Know your (governance) stakeholder: The best tech is not necessarily the best solution from a compliance perspective. (In my experience, for example, a continuous delivery capability can turn out to be unnecessary gold-plating and thus waste if a legally required audit takes a week anyway.)
- Be cautious, though, that some governance stakeholders may be tempted to use your openness to strengthen their position within the organizational power-play.
Engaging with influencers:
- Learn to distinguish between the formal role of “influencer” and the individual that genuinely exercises influence. Sometimes, the formal role bearer and the real influencer are not identical.
- Invest in networking within the higher levels of the organization to build rapport with prospective influencers and learn early about change coming your way.
- Keep your friends close, keep your opponents closer.
Conclusion: How to Use These 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions
Scrum has always been a pragmatic business, and to succeed in this mindset, candidates need to have a passion for getting their hands dirty. While the basic rules are trivial, getting a group of individuals with different backgrounds, levels of engagement, and personal agendas, to continuously deliver value by creating a great product is challenging. The larger the organization is, the more management level there are, the more likely failure in one of its many forms is lurking around the corner.
The Product Owner interview questions are not necessarily suited to turn an inexperienced interviewer into an agile expert. However, they support figuring out what candidate has been working in the agile trenches and who’s more likely to be an imposter. (You should avoid inviting candidates from the latter category to a trial.)
Hence it’s probably a good idea to look for a pragmatic veteran who has experienced failure—and success—in other projects before and the scars to prove it.
Regarding certifications of candidates, I recommend looking out for those with PSPO I , PSPO II , and particularly PSPO III certificates from Scrum.org.
📖 Product Mindset Related Posts
Product Owner Anti-Patterns — 31+2 Ways to Improve as a PO
28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
23 Product Owner Anti-Patterns from Job Ads: The Snitch, the Whip, the Bookkeeper, the Six Sigma Black Belt™
Overruling the Product Owner? — Making Your Scrum Work #21
Peer Recruiting: How to Hire a Scrum Master in Agile Times
The Scrum Guide Reordered — understand the Scrum Guide’ patterns and concepts quickly to avoid hiring imposters
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Sep 2, 2019
4 Practice Case-Studies for your Product Management interview
The Case Study round is one of the qualifier rounds for any product manager interviews. It helps recruiters understand your product, problem-solving, and communication skills.
Generally, case studies will have multiple parts to gauge your overall product understanding.
- Product Design Questions Expectations: Wireframes & Prototypes
- Revenue Estimation/Projection Expectations: 3 or 5 years of revenue estimation
- Writing a blog or email to your customers Expectations: Simple blog or email in 300 words
- Problem Solving Questions Expectations: User flow diagram or pdf docs or presentation
Let’s jump on the sample questions and scenarios
1. Instagram Case-study
Type: New Features, Marketing, Problem-solving, Go-to-market strategies
You have been on-boarded as a Product Consultant for Instagram. In your monthly catchup meeting, you found that businesses or brands pay influencers to post adverts on their profile. Influencers are also generating decent revenue from their followers, but the entire process is happening outside the Instagram platform. Some of the companies who help businesses do this are — Ifluenz , Scrunch , and Pulpkey .
Part 1: New features — Can you build something which can make the entire experience smoother for both brands and influencers? Think from both influencers' and brands' perspectives.
Expectations: - Explain how you would like to solve this problem? - User flow diagram. - Wireframes & Prototypes
Part 2 : Launch Strategies — Let’s say you have got this feature built by your tech team. How would you go about the launch plan?
Expectations: - Explain your launch or Go-to-market strategies for this feature - Write a blog post in around 300 words to be shared with influencers.
2. Lyft Case-study
Type: New Features, Metrics, Problem-solving, Prioritization
You joined Lyft as a Product Manager. You aim to increase the revenue per active rider in the next six months. How would you go about it?
Expectations: List down the improvements in existing features or suggest new features. First, provide a name and a short description of your product features. Then, please select the highest value feature and describe it in detail. - Work on a PRD and wireframes. - Include the metrics that would help you measure whether you are moving towards your goal. - Three years of revenue estimation plan.
3. Google Case-study
Type: Metrics, Data, Business Insights, Product Roadmap
Let’s assume; you joined Google as a Product Manager for a newly launched app Neighbourly . How would you go about planning the 12-month product roadmap?
Expectations - Build a 12-month product roadmap. - Choose the metrics you would track and why. - Come up with a revenue model for this app.
4. LinkedIn Case-study
Type: Data, Metrics, Problem-Solving
You joined LinkedIn as a Product Consultant. You have observed that the newly launched “ Career Advice ” is used by only 5 million users out of their 575 million user base. What would you change and why?
Expectations: - PDF document the proposed solutions and how you would validate your ideas. - List the Data points you would analyse, which lead to your conclusion. - Discuss the success metrics of the proposed solution.
“P.S — These are not actual interview questions. I’ve drafted this based on my personal experience with product management interivews.”
EDIT: I’ve also published the sample solution of one of my case studies — https://sushantkr17.medium.com/clearing-the-product-management-case-study-round-sample-solution-91dcbe677f4b
I’d happily share my reviews and comments if you work on any of these case studies.
More from Sushant Kumar
Product Manager @ Times Internet | ex-DailyNinja | Co-founder @ InternStreet
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Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers Agile Management
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Are you planning to make a career as a Product Owner? Are you worried about the interview? So what exactly you need to crack the same? Have no fear! Go through these frequently asked Product Owner interview questions. The following list of interview questions on Product Owner for freshers and experienced will help you answer questions like what are the characteristics of a good Product Backlog Item? Can the Product Owner and Scrum Master be the same person? What is ‘Definition of Done’? Master the top interview questions on Product Owner role and crack your interview with ease and confidence.
Intermediate
1. as a product owner, what are the typical activities done by you.
This would be one of the initial questions, which will help interviewee to open up and also will give interviewer the opportunity to understand the exposure of the candidate.
The answer will vary a bit from candidate to candidate, but will typically will be: Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, Grooming. If the PO says Daily Scrum (Daily Standup), ask what he does there. It is ok for PO to attend daily scrum, but he just need to be observer there and should not speak.
2. Are you part of story grooming / User story splitting and estimation discussion?
Yes. PO helps the team in understanding the user story which will help them in right user story splitting and correct estimation. While PO will act as an SME for User story point of view, he will help team to understand it better, he will NOT give or suggest story points in User story estimation.
3. Can Product Owner and Scrum Master be the same person?
No. Product Owner and Scrum Master are two separate roles and mixing them can have a very negative effect on the development process. Both role requires 100% involvement. One person will not be able to fulfil all his responsibilities in 100 %. Scrum Master sometimes needs to act as a mediator between the development team and PO when their goals start to diverge. In such case, if the same person is acting as both, there will be a conflict of interest.
4. How do you prioritize your Product backlog items ?
Typical answer will be MoSCoW – Mo (Must be), S(Should be), Co(Could be), W(Won’t be). But a good and experienced PO will also talk about other techniques such as WSJF.
5. What are the characteristics of a good Product Backlog Item?
A good product backlog item should be DEEP – D (Detailed appropriately), E (Estimated), E (Emergent), P (Prioritized).
6. In Product Backlog Refinement meeting, do we focus on items of upcoming sprints or the current sprints?
Product backlog refinement meeting is for upcoming sprint. The Items in the current Sprint are no longer on the Product Backlog. They are in the Sprint Backlog.
7. As a Product Owner, do you write user stories and give it to development team.
No. A Product owner gives a big user story to the development team. It is the team that discusses it further and splits it.
8. What are the characteristics of good user story?
A good user story should be Independent (I), Negotiable (N), Valuable (V), Estimable (E), Small (S), Testable (T). In short – INVEST.
9. During User story splitting and estimation, you find that Development team is struggling to do so. What will you do?
As a Product owner, I will see if there is any challenge understanding the large user story given by me or in understanding the business requirement. I will discuss and with them and will answer those queries. However, if the issue is because of incorrect splitting technique, I will inform Scrum Master to further facilitate it and plan for any grooming or training session.
10. What is ‘Definition of Done’? Who creates it.
Definition of Done (DoD) is the shared understanding of what “Done” means for a user story. It is a simple list of activities such as writing code, coding comments, unit testing, integration testing, release notes, design documents, etc.
The Development team creates DoD
11. What is acceptance criteria? Who sets it?
Acceptance Criteria is a set of accepted conditions or business rules which the user story or feature should satisfy and meet, to be accepted by the Product owner. They are a set of statements, each with a clear pass/fail result, that specify both functional and non-functional requirements applicable at the current stage of project integration.
The Product owner sets the acceptance criteria.
12. Is Definition of Done is same as Definition of Ready?
Definition of Done (DoD) is a simple list of activities such as writing code, coding comments, unit testing, integration testing, release notes, design documents, etc.
Definition of Ready (DoR) is a sort of criteria or at times checklist that determine whether a story is “Ready” to be picked it for next sprint.
13. Can the same person be Product owner for multiple scrum teams?
As long as it’s the same product on which different teams are working and the product owner can give sufficient time to each of the team, is it acceptable.
14. Can there be more than one PO for in a scrum team ?
No. A team should not have more than one PO or a committee of product owner acting as a PO. PO is someone who steers the scrum team towards the product vision and goal. Having more than one PO will create confusion and issues of alignment of development team with the product.
15. How does Burn Down charts help a Product Owner track the progress of a Sprint ?
Burn-down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal. That is, it is a run chart of outstanding work. It is useful for predicting when all of the work will be completed
16. As a product owner, can you decide to cancel a sprint?
Yes. It’s only the product owner who has the authority to cancel the sprint. However, this should be in consultation with business stake holders and development team.
17. What would happen to the “Done” Product Backlog items when the Sprint is cancelled?
In case the sprint is cancelled, any ‘Done’ product backlog item should be reviewed. If they are potentially releasable, product owner will accept it.
18. What should be done to sprint backlog item which could not be completed till the end of sprint?
Sprint backlog item which could not be completed during the sprint as per DoD, will not be demonstrated during sprint review. Extending it to next sprint might not be good idea. Rather than extending it to next sprint, the right approach is to move it to product backlog and then re-evaluate, if it should be picked for next sprint.
19. Does a Product Owner needs to be a technical or techno-functional person ?
There is nothing wrong in a Product Owner coming from a technical background, but a PO should never be part of the development team. Also, a PO coming from technical background should practise restrain and should not act as a technical SME during story splitting etc.
20. Your development team is repeatedly failing to fulfil the sprint commitment. As a product Owner, what can you do?
It is very important for Product Owner to look and understand the reason for development team failing the sprint commitment. There might be multiple reason for that. It might be because of incorrect estimation or over commitment. It might be because of lack of trust and collaboration in the team. It might be because of not understanding the user story and not slicing it correctly. A PO needs to identify it and based on it, needs to work with the development team and Scrum master to find the solution.
21. As a product owner, is it your responsibility to track or measure the performance of your project?
Yes. While development team is one who measures sprint performance, it’s the product owner, who measures project performance.
22. Does your Agile project has proxy product owner ? If yes, how is he different than a Product Owner?
In practise, distributed agile projects , especially those working on on-shore/off-shore model has a proxy product owner. Proxy product owner acts as local product owner to answer to development team questions. They do not own the product backlog but helps the product owner in managing and maintaining it.
23. Who sets sprint goal ?
Product owner. Defining sprint goal or objective is one of the most important goal of product owner.
24. According to you, what are the qualities or characteristics of a good product owner ?
A good product owner is someone who should be
- Available and engaged with the team.
- Have good knowledge or product and domain.
- Good at communication.
- Empowered to take decisions related to the product.
25. What is a Product increment?
A product increment is the cumulative sum of all the PBIs completed during the sprint and the value of the increments of all previous sprints.
26. As a product owner, you feel that the team is estimating most of the user stories to the upper maximum limit and creating lot of padding. This results into very less throughput and practically, estimation losing its importance, As a Product Owner, what will you do ?
Since a product owner is part of estimation meeting, for larger stories, he may try to explain it to the development team to ensure that they have understood it correctly and have sliced it properly. If still he finds a challenge, he could further discuss it with Scrum master. The SM can coach the team further.
27. Tell me about your favourite product you used this morning. Why is it a good product?
There cannot be a fix answer to this question. What interviewee will be looking for is that the product owner should talk about design, functionality and usefulness of the product and should clearly articulate it. Also, the interviewer will give some point on the creativity of the product being picked .
28. One of the Agile value is ‘Working software over comprehensive documentation”. Your team seems to live with it. While they create a world class product, they are reluctant to document. This results into many practical challenges. As a product owner, how do you deal with it.
Agile manifesto uses the term ‘Over’, which means a higher preference to working software, it does not say that we do not need any documentation in agile. This means one should do the necessary documentation to support the development and use of the product. An open discussion explaining the development team about it with involvement of Scrum master would help.
29. How is PO and SM collaboration important? How do you collaborate with scrum master?
The role of PO and SM has some overlaps and a good coordination between the two is key to a successful scrum team. Scrum Master facilitates activities like backlog grooming, Scrum master communicates the outcome of sprint retrospective to Product owner so that next sprint could be improved. Since Scrum master works closely with scrum team, he also helps the product owner to overcome any teaming challenge within development team. In general, the role of SM and PO complements each other.
30. When it comes to creating design of a product, agile focuses on doing design early in the project. What does that mean?
Early design in Agile means creating just enough design up front to give a good foundation to start from and helps to mitigate risk, without wasting unnecessarily time. As the product evolves, the design emerges.
1. What do you mean by “Product”?
A ‘product’ is a tangible/non-tangible item created to produce specific value for a group of customers and to the organization that provides it. A product can be anything, it can even be an idea. From that, a spoon would be a product. The Facebook application would be a product. Agile consulting services would be a product. A painting would be a product. A product can be something physical (the spoon). It can be a digital product (Facebook application, an e-book or online videos). It also can be a service (consulting). As stated by Mike Cohn – “Products Can Be Defined Recursively” which means a product can exist within another product. Another important thing to note is, the product should deliver some value to the customer. Even the smallest entities in the product (sub-product) should be beneficial to the market.
2. What is a Scrum framework?
Scrum is an iterative and incremental way of delivering value to the customers in a time-boxed manner. It is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products. Jeff Sutherland, together with Ken Schwaber created Scrum as a formal process at OOPSLA'95. Scrum is a very lightweight model and easy to understand the model for any team but though it is easy to understand it is really difficult to master.
The foundation of scrum lies in its values which are Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness, any team opting for scrum should be open to adopting these values to make the team successful. As mentioned earlier, scrum is really lightweight and it does not prescribe much of hierarchy or embedded roles, it just talks about three(3) basic roles – The Product Owner, The Scrum Master, and the Scrum Team, that it! Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams select how best to achieve their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. Cross-functional teams have all capabilities desirable to achieve the work without depending on others not part of the team. As per the survey by Version 1, scrum is the most widely used framework across the globe, isn’t it interesting!!
3. How are traditional requirements different from User Stories?
Before talking about the traditional requirements, let’s understand what a user story is. Nowadays, if you are in an agile organization, everyone would be talking in terms of user stories.
User stories are short descriptions of functionality told from the user’s perspective where the focus is on why and how. The user story concentrates on the experience — what the person using the product wants to be able to do. A traditional requirement concentrates on functionality — what the product should do, it talks more in terms of the ability of a product. Traditional requirements documents go into excessive detail on how an area of software should be designed. They typically provide instructions to the software team on how to build it. Requirements documents often contain things like executive summaries, scope, risks, and more. In contrast to the traditional requirements, a user story is a much simple with acceptance criteria to define the completion. Also, a user story talks about what exactly is the user’s need at the very lowest level of implementation.
4. Where are the customer requirements stored?
All the requirements generated from a customer needs are stored a Product Backlog. Whenever a requirement is received, it is first placed in the product backlog, the business owner or the product owner can then prioritize the items as per the market and customers’ needs. It is a kind of a bucket which accumulates all the necessary items to deliver a complete product. There are several ways to create a product backlog, some use manual charts, others use excel or the tools available supporting Agile such as Rally, Version 1, etc. One should always remember, the product backlog is not a substitute for a requirements specification. Any feedback from the customer during the demo or and the grooming call should be captured and logged in the product backlog. This way it makes sure nothing gets missed, even if it is a low priority item.
5. What is a Definition of Ready and what are its components?
The product backlog consists of the wide variety of items such as – new requirements, enhancements, bug fixes, refactoring stories, etc. but to make sure the items are in a state for a team to commit is really important. To elaborate more, the items which the team commit in a sprint should meet a few criteria to make sure it has everything required to work upon it.
The definition of Ready is an agreement between the team and the product owner where the backlog items have to pass through a few agreed points to mark it as ready. For Example, Definition of Ready for a story will have User Story defined, User Story dependencies identified, User Story sized by the delivery team, performance criteria identified, no open questions, the team has a good idea what it will mean to Demo the User Story.
In the same way, we can have the definition of ready for the features as well. Although, the components might differ from product to product. This shared definition then allows the team to discard the stories that don’t have clearly defined acceptance criteria. It will save a lot of time if each user story meets Definition of Ready before the Sprint Planning meeting.
6. Who owns the product backlog and prioritization?
The product backlog is owned by the product owner, it is one of the roles in a scrum team and is aligned completely to the product. Per scrum guidelines, the product owner is responsible for maintaining the product backlog. But that doesn't mean Product Owner is only the input source for the product backlog.
Any stakeholders (Business analyst/Tech architect/software architect/tester/developer/customer) in the organization/project can contribute to the product catalog. But Product owner has the ultimate responsibility for prioritizing them (with or without Development Team). It is the responsibility of the product owner to capture and add anything and everything into the backlog. Also, the product owner will make sure that the items in the backlog reflect the prioritization as the market needs. The item delivering the highest value should be at the top. There are several ways a product owner can use to prioritize the backlog such as – Ranking, Moscow, and Hundred Dollar method, etc., the goal is to keep the backlog healthy and prioritized. You can even say that the product owner is the mini CEO for his own area.
7. What is the Release Burndown Chart?
A Release Burndown Chart is one of the information radiators for an agile project team and is a way for the team to clearly see what is happening and how progress is being made during each sprint. The release burndown chart has sprints or timeline on the X-axis and the story points on the Y-axis. Just by the glance of the chart, you can tell exactly how the release is going. It captures how much scope has been increased during the course of a release, it also gives us the insight into the stories getting acceptance on time from the PO or the stakeholders. With the help of this chart, we can even identify if there are any risks to the delivery in the said amount of time. It is majorly used by the product team, management and sometimes the stakeholders to assess the delivery of the release. It is an important chart when we work with business owners as it also gives the view of items which might creep out of the boundaries.
8. Why there is no project manager and no agile product manager?
It’s true that Scrum doesn’t define any project manager or agile product manager role, it only mentions three roles – development team, scrum master and the product owner. Each of them has their own boundaries and responsibilities. But, even before the delivery team starts working on the product, there is a lot to do like, team formation, procurement, risk management, etc. these are not mentioned in any of the three roles defined. So yes, even in agile development, we do have a project manager who takes care of all these things and ensures smooth startup of the teams. Even scaledagileframework.com talks about the evolving role of managers in Lean-Agile development. Like the project manager, the agile product manager role also exists, it is the same as the usual product owner role, and it is just how you want to address it. The role and responsibilities are the same because it’s just another name for a product owner.
9. What is the relationship between vision and product roadmap?
Vision is a sort of a goal you see for your organization, the product or even for yourself. “Vision is knowing who you are, where you’re going and what will guide your journey.”– Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner. Thus, there are three elements which constitute a vision on a broader level, the purpose, the picture, and the values. Connecting the vision to our topic today, we will talk specifically about the product vision. For any product, it’s really important to understand why we are building it, what purpose will it serve to the customer or the client.
Next comes the picture where we see how the end result should look like and lastly what value will it deliver. The vision statement can be just a few lines and it is not going to be very elaborative or prescriptive. To achieve this vision, a roadmap is created, it is a powerful means to define how a product is likely to grow, to align the stakeholders, and to procure a budget for developing the product and it is also a visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of the product offering over time. It outlines goals, milestones, and deliverables for a product in development.
10. What are the different estimation levels in Scrum?
Estimation plays an important role when we talk about the product backlog. Estimating is about creating a shared understanding of the requirements, and a shared understanding of the solution. When teams have problems estimating, it’s almost never an estimating problem, it’s a shared understanding problem. Estimation can be done at two levels:
- Product Backlog level – Estimation at the product backlog level helps the team to predict much can they deliver in said time, it can be a release of three months or six months or as per the product need. It also helps the product owner in making prioritization decisions. Another purpose to estimate items on the product backlog is that team members become more well-informed about the detail by thinking about it enough to estimate it.
- Sprint backlog level – Estimating at the sprint backlog level helps the teams to understand how much work they can pull into a sprint. The estimates at the sprint level are more precise which increases the possibility of the team completing all they say they will. In addition to it, this also helps the team to better synchronize their work.
When the team estimates at the product backlog level, it gives a rough or a high-level estimate, this gets further refined when they estimate at the sprint level.
11. What is the difference between estimating and committing?
When the agile team works on the product backlog, they break it down into chunks and align them into a roadmap for the delivery, during this process, they also estimate the product backlog which gives them the visibility on its completion, the functional approach, and complexity. Estimates tell at the high level of what it takes to deliver the item. Commitment, on the other hand, is the promise from a team assuring the delivery of items taken in a sprint or in a release. During the sprint planning meeting, the team pulls in some items as per the collective capacity and makes a commitment to the product owner or the stakeholders for its delivery in a time-boxed manner.
Both estimating and committing are important activities in the scrum but they serve totally different purposes. Estimates are never a commitment from the team. An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. One should always remember - Committing does not guarantee the delivery of items, there might be situations where the team gets stuck because of some very valid and reasonable impediment. There are several ways a team can estimate the backlog.
12. What are the methods of keeping a healthy backlog?
To start with any project, there is a need to have a backlog, it might not be perfect but at least it provides a starting point for the teams. There are challenges if we don’t have a proper backlog, which can be, backlog consisting of very big items or sometimes the items do not define the exact deliverable and miss on the details. Hence, there is a need to keep it healthy, so that it can be used by the teams to openly see what is next, what it can be worked upon, and what they have to plan for the future.
A healthy backlog has 1–2 sprints of work ready to go for the team to work on which should include tech debt, bugs, and new feature work. The backlog should be visible to all the team members and everyone in the team should be encouraged to contribute so that nothing gets missed, like, new additions the team feels can add value to the client or any tools the team wants to replace to increase productivity and capability. Most importantly, a healthy product backlog is regularly ordered and prioritized. The product owner has to keep the pile of items in a ready state which can be defined under the definition of ready.
13. How is backlog grooming done?
The backlog grooming is intended for making sure that the team has the backlog which is relevant, detailed and estimated to a degree appropriate with their priority. In the backlog grooming meeting, the scrum team sits together to discuss the items from the product backlog and this meeting is done on a regular basis to keep the backlog healthy and up-to-date.
They pull the items as per the priority order and refine them with rigorous discussion and brainstorming. They even talk about the blockers that might come up in their way and also the dependencies, whether it is upstream or downstream. In the backlog grooming the team takes up an item from the backlog and discuss how they can work upon it, they even talk about the ways of implementation. This meeting gives the team the time they need to understand new stories before estimating and working additionally providing time to optimize the design. It also helps in streamlining the planning meeting by saving the hours the team would have spent. By devoting time to backlog upkeep, the team safeguards that this preliminary planning occurs prior to the sprint planning meeting.
14. What is the importance and benefits of prioritizing the product backlog?
The Product Backlog is the master list of all functionality desired in the product in a prioritized order. Backlog prioritization is required to organize the product backlog items (user story/Defects/Spike etc) to make the sequence of its development and deployment. Prioritization leads the team’s work by concentrating the team on the most important items. It also freezes the backlog contents gradually.
The product backlog items are detailed according to their priority. This constructs flexibility into the process and allows deferring decisions about the lower-priority items, buying the Scrum team more time to assess options, collect feedback from customers, and obtain more knowledge. This eventually results in better results and a better product. Few of the business benefits of prioritization includes – Faster return of investment, better management of dependencies, minimizing risks and focus on value-driven development. Prioritization not only helps the business but also the teams – They can do effective grooming by saving the time of selection, better visibility to pick up stories within the current scope. The team can pick up the first few items from the prioritized list to discuss and work upon, in this way a lot of confusion is eased out on what needs to be worked upon.
15. What is the goal of release management?
The main goal of release management is creating value to the customer. The deployment of releases into production and the establishment of effective use of the service are the goals of release and deployment management process. To meet this requirement, they create a clear and comprehensive release and deployment management plan. This helps the customer and the teams to align their activities, the release management team chalks out the dates which is then targeted by the teams.
The release management team is also involved in building, installing, testing and deploying release packages efficiently and successfully as per the schedule. During all this, the release management team also makes sure that there is a minimal unpredicted impact on the production services and above all, they ensure that the customer or the users are satisfied. The definitive goal of service management is meeting and even exceeding customer expectations and ensuring customer satisfaction in service delivery.
16. What does it mean when we say “planning is adaptive, iterative, and collaborative”?
The Product Owner has to understand that planning is adaptive, iterative, and collaborative which means, planning takes place at different levels in Scrum:
Product, release, sprint, and day. Each level has some output which gets as an input for the next level. When we talk of planning in Scrum, it is more dynamic and change as more information about the customer needs and the product being developed becomes available. The product gets build over every iteration, at the end of every sprint, there is an increment which gets added to the product. The team plans for each iteration in a release with the collaboration of the product owner and the stakeholders.
The release planning activities are carried out by the Scrum team often with the help of stakeholders, for instance, in the sprint review meeting, the team presents the backlog they have worked upon and take the acceptance from the product owner. If there is any feedback on the items, it will be added in the product backlog and later would be prioritized by the product owner. The product owner ensures that the necessary release management activities take place. It is more of a collaboration among the product owner and the teams which results in the success of the product.
17. Explain the concept of technical debt.
The term technical debt was coined by Ward Cunningham and mentioned that some problems with code are like financial debt. As per Ward “With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but until you pay back that money you will pay interest”. Technical Debt is something where you are required to do refactoring or improvement related to the source code and its architecture.
Factors adding up to technical debts cab be issues related to architecture, structure, duplication, test coverage, comments and documentation, potential bugs, complexity, code smells, coding practices and style. All these types of issues incur technical debt because they have a negative impact on productivity. Any compromise with the quality during the development lifecycle leads to technical debts, the software becomes fragile and expensive to extend and maintain. With the evolution of agile, we have witnessed a gradual decrease in the amount of technical debt and this was feasible because now we follow shorter cycles and frequent software updates require high quality, hence, the chances of piled up issues lower.
As per Atlassian “Technical debt is the difference between what was promised and what was actually delivered. Preventing technical debt is what allows development to be agile in the long run.”
18. Why do we say software should be released early and frequently?
Early and frequent delivery not only helps the team but also the customers. When we start working in iterations, there is an increment that gets added to the product, this increment is always (most of the cases) the highest priority item as expected by the customers. So, every time the customer gets the finished work which they have been seeking as critical or something which was highly desired.
Short iterations also give the customers the time they need to shift the priorities and align the requirements as per the market needs. On the contrary, the team also gets positive notes while working with software development in short cycles, which is early feedback. They get the feedback as and when they reach out to the customers with some finished items. Sometimes, during the demo the customers get to see what exactly has come out of the requirements shared by them, accordingly, they tweak and provide feedback which is then converted into a story and taken up by the teams. The early and frequent release also ensures that the scope of change will be small as compared to releasing something big. Here, every release (“iteration”) has a specification, development and testing phase. This means that every couple of weeks the software is fully usable, although it may have very few features at the start.
19. What do you understand by velocity and how to measure it?
“Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a Team can tackle during a single Sprint and is the key metric in Scrum. Velocity is calculated at the end of the Sprint by totaling the Points for all fully completed User Stories.” – Scrum Inc
Velocity is a simple but powerful method for accurately measuring the rate at which the scrum development teams consistently deliver business value. Velocity is measured in the same units as feature estimates, whether this is story points, days, ideal days, or hours that the Scrum team delivers - all of which are considered acceptable. It is a metric which can predict how much work a team can complete in sprint time.
Velocity in agile is the total number of points delivered in a sprint. For example, if a team commits 30 points worth of stories in a sprint and by the end, they are able to deliver only 25 points then their velocity will be 25 points and not 30 points. Hence, velocity is the total points delivered and NOT the total points committed. The velocity helps the teams to predict the amount of work they can commit as a team, it also helps when we do our product increment planning in a Scaled Agile Framework.
20. How the Product Owner and Development Team collaborate during the Sprint?
The essential trait to win the scrum methodology is the continuous communication between the product owner and the development team. They both need to collaborate at every step in the development to make sure the team is delivery what is expected and there are no surprises at the end of the sprint. The product owner helps the team to look at the bigger picture, this role helps the team to understand the ‘Why’ of the product. During the sprint, the Product Owner helps the team in letting them know the priority so that in the sprint planning they commit as the priority.
During the course of the sprint, the team touches base with the product owner as and when they feel, they can demo something to get the early feedback rather than waiting till the end of the sprint. Along with this, the team also sits with the product owner to groom the stories for the upcoming sprint so that they can refine and add the required details to the story and make it in a ready state to be pulled. The constant collaboration between these two helps in early resolution of dependencies or blockers and also reduces the chances of developing something which is not in the scope.
21. Why sprints are timeboxed and protected?
In scrum, we divide our work into iterations or cycles which are called sprints. The output of the sprint should add some value to the customer. For every sprint, we talk about time-boxing, which means it will have a start date and an end date. This timeboxing allows the customer to know when they can expect the output from the teams, also the team knows how much they can commit so as to deliver a quality item to the client.
Time-boxing also allows the team to focus on the value, whatever they pull as commitment is expected to be the highest priority item from the backlog which will add the highest value. Protecting a sprint means, the scrum master will make sure that the team does not commit more than their capacity, else, they won’t be able to complete the work in time. Protecting a sprint also refers to ensuring the stakeholders are not over-doing the participation in the daily activities, as it impacts the team’s focus. The team can set some ground rules or can have working agreements to make sure they strike a balance in the scrum ceremonies. And lastly, protection is also in terms of shielding from outside interferences.
22. What do you understand by the concept of sustainable pace?
The team targets a pace of work that can be sustained for a long time or indefinitely. The team has to come on an agreement on how can they give to make sure that is balancing the overall structure. The term "sustainable pace", more general, was proposed by Kent Beck himself in replacement of the original "40 hour week" denomination for this Extreme Programming practice. In the first edition of “Extreme Programming Explained,”
Kent Beck suggested working no more than 40 hours per week and never working overtime a second week in a row. Finally, one of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto was dedicated to "Sustainable Pace", which can be regarded as the most widely accepted definition: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”
As per Sustainable pace – “Sustainable Pace is not about taking it easy and going slow. It's just the opposite, you should expend energy vigorously, and regain strength by resting. In the long run, make sure you invest your energy wisely and set your priorities taking into account the findings of happiness research.”
23. What is the difference between the Scrum Team and the Development Team?
A scrum team is a closed group consisting of the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the team. All three entities in the scrum team are aligned towards a single goal. In the scrum team, the scrum master will make sure that the team is focused and will protect the sprint from outer interferences. On the other hand, the product owner will align the prioritized requirements, so that the team has a lined up stories to work on. And the third entity in the Scrum Team is the development team who is focused on the delivery of the value to the stakeholder.
The development team takes up the ‘actual work’ in terms of coding, testing, etc. As per the scrum.org “Development Team consists of professionals who do the work of delivering a potentially releasable Increment of “Done” product at the end of each Sprint. A "Done" increment is required at the Sprint Review. Only members of the Development Team create the Increment.” The development teams are self-organizing and cross-functional, no one directs the Development Team how to turn Product Backlog into Increments of potentially releasable functionality. Specific Development Team members may have specific skills and areas of focus, but accountability lies to the Development Team as a whole.
24. Who is allowed to add items to the backlog and make adjustments to them?
Anyone from the team can add items to the backlog, there is no set rule for any role to add to the backlog. During the course of development, the team can find some requirements which were earlier not identified, they have the liberty to add that item to the backlog. Sometimes, the teams might identify some stories to improve the coverage or the quality, which is a good practice to follow. Keeping this addition to the backlog open for everyone in the teams ensures that we don’t miss the requirements even if it is low on the priority list.
Though anyone in the team can add items to the backlog it is only the product owner who is responsible to prioritize the backlog and also the one who determines what happens to the product backlog item. In the grooming meeting, the team sits together with the product owner and goes through the backlog. Nowadays, the teams use online tools to help and create the backlog, this not only helps to work across the distributed teams but also helps in keeping things together. The sole intent of creating the backlog is to capture all the requirements at one place.
25. Can a Product Owner be the Scrum Master for a team?
The Product Owner cannot be the Scrum Master for the delivery team. Both the Scrum Master and Product Owner are a full-time job and require strenuous efforts to fulfill their responsibilities. Also, the two have conflicting goals, as a scrum master, you will always try to help the team commit the optimum number of items as per the capacity but the product owner will just focus on delivering the maximum work. Also, the product owner is responsible for delivery but the Scrum master is not. In a case where a product owner plays a scrum master role, the scrum values and agile practices will take a back seat. The team becomes more pressurized to deliver the backlog items. The scrum master role is more on the process side and the product owner is towards the business end, mixing both the roles misbalances the transformation journey.
26. Should the Product Owner attend the entire sprint planning ceremony?
The sprint planning meeting is divided into two parts – committing the sprint items and creating the sprint backlog as per the capacity. During the first half of the meeting, the product owner should actively engage with the team to get the right stories being committed as per the market priority. The product owner can answer any open query the team has and can also talk about the expectations on the delivery.
This role can also help the team in providing optimum estimates by clearing out any doubts. During the second half of the meeting where the team is creating tasks, the product owner might or might not attend as per the situation. If the team has all the queries resolved and they understand the priority, in this case, the product owner can step out and let the team create their tasks. But if there are few points for contention or the team feels they won’t be able to meet the goals, the product owner should be there to listen. Ideally, the sprint planning should be attended by the scrum team which is – the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the development team. Hence, everyone should be there to make it a success.
27. Define a Product Owner Role.
A product owner is a role in a product development team or a Scrum team who is responsible for the product backlog, making sure that it is up-to-date in terms of priorities and has the items which translate back to the vision. The Product Owner represents the business or user and is accountable for collaborating with the consumer to define what features will be in the product release.
The Product Owner works with the stakeholders to get the right requirements, right in the sense, help the users to devise the requirements which they might not see or comprehend at that point. This not only improves the relationship with our customers but also helps to build up the trust. And at the other end, the Product Owner helps the delivery team/development team understand the vision and the requirements. Hence, this role is kind of a bridge between the two ends, holding tight the two corners and effectively enhancing the smooth communication. This role is really critical as it handshakes at both the ends – the development team and the stakeholders.
28. What is the difference between PM, PO, and Business Analyst?
Product Owner role is much wider in its scope and comes with a lot more responsibility including researching market trends to fill gaps with a new product. A product owner is responsible for a particular product and works to grow it right from its inception stage to maturity with a vision. A business analyst, on the other hand, would work on parallel lines as a product owner, but, would be limited by the scope of the work.
Usually, a business analyst would be responsible for a particular section of the product and would work towards its requirements or coming up with ideas to improve or innovate the process pertaining to its scope. Both PO and BA have many similarities in terms of attributes such as strong relationship skills, ability to think outside the box and being clear on the expectations of the work. On the other hand, the Project Manager is the person who must ensure that the scope of a project is delivered against budget and timeframes agreed. This requires the Project Manager to create plans, negotiate budgets, resources, and track progress.
29. What is a Product Owner responsible for?
According to Roman Pichler, the ultimate responsibility of a product owner is to ensure that the product creates value for its customers and users, as well as for the company. “Think of the product owner as of the person who champions the product, who facilitates the product decisions, and who has the final say about the product,” he says. “This includes if and how feedback is actioned, and which features are released.”
The role and responsibilities of a Product Owner are too deep so as to make sure he/she understands the core of the product and too wide that collaboration is done at 360-degree level, being a liaison and face of the user. Defining the vision - The Product Owner has the responsibility of creating a vision so that the development team clearly visualize the expected outcome by the user. Managing the product backlog - The most essential responsibility in a role a Product Owner is managing the product backlog. Today’s market is really dynamic, every customer wants to stay at the top of the new features being introduced. Even the items in the product backlog might require some movements due to changing priorities. Prioritizing needs - Making choices about the priority of product backlog items in order to deliver a maximum outcome. Anticipating client needs and acting as primary liaison.
30. Who are PO’s are accountable to?
The Product Owners are accountable to everyone involved in the product. They are accountable to the customers for quality product delivery, they have to make sure the requirements are translated well and there is a mutual understanding of the deliverables. The clients look up to the product owners for their requested work and the feedback loops to be taken care of by the product owners. In the same way, the product owners are accountable to the delivery team to make sure they have the right set of requirements to start their work with.
Along with this, they are accountable for the milestones and the roadmap so that everyone talks the same language. They are even accountable to the management because of it the management who are dealing in terms of finances. The product owner is even accountable to their product backlog, to make it healthy! A lot goes into the accountability of the product owner, it’s like 360-degree accountability that they have performed. Whatever work the development team takes up, it is the accountability of the product owner and even making sure the team develops the right thing.
31. What is the definition of Release PO versus Feature PO?
When the backlog is too big to be taken care of by a single product owner, there is a need for adding a person who can take care of the bigger picture. Hence the role of a release product owner comes up. For example, the team product owner works with the development team for feature delivery and in turn, the release product owner will work to formalize the release of those feature to the market.
The feature product owner ensures the feature is well understood by the team and they also make sure, it gets delivered on time if there are no impediments. There can several features the team can be working on. The release product owner takes care at the higher level to consolidate the feature delivery through a release, they set the release dates, which can go from a month to six month time. The feature PO is more focused towards the team and collaborates with the delivery teams whereas the Release product Owner interacts with the team of product owners.
32. Is the product owner a member of the Scrum Team?
As defined in Scrum, the scrum team comprises of the development team, the scrum master and the product owner, so yes, the product owner is a crucial part of the scrum team. The product attends the scrum ceremonies with the development team and stays available throughout the sprint to assist the team members in terms of requirements. The product owner is part of the sprint planning to ensure the team commits the right work and also which adds value to the product. Throughout the sprint, the product owner may or may not join the daily scrum but will be there to assist.
During the sprint demo, the product owner has to be there to accept/reject the work done during the sprint and also to provide feedback on the deliverables. The team along with the product owner also sits together for the backlog grooming where they brainstorm on the requirements and make it ready to be pulled up for commitment in the upcoming sprints. It is the product owner who acts as a bridge between the delivery teams and the client hence, it is an important role in the scrum team. Though this role might not be involved in the technical part they take care of the functional aspect.
33. What is the common industry job title for product owner responsibilities?
Usually, the titles used in software development include Program Manager, Technical Program Manager, Technical Product Manager, Product Analyst, or Product Owner. Each of them has a common set of responsibilities, which have been defined below:
- Creates and maintains the Product Backlog
- Prioritizes and orders the Backlog as per the business value
- Supports with the bifurcation of Epics, Themes, and Features into user stories that are small enough to be completed in a single sprint.
- Delivers the Vision and Goals at the beginning of every Release and Sprint.
- Epitomizes the customer, interfaces and involves the client.
- Takes part in the daily Scrums, Sprint Planning Meetings, and Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives and another sync up meetings with the team.
- Reviews the product development at the finish of every iteration
- This role is the face of the Team to the outside world and should make sure that all methods of communications are open and that projects have the right amount of support required to succeed.
- Dismisses a Sprint if it is found that a severe change in course is required
34. Is the Product Owner or Release Product Owner Full-Time job?
Yes, it is a full-time job, where the product owner works with the team sprint by sprint for effective delivery of the committed work. In the case of Release Product Owner, it again requires full-time involvement where they connect with the customers to understand their need and set expectations on the milestones and delivery. They work on managing the dependencies on the product which might extend to different teams, this requires a lot of effort because if any of the dependency goes unnoticed it impacts the overall release plan.
They also work to keep the backlog stay up-to-date which ordered and prioritized requirements, this is a critical aspect as the client satisfaction is the key, they need to stay competitive in the market. Underestimating the role of the product owner or the release product owner can give a big set back to the teams and the organization, they should be given space to try out things and have them increase the collaboration with the customers and the teams.
35. Will that impedes your work as a product owner?
Yes, for sure, if the product owner is missing the control, it will impact the overall product and even the work of the product owner. In this case, the product owner has to set up and understand the role and responsibility of being the PO for a scrum team. It might be a possibility that the product owner is not getting the space to work and his powers are being controlled. Hence, make sure that the person called the Product Owner actually OWNS the product. He has to create the product road map and set business goals for the upcoming quarters. As a product owner, you should have good communications flowing with the stakeholders along with good cooperation. The product owner has to work in enhancing the product backlog and keep it aligned with the market needs. It will be difficult for a product owner to handle messy backlog which lacks control.
36. Should the team accept changes in the sprint as requested by the Product Owner?
Agile has helped the teams to manage changes within the development process. The Agile Manifesto talk about the ‘responding to change over following a plan’ and the Agile principle says ‘Welcome changing requirements’. The Agile team has to strike a balance between responding to change and working as per the sprint plan. If the change is being requested by the Product Owner, the team has to decide if they should accept it or not. Some of the deciding factors can be – the volume of change, if the change is too big, the team might ask the Product owner to break it into parts or commit the whole in the next sprint. Second, time of change, if it is inserted early in the sprint, the team consider it rather than in the end.
Third, if the sprint commitments are getting changed or any new changes are introduced frequently, it should be addressed with the Product Owner. Whatever might be case, it is a negotiation between the product owner and the development, the team gets to take the final call on the acceptance of change.
1. Please explain your product line governance.
The answer will vary a bit from candidate to candidate. If he is in a large organisation where there are multiple team working together on the same product lines, he will talk about his peers and coordination, the product line chain (something like Product Owner, Area PO, Product manager, Chief PM) or in case of distributed agile team, he will also talk about Proxy PO at off shore. If he is from a small organisation, he will talk about him directly discussing and coordinating with Business executive and Sales guys.
2. How your role as a Product Owner different from Business Analyst.
A Product owner is someone who focuses on product vision, roadmap and changing priorities. He does not give the solution. A Business analyst largely translates the product vision into solutions and at times recommends different ways or solutions. While Scrum does not requires a Business analyst, there is practise in many organisation to have a PO, who is focussed on product part and a BA, at times called as BA or even proxy PO, who is a techno-functional person who helps in defining then acceptance criteria, a solution etc.
3. Have you heard of MoSCoW ? What is that?
MoSCoW is a Product backlog refinement technique, where Mo stands for Must be, S stands for Should be, Co stand for Could be and W stands for Won’t be.
4. Mostly the product backlog will have many items falling under Mo (Must Be) and S (Should Be) of MoSCoW. How will you prioritize within these items?
MoSCoW is a very basic prioritisation technique. Most of the PBI will be falling under Mo and S. An experienced PO would be using various other ways to differentiate between Mo and S. Popular one is WSJF – Weighted Shortest Job First. WSJF = Cost Of Delay / Job Size.
5. How will you create or help in creating a Product Roadmap?
The answer will vary from candidate to candidate based on their exposure and the size of organisation they are working in. For a small organisation the PO might be directly involved in creating the roadmap however in large organisation, he would be someone whose input would be required.
Typically the answer would evolve around : Continuous exploration – Taking feedback after every release , checking how the features has been perceived by the market, analysing competitor’s offerings and our customers’ reaction to it. Not doing upfront design and freezing the requirements. Having features variable for future releases and creating a roadmap which will follow Cone Of Uncertainty.
6. What does Cone of Uncertainty show ?
Cone of uncertainty shows, how much is known about the product over time. Its more variables and less fixed initially but as we move, it will have more fixed and less variable.
7. Typically, how much time or what percentage of your time do you allocate to user research and understanding your customers’ needs while product discovery phase?
The answer may vary from person to person and organisation to organisation. If the person says that they spend 50% of their time on user research, that’s excellent. However, if a product owner says they spend 10% or less time, it’s not good. This means they are not doing enough customer exploration and feedback and might also be ignoring changing market condition.
8. You have important new features prioritised to be picked up for next sprint. In that case, how will you handle new bugs and accumulating technical debts?
When valuable new features are competing with bugs and technical debt in a product backlog, as a product owner, with every sprint, along with the features I will include a limited number of the most important bugs and the most pressing issues caused by technical debt. Based on the product, we can also have some basic thumb rule set for it, such as allocating 10% of the resources to bugs, 15% to technical debt and rest to new features.
9. How would a Product Owner deal with uncooperative stakeholders?
The best (and perhaps the only) way to deal with uncooperative stakeholders is to win their confidence by engaging them through regular meeting and discussions and demonstrating the value of agile product development. ID it still fails, the product owner should seek help from sponsor.
10. While team estimates the user story of the current sprint, for the product roadmap, do you do or get the estimation done for future Product backlog items (Epics/Features) ? How is that done in your organisation? Who does it?
While team estimates the current sprint backlog, for future roadmap, which is highly flexible it is advisable, not to involve the team in estimation. The product line (Product manager, Product Owner etc) could do the rough estimation based on historical data.
11. As a Product Owner how do you communicate your marketplace knowledge to the Scrum Team?
It is very much required that the scrum team is aware of the changes happening in market place. It is one of the responsibility of the product owner. The PO does it continuously as a part of his informal interactions with development team and SM. He also does that through formal discussions and meetings.
12. How do you plan release of your product? Is it every sprint?
No, it is not required to release every sprint. While deployment is a planning activity and could be per sprint or continuous, release is a business and strategic activity. The development team may continue to create a shippable product, the shipping is a business decision. The PO or the product manager will plan a release date , when it makes sense from business perspective.
13. Who are your product stakeholders?
Major stake holders with whom a Product Owner interacts are – Customers, Sponsors, Key decision makers, professionals, regulators.
14. As a product Owner how will you manage various stakeholders’ desires for the product ?
A PO can manage desire of various stakeholders by coordinating and collaborating with them through discussion while designing product roadmap, seeking their input and feedback in designing and defining Product backlog items and preparation of sprint events. A consistent and constant collaboration would help.
15. Before putting an idea in a backlog as a Product Backlog item, what are the steps you perform.
As a Product Owner, we should not out rightly reject any of ideas, nor can we accept all of them. Every idea that comes needs to be analysed. So ideation needs to be followed up with analysis. The analysis can be done in several ways like analysing through creating a prototype, working on pilot customers, based on experience etc. Based on the result of analysis, the idea should be added to the product backlog.
16. What is systems Thinking? How important is it for a Product Owner to have a Systems Thinking approach?
Systems thinking means holistic thinking. It gives the complete view. For a Product Owner, it is very important to have the complete view of the product, then only he will be able to design a product vision. Also if he has in an environment where there is a complete product management line of product managers above him, a holistic view will help him to understand why there has been change in the Product roadmap and why he should adjust the product backlog items
17. If you are made product owner of Gmail, what changes will you bring?
That’s a great position . But with great position comes greater expectation.
The answer of this question will unwrap the product owner inside a candidate. Different candidate may answer it differently. Someone may talk about adding new look and feel feature or adding UX (User Experience) etc, while few may talk about how gmail as a product would evolve, such as its integration to other existing product, or vice versa something like G-Pay integrated with Gmail or making it a one stop shop for all your needs – communication, collaboration, banking , shopping etc. This shows the vision of the person.
18. There is a recent regulatory change which does not directly impacts your product, but that opened a new avenue of opportunity to your product. Anyone who adapts first will gain the market share. You are just mid-way of your existing sprint, but every day counts. Will you cancel the current sprint and work on the new opportunity features?
If the requirement is such that it may create new opportunity or help in gaining the market share for first mover (such as it happened for fintech companies like PayTM in India during demonetization announced by government in 2016), the product owner should act on it. The Product Owner has the authority and can cancel the current sprint if he deems it fit, adds item to product backlog and reprioritize it.
19. With DevOps as new wave across industry, do we need a Product Owner for a DevOps team?
Yes. A DevOps team also works around a product. With automation, CI/CD, it becomes more important for DevOps team to understand business requirement and needs and then automate the delivery pipeline. The business need could not be understood correctly, and doubts answered without a Product Owner.
20. As a Product Owner, how do you think, you could achieve the next level of Product ownership?
Next-gen product owner is not someone who just maintains and prioritize the product backlog with multiple features, next-gen PO is someone who plans how the whole product evolves and changes with time, how new product lines evolves from the same product branch and how it remains relevant and front runner with changing market and taste
21. What are the properties of a sprint?
Like any other entity, the sprint also has few properties like:
- Timeboxing – Almost anything in a sprint is time-boxed, whether it is a ceremony or the sprint itself. Timeboxing allows the space for discipline and closed boundaries for any planned activity. It helps the team to focus, remember the good old days when the actual study would start the day exam dates are published?
- Following a fixed time box in development creates a cadence, it also helps in gathering metrics on steady intervals, for instance, we calculate the velocity of the team every time box (Sprint).
- Protected from any changes – Scrum says, once the team has made a commitment in the Sprint Planning, the scope of the sprint will be locked. Any changes in the commitment in terms of scope change is not encouraged. But if the change is small enough to be incorporated in a sprint, the team should pull it up as Agile Manifesto also talks about ‘Responding to Change over Following a Plan’
- The maximum duration of a sprint should be a calendar month.
22. How is vision and goal aligned to the product backlog?
The product can only deliver value if it is aligned with the vision and goals. The Product vision defines the purpose of a Product, the intent with which the Product is being developed and what it aims to achieve for customers and users. When the product owner discusses the backlog with the development team, they refer to the order in the backlog which is based on the value.
“The vision plays an important role in bringing a new product to life: It acts as the overarching goal guiding everyone involved in the development effort.” – Roman Pichler.
Vision provides a high-level view of what the future product should look like, it helps the development teams shape the product in a way it meets the required goals, as set with the customer. The product owner helps the team in identifying the sprint goals which are in line with the product vision so that the teams can deliver maximum value to the customer. The vision and goals are even linked to the MVPs (Minimum Viable Product). In Agile, the vision statement becomes a guiding light, the “what we are trying to achieve” statement that the development team, scrum master, and stakeholders refer to throughout the project.
23. What are the desirable qualities of the vision?
The vision forms the foundation of any product, it is something which encourages and inspires people to stay on the right path, hence it should be clear and firm; extensive and appealing. To list out few desired qualities of the vision, let’s look at the following points:
- Clear and firm – The product vision should be easy to interpret and creates a common purpose for the teams. It should be able to give clarity on what’s in the future and it should not create confusion among the teams.
- Extensive and appealing – It should provide a very high-level view of where we want to go, and also provides the development team with space to come up with ideas, to collaborative, to find solutions, to inspire to achieve more. It should encourage the team for better delivery in line with customer expectations.
- Brief and concise – The vision is not something which involves long written paragraphs, it should contain only information critical to the realization of the product. It is not a list of requirements, hence, it should not cover the minute details. In simple terms, it should be short and sweet.
24. What is the scope of the ScrumMaster role at a high level?
The scrum master role is very vast in nature, this role wears a wide variety of hat as and when required. At a high level, a scrum master is someone who will work with the Product Owner, help the team in sailing through the sprint smooth and work with the management in removing the impediments. Now, this is a high-level view but if you dive further into it, this will grow like an iceberg. This role is very crucial and important for the team in making a successful delivery. The Scrum Master serves as a facilitator for both the Product Owner and the team.
The scrum will help the product owner in prioritization and slicing of the features or the user stories, the scrum master can even use a few tools available to help the PO with backlog alignment. For the team, the scrum master will work to remove the impediments faced by the teams. Along with the delivery, the scrum master also makes sure that the agile team lives by the agile values and principles and follows the processes/practices that the team agreed to use. As per Mike Cohn – ‘The Scrum Master is often considered a coach for the team, helping the team do the best work it possibly can. The Scrum Master can also be thought of as a process owner for the team, creating a balance with the project's key stakeholder, who is referred to as the product owner’.
25. Explain one technique suitable to capture product backlog items?
Whenever there is a need from the client or the customer, it has to be captured in some form, here we can talk about product backlogs, and we capture the requirements in the form of user stories. It is one of the techniques where the stories are added to the product backlog. The User Story is a tool used in Agile software development to capture a description of a software feature from an end-user perspective. It defines the type of user, what they want and why they want it, also it helps to create a basic portrayal of a requirement. A user story template often uses the following type of format:
As a <role>, I want <feature> so that <reason>
The user stories are short enough to be accommodated in a sprint if not, they are further broken down into smaller pieces. It is written in a language which is understandable to both the client and the team, it is then the job of the agile team to take care of how to develop the code that will satisfy the requirements of the user story. To accomplish this, regular and close interaction is required from both the parties – the client and the team.
26. How non-functional requirements can be dealt with within the product backlog?
Non-functional requirements play an important role in the overall product development and delivery. These are the requirements without which the functional part cannot be termed as complete. Let’s first understand what a non-functional requirement is, “Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) define system attributes such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, and usability. They serve as constraints or restrictions on the design of the system across the different backlogs.” – Scaledagile. There are different ways of handlings such requirements, like:
- Create user stories in the backlog – The non-functional requirements can be similar to “constraints” we put on the system. It can be written in the same format as the usual user story.
- Inclusion in DoD – The team can add these requirements as part of their definition of Done. If it is one of the parameters in the definition, it will make sure the NFR doesn’t get missed out and the team can keep track of it along with the original story.
- Acceptance Criteria – Non-functional requirements may also be articulated as part of Acceptance criteria which are circumstances that a product must fulfill to be accepted by a user, customer or other stakeholders.
27. What are the techniques used for backlog prioritization?
Prioritization as a norm means “doing the first thing first”. Globally, the teams have been using several methods or techniques for backlog prioritization. It is really important that they understand few techniques that can help in way of prioritization such as MoSCow, where a list of requirements or user stories are categories into – Must Have, Should Have, Could Have and Won’t Have. Once the classification is done into the 4 groups, the requirements are graded in order of preference within each category. Another method of prioritization is the 100-Dollar Test or Cumulative Voting, in this method, the stakeholders are invited for a prioritization meeting and to make a list of options to be prioritized.
All the stakeholders are given a finite amount of virtual entities (dollars, points, etc) which has to be divided among the given options (user stories, requirements, etc.) After that one can calculate the total units for each requirement. There’s another model which is comparatively more simple and effective – Stack Ranking. In Stack Ranking we consider each backlog item and place it in order of priority. The best part of this method is there can only be one number one, hence, helps to avoid a common issue where everything becomes a very high priority.
28. What are the factors impacting the prioritization of a product backlog?
When the product backlog is being prioritized, there might be some factors which come in way of doing it effectively. To list out some, first can be, the time needed for completion, though the item is on high priority the development needs time to complete it and it is not fitting in a sprint. In this case, the product owner has to grill out the most important part of the requirement to be shipped first.
Then we can have, Correlative or conditional relationship between urgently required tasks and other tasks. There may be dependencies between the urgently required tasks and other tasks in the pipeline. The team cannot deliver the prioritized requirement before resolving the dependencies. Another one can be, timeframe given by customers for feedback is not enough for the teams keeping in consideration the slippage. Even sometimes the customer emphasis is too much that the product owner has to guide the customer on what market needs are and how to get maximum return. Even the customers sometimes need direction to follow, this is where the product owner can pitch in.
29. Why quality is said to be frozen?
In agile, we talk about the quality at all stages in contrast to the waterfall where attention to quality was being given more towards in the beginning part of the SDLC rather than later on. We make sure that in Agile, we have certain checkpoints to make sure whatever goes out, is as the quality standard. And hence, we set the definition of done where we set the parameters on quality.
This definition of done is made as per the agreement between the team and the stakeholders and is fixed for a sprint (at the minimum). The stories committed by the team can only be marked as complete once it meets the criteria defined in the definition of done. In the definition of done, the team can set unit testing, code review, coverage, etc. as the parameters, if the team is working on accessibility, they can add the criteria in terms of compliance. Hence, the quality is frozen at the initial level so that whatever requirement is shipped, it should adhere to the set norms. In the same way, we can have a quality backlog to be entering into the sprints with the help of definition of ready.
30. How can a release plan help forecast the future?
When we have the data points from the historic velocity of the teams, we then can predict how much they can deliver in the upcoming sprints. In a release plan, we talk about the next three to six (or whatever is the release schedule) which comprises of the sprints. With the help of the historic data can align sprint with the numbers and subsequently can total out the effort the team can put in.
“The release plan helps you track the development from sprint to sprint, anticipate if the relevant product backlog items can be delivered on time and budget (or how long it will take and how much it will cost), and to make the necessary adjustments, such as, reduce or remove a feature, or add a new team member to the team.” – Roman Pichler.
If the teams’ average velocity is 30, we can say in the upcoming release which has six sprints, the team can take up the work worth of 180 points. With the release planning, we can even tell ahead of time what will be the dependencies which might crop with during the development phase. The release plan differs from organization to organization but the essential part of the planning of iterations.
31. When is it okay to cancel a sprint?
Canceling a sprint usually happens when there is a drastic change in the priorities which means something which was earlier measured as important has moved down in the priority list and something with the critical priority has come up. If the requirements which were earlier considered as a high priority have been marked as low, will automatically impact the committed items in a sprint.
Hence there is no point in continuing any further. It is actually not a good practice to cancel the sprint very often because in this case, it implies that the stakeholders or the product owner do not have the clarity on what exactly are they looking for. They are not able to prioritize the backlog and might need some help. There is a misconception that the sprint can only be canceled by the product owner, which is not true. The product owner can make a call to cancel the sprint but the other factors are also to be taken into consideration. Once the sprint has been canceled, the first thing that the team will do is – Planning for the new sprint.
32. How would you characterize your role as a Product Owner? Are you a facilitator, a coach, a manager, a visionary, a tactician, a coordinator, or a driver?
In the role of a product owner, only managing the backlog is not the only job, the product owner wears different hats at different times to make this role a success. Product development encompasses tons of discussions with clients, with the development teams and with the leadership. Having a product owner playing a facilitator comes into the picture to ensure the team has a collective outlook on what needs to be done and getting the clients to have the right expectations on the output.
The product owner can be visionary for the teams and they look up to this role to provide the product vision and help them stay focused to achieve it. For sure, the product owner drives the product for successful delivery, he/she will ensure teams are pulling up the right work and coordinates with the clients ensuring the alignment on the expected delivery. Being in a role of a product owner does not only involve a comprehensive understanding of the product but it also demands the analytical, strategic skills and needs to comprehend the company’s technology and interface with the development team in order to successfully lead the approach for the product.
33. What titles would you think suitable for your business card when you think of your role as a Product Owner?
The product owners wear multiple hats in during their role, hence, there can be many titles which they can write on their business card. As they are the owners of a business or the product, the best-suited title can be similar to the highest ranks we have in an organization, like Product Captain, Business Marshall, Product Magnate. The product owners create a vision for the team and help them walk the path towards attaining the desired goal, hence, the title can even be a Visionary, Servant Leader or Goal Keeper.
They are often aligned with the strategic design of the roadmaps which makes them a Strategic Thinker or System Thinker. With the product development, the backlog over a period of time gets some in innovative ideas from the product owner which are liked by the clients too, and even the team works on them for launch, in such a case the title can be of an Innovator. There can be several titles a product owner can have on their business card, it all depends on how creatively a person can think of.
34. Does a Product Owner have a veto over the release of user stories?
In scrum, the product owner is the face of the client or the customer, hence the person playing the role will have the authority over the product being developed. The decision of what all will go into the release and when it should go is taken the product owner. Yes, the product owner has the veto over the release of user stories. This applies to all the business requirements or defects being delivered. But the only thing which the product owner cannot decide is the technical debt. It is the developer who takes the ownership and releases with the product. The release dates and the release candidates are pre-decided the product owner well in advance so that the teams can get time to develop and deliver. The product owner can accept or reject the user stories if they don’t meet the acceptance of the expectations.
35. What are a few challenges with the Product Owner role?
As everyone in the agile teams, the Product Owner also has few challenges to tackle with, let’s talk about a few of them:
- Missing product roadmap - Product Owners should create a product roadmap based on research, business standards, and best practices instead of constructing product features exclusively from a client’s customization requests.
- High-level acceptance criteria – The Product Owners should you INVEST model to create the structure. If the story is too much detailed, the team will fell that their questions are settled and there will be no room for discussion.
- Spending too much time in dealing with product support instead of grooming the backlog
- Changing priority while sprint is in progress
Product Owners can escape these usual snares by working around the product roadmap, centering on high-value backlog items, defining crisp acceptance criteria, concentrating on grooming quality backlog item, and avoiding disturbing sprints.
36. Describe a typical work week for product owner position?
As per the Scrum guide “A Scrum Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team." To meet this statement a product owner has to participate in several activities, talk to the stakeholders, do research work, etc. The product owner has to attend a meeting with the team which is planning or pre-planning or any of the scrum ceremonies. To make sure the product owner adding value to these meetings with his presence, he/she has to spend a lot of time talking to various stakeholders and understand their problems and area of work.
They also capture the metrics related to the product backlog to understand the state and use for reporting. They speak with UX designers or the Architect to identify how we can improve the system to remove the customer pain area. During the course of the day, the teams contact the product owner to clarify the doubts on requirements. Apart from this, there will be status update meetings for each project. Along with all this, the product owner has to keep the backlog healthy and prioritized.
37. What are the critical strengths of the Product Owner role?
As per the Scrum Guide “The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team”. To meet this, the product owner has to have mastery in many areas but only a few can be termed as critical because that is something which is a ‘must-have’ for this role. First, the product owner should have the ‘Business Analyst’ skill for concisely and correctly defining requirements but also have the domain knowledge and business knowledge to be a decision-maker to determine and prioritize what those requirements should be. Domain knowledge is the core subject for any product owner to master in their area and also know the market and how the workflows are one of the critical skills required.
Second, “Project Management” skills to make good risk-based decisions on managing the project to make it successful from an overall business perspective (not simply meeting defined requirements). The person opting for the product owner role has to strike a balance between these two provides the team with the optimum work.
38. What skills & competencies should a Product Owner demonstrate?
The role of a product owner demands a few basic skills like, good communication skills – this is the most important skill as the product owner has to work with the delivery teams and with the stakeholders. This role serves as a bridge to fill up the communication gap, the Product Owner needs to work with the clients to comprehend their idea and with the development team to bring it to actuality. If they are not communicating efficiently, things can go crooked in no time. The product owner should be able to clearly communicate the vision between the backlog items and the greater business goal.
Hence, the person should be able to see the vision and how it aligns with the backlog. Another important skill entails around guiding the clients and setting their expectation correct. Sometimes, the customers can demand something which might not be feasible, hence the product owner should be able to say no. And lastly, they should possess curiosity, the person should be ready to learn and ask ‘why’ for things being developed or should be able to ask ‘why’ to the clients as well. This way they can understand the business rules better and can create a better vision of what the final product should be.
39. How much customer interaction is expected from a Product Owner? How is their interaction different from Product Managers?
As discussed earlier as well, the product owner is the face of the customer, hence, it is really important for the product owner to stay in constant contact to understand the vision better and take updates on the product. The frequent interactions allow the product owner to stay up-to-date with feedback, market situations or any change in the requirement. This not only helps the product owner but it also builds a level of trust and confidence among the customers. In a few of the organizations, this interaction is being handled by the product managers, thus, these two roles can fill in the gap wherever required.
The regular interactions also help in aligning the expectations from the customers, the product owner can, from time to time, showcase the developed product and ask for the feedback. In this manner, if something was missed out in the initial discovery phase that can be catered now. If we talk about scrum, there are no product managers, but in agile, we have product managers sitting above the product owners and looking at the product at a higher level. The product managers are more into the market side whereas the product owner’s involvement is more with the development team.
40. Where is management support to product owner role & backing their decisions?
As we have been discussing, the role of a product owner is really critical and to make it successful, this role requires support from all ends, like management. The management can direct all the work for the teams through the product owner so that the incoming of items is from a single channel, thus, minimizing the haphazard behavior in teams. Backing the product owner to make acceptance decisions during each sprint. The management can give feedback on product backlog content, priorities, and dates with a clear purpose. Development Leadership can assist the Product Owner in helping key stakeholders to understand and accept the need for making balanced choices on dates and/or feature content steady with definite team capacity. Apart from this, the management can help through coaching and skill-building activities so that the person in this role can enhance the competencies.
41. What reporting structure should Product Owners follow?
Each organization is different and so is their structure. With an organization with a product management group in place, the product owners can report to the product managers. But in an organization which is just starting up the practice of Scrum might not have a full-fledged hierarchy in Agile, hence, in this type of structure the product owners usually report to someone who is a level up in position, it can be the senior manager or the director. In case of SAFe environment, there is a proper structure with product group in place. Ideally, the product owner reporting should be made in such a way that they get full space on creating the vision, for innovations. It should bring out the best from the product owner role rather than diminishing its influence. The organizations need to understand accept the importance of this role, hence, the reporting structure should not hinder the product.
42. What defines success for a product owner?
The success of the product owner depends on how much invested the person in this role feels and he/she understands the true meaning of being a product owner. But to measure the success, we can define some parameters like:
- Strength of Product Backlog – If the product backlog stays healthy with prioritized items and has good user stories to worked upon by the teams.
- Constant delivery of Value – Whatever the teams are delivering by the end of the sprints, should be adding value to the clients.
- Attaining of Release Goals – At the start of a release, whatever the items teams commit should reach the end line. The goals should be met.
- Understanding of Product Vision by team members – The delivery team is able to understand and comprehend the vision from the product owner, they should be able to understand why are they creating the product, what value is it going to add to the customers.
- Defining a successful Product Roadmap is again important for the realization of the release goals.
- Lastly, the customer is satisfied.
There can be many parameters to access the success of this role, every organization has its own set of KPIs for it. But most importantly it should the collaboration between the product owner and the teams plus the product owner and the customer.
43. When do we need this distinction versus having a single PO for smaller product teams?
Very large products need a complete product management team to deliver the working product through multiple teams, in this case, the product is divided into verticals which are being taken care of by different product owners. But if the product is small and can be delivered by smaller teams, a single product owner can suffice. In this case, the Product Owner will act as a single point of contact and can be the face of the client as compared to large products.
Single product owner with smaller teams have a high rate of efficiency and delivery due to clarity in vision and goals, there is a lot of transparency among the scrum team and the stakeholders. In a few instances, the RPO may also act as team PO for one of the Scrum Teams with the help from other team Product owners on other delivery Teams. Having a product owner caters to multiple teams impacts the team functioning as they have to wait for the availability of the PO, along with this even the product owner has to ensure they are giving enough time to multiple teams.
44. What is the value of technical product owner versus a business-focused product owner (and vice-versa)?
The technical product owner is not a role but it describes a person in a Product Owner role with a technical background and who works on a technology product. And business-focused product owners are more towards the functional aspect. It is always good to have a product owner with technical knowledge, they can understand the product and can create a strategy for successful delivery. Also, if the Product Owner has the technical background, they can understand the technical blockers or impediments and accordingly visualize the impact on the release. But technical knowledge is just good to have, there is no expectation that the product owner should have it as an essential skill.
Also having a technical background doesn’t mean that they have to jump in the code or work around the architecture. In the case of business-focused product owner, they totally rely on the development team for all the technical discussion and decisions. This helps the team to become self-organized, even the Agile principle says “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Nowadays we have started noticing the openings for a technical product owner, wherein the organization needs Product Owners to understand the company’s technology at a deep level.
45. If a product has a single PO are they also the RPO?
Yes, if there is a single PO, can also take care of the RPO role, which is Release Product Owner. As there is only one person taking up the responsibility, the product owner will perform the duties towards the scrum team and also towards a higher role, let us see what an RPO does and what are the essential responsibilities:
- Creating a clear statement of vision, direction, release purpose and goals
- Managing overall Product Backlog and publishing the Product Backlog so that the teams can pull the work items in their release commitment.
- The features should be mapped with product roadmap to make sure the end result builds up as expected.
- Once the initial set of requirements are up, talk to the stakeholder and get their buy-in on Product Backlog
- Prioritization of Product Backlog and keeping it healthy throughout.
- Prepare appropriate Product Backlog to drive release planning
- Working on getting the ongoing release plan forecasting maybe for six months or a years’ time (as per the organization and client delivery expectations)
- Deployment & release readiness checklist
- Market launch split out to Product Management
46. Who is responsible for staffing the Product Owner role?
When the organizations open the position of a product owner, it is the product management team who helps the recruitment team in getting the right candidate. They access the candidate on their domain knowledge and analytical skills. The candidate might even be required to go through where he or she can meet their cross-location counterpart. If the organization does not have a set product management team, the senior management can come into the picture and work with the recruitment team to get the best candidate. In some rare cases, where the teams are very mature, they themselves can be a part of getting their own product owner. As we have been discussing so far, every organization is different and so is their structure, it all depends on how they function. But majorly, the person who has good domain expertise and knows how to judge the other essential skills should be made to access the candidate.
47. Who should Product Owners report to?
Every organization is different, they have their own hierarchy. Scrum does not provide any ground rule on the reporting structure for the product owner. In large organizations where the product is fairly big, they have product managers at the highest level, who are the main owners of the product. At the team level, they have product owners who constantly stay in touch with the product managers. In this case, the product owners will be reporting to the product managers. But as stated before, there is no set criteria or hierarchy being followed at the organizations. Some even align the associates as per their position e.g. product owner at the lead level will report to someone at the manager level.
“As a Product Owner, your job is not to manage 'resources' or 'tasks'. Your job is to maximize the value of your product! To create those features that deliver the most value for the products' users! In order to maximize the value of your product, you don't have to manage stuff like tasks, what people do on a daily basis, what the progress of the team is in a Sprint.”- Scrum.org
48. Product Owners belongs to which area?
Every role in Scrum is aligned to an area, like the development team takes care of the technicalities, code, quality, etc. in the same way the scrum master helps the team to deliver and stay focused in the same way the product owner has to take care of the business side. This role focuses on the business aspect, and hence connects with the stakeholders to define the exact requirements and passes on to the team for development. They have to understand the business, how it functions and how the market situation is. Therefore, it is all about the business, a product owner belongs to.
49. Can a person be PO for multiple products?
As the name suggests, the Product Owner is the owner of the single product. The product owner focuses on the given product by constantly being in touch with the customers and through the expertise in the market understanding. Aligning a PO for multiple projects will impact the quality of deliverable and it will also affect the individual playing the role of a PO.
The focus gets divided, the time also gets broken down between different parties which in turn creates a mess for the product owner. It is not advisable to align one product owner with multiple projects as it also affects the strategy and timeline for the project. It is like asking an author to write two books at the same time, it is difficult to justify the efforts and we end up with chaos. It is difficult to multi-task, manage multiple stakeholders, manage his/her throughput of deliverables across products, prioritize the tasks across product teams, etc. Though few of the organizations are aligning their Product Owners to more than one product, again, it then depends on their ability to deliver the right thing.
50. Handling “Part Time Product Owners”?
The product owner role has a large number of responsibilities, which can be broken down into tasks that can actually keep the product owner-occupied for full-time. Ideally, it is not advisable to have a product owner is not available for the team half of the time. But in cases where they have a Part-Time product owner, they have to support a lot. There will be a few tasks which the team has to take over, like brainstorming alone as a team without the product owner and coming up with the queries.
They might even have to do follow-ups which could have been taken care if they had a full-time product owner. Part-time product owner also becomes a challenge as the timely feedback from the client might not be possible all the time. In such cases, the team can take help from the BA (Business analyst) who can work as a proxy to help the team move forward. The BA can connect a regular interval to seek guidance from the Product owner. Usually, in cases where the teams do not have their product owner co-located, they take support from the BAs.
51. How to maximize the value of the Development Team’s work?
The Product owner can very well increase the value the team delivers. Continuous interaction is one of the factors that contribute to maximum value being delivered. Other factors can be –
- Domain Training – Investing time in teaching the development team about the domain, helping them understand the business and how it works.
- Vision – Taking out time explain the vision for the product and the organization.
- Value Delivery – Making the team understand the value being delivered at the story level. How the story can impact the overall product? How can the team deliver the highest value item? As a product owner, you should have these discussions with the team.
These not only encourages the team and helps them own the product but it also helps the overall business.
52. Is Product Owner a job title or a role that someone with an existing job title fills?
“Teams need to understand who does what and how the various work fits together. This becomes even more important as companies grow.” - Brian de Haaff.
The product owner role is really critical in an organization as it helps in translating the requirements to final products. As we have been discussing so far, it is a full-time job which requires constant collaboration with the clients, pulling up the feedbacks, working on the backlogs, helping the teams, etc. But if someone with an existing job title tries to fill in, he or she will not be able to justify the role and in turn, the product and the team suffers.
There might be delays in the feedback loops, the vision and roadmap might not get clear to the team, even the backlog suffers as it requires continuous attention. It is not advisable to take someone with already a title to play this role. The organizations need to focus on quality and time to market to stay up-to-date, hence, a person with dual role might not be able to substantiate such expectation from the role. Also, it will impede his or her efficiency in their former role. Though, in very small organizations where the team size is small and the teams are directly interacting with the clients, in those cases, this dual role can work.
53. How many Scrum teams would we expect a full-time Product Owner to handle?
In Agile, there is no rule on the ratio of the product owner and the scrum teams. A product owner is aligned with a single product and this person takes care of keeping it healthy. It might be a possibility that multiple teams are aligned to deliver that product, in this case, it will be overwhelming for the product owner to take care of all the teams, answering their queries, sitting in their planning meetings, etc.
In real-life scenarios, we try to align maximum of 3 – 4 teams per product owner, if it exceeds the number, one can have proxy product owners who can indirectly help the main product owner to manage the product and teams. With proxy product owners, there will be a need for coordination and alignment. All the proxy owner will need to stay in sync with the main product owner so as to achieve the desired results. Though it is encouraged to have a single Product Backlog and a single PO being responsible for return-on-investment when developing one product. Having a single Product Owner creates transparency and enables proper empiricism. It also depends on the size of the product, if it is too large, it should be broken down further to create sub-products and those should be aligned with different product owners.
54. Handling “Distant Product Owners”?
“A distant product owner works separately from the team. But distance comes in many forms and degrees. It starts with working on the same site in different rooms, and it ends with the product owner and the team being separated across continents and time zones. I have found recurring issues with distant product owners, including mistrust, miscommunication, misalignment, and slow progress.” – Roman Pichler
To work with a distant product owner, the team has to stay in constant communication to avoid any gaps in the information being processed. Distant product owners should be on-site at least for the sprint planning, review, and retrospective meetings. They should have frequent video conferencing to help with face-to-face interactions, this not only instills confidence but also helps with getting the right product shipped. The teams having ‘Distant Product Owners’ should resolve their queries as and when they receive because any lag will cost them time in a sprint. It is always better to move from Distant to Co-located product owner as they are available runtime to answer the queries and help the teams follow the goal.
55. What are the qualifications to become a Product Owner?
To become a product owner, there are no formal degrees that are being awarded but we do have certifications which an individual can go for. There are multiple platforms providing knowledge and certifications such as Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org or ScaledAgile. There are different levels of certification starting from basic to advanced. Each of them designed to cater to certain needs of the individual. The scrum.org provides Professional Scrum Product Owner I and Professional Scrum Product Owner 2. If you are working on a scaled environment, you can opt for SAFe® Product Owner/Product Manager certification. The training is of two days, during which the attendees will get an in-depth understanding of the Agile Release Train (ART), how it delivers value, and what they can do to effectively perform their role. Even though an individual acquires the certification still the in-built skills are the foundation of being a great product owner.
56. What are the skills we need in a Product Owner? Must those skills be in one person?
Every role demands some skills to meet the expectations of the position. In Agile, the role of a product owner is very important to keep the inputs and outputs up to the mark. Few of the essential skills to be competent product owners are:
- Communication - It is predominantly critical for the Product Owner to have good communication skills that can adapt to different teams and behavior types. The Product Owner needs to work with the business to understand their vision and the development team to bring it to reality.
- Commitment - The Product Owner should be committed to the project, vision, team and the business.
- Vision - In connection with communication, the Product Owner should clearly communicate the vision between the small backlog items and the larger business goal.
- Focus on functionality - A Product Owner has a focus on functionality, hours or even story points are less important. The goal of the Product Owner is to maximize value for the customer.
- Available - A Product Owner is available for the stakeholders, the customers, the development team and the Scrum Master.
People skills are a must, relationship building, conflict management, client relationship management, vision, understanding requirements, clearly communicating the requirements to the team, and other skills are needed. These are many of the responsibilities/skills that POs must have to be successful. Yes, all the critical skills required to be a product owner should be in a single person.
57. Can you act as a credible Product Owner if you’re not in control of the product backlog?
One has to have control over the product backlog to be a credible product owner. The primary and critical responsibility of the product owner is to keep the backlog healthy and updated with prioritized requirements. If the product owner has no control then the team will not get the right direction on what is to be developed. They will not understand the vision and goals of the product.
Even it will impact the customers very hard, as they will not get what they expect to. No control also means anyone can add or edit the requirements which might or might not be in sync with the customer. The backlog will look like a bunch of random things thrown together. One cannot see the product development strategy behind the Product Backlog Items which gain is a big risk to the development. The product backlog is the backbone for any scrum team, if it goes out of shape, the team and the customer will not get any output from the efforts they are putting in. The Product Backlog eventually outlines the accomplishment of the product and assists as a master plan for the Scrum Team.
58. During the review, suppose the product owner or stakeholder does not agree to the feature you implemented what would you do?
It is not always possible that the product owner agrees to what the team has developed. If the team has delivered the story/feature as per the acceptance criteria mentioned and has covered all the scenarios around that feature, then we can ask the product owner to accept the story/feature and anything which is not covered will be taken up in the new feature or a new story. But in the case where the product owner is not agreeing to the feature you delivered and it was part of the acceptance criteria then the product owner has all the rights to not accept the item. In this case, the team can take this up as the retrospective point as to where they missed, how it got shaped in a different way. The team should introspect what went well and how can they make it better. They should again set up a meeting with the product owner to get a clear understanding of the requirements so that they do not deviate from what is expected.
59. What kind of information would you require from the Product Owner to provide the team with an update on the product and market situation?
One of the primary responsibilities of the product owner is to make the team aware of the market demands and how the priorities get realigned due to market situations. The product owner provides a clear vision and sprint goals to the team to help them stay updated with the product. If there is any change in the backlog with respect to new requirements or priorities, it should be communicated to the teams. This helps the team to understand the bigger picture and what exactly is expected from them at that moment.
The team even feels connected and understand their role critically. It ensures that the team is building the right product and consequently delivering the ROI anticipated. There might be cases where the backlog aligned for a sprint gets scraped off just because it is no longer required due to a fragile market situation, in this case, the product owner can terminate the sprint. The product owner is the voice of the outside world to the team and should ensure that all channels of communications are open and the team is very well understanding the market situations.
Description
A Product Owner of an agile team is a key role in managing the stakeholder’s needs and also the sole ambassador of the agile team. Product Owner is the only person responsible for the standard of the team’s performance. Product owner role is a highly responsible role as they are the owner of the product backlog.
There is a huge demand for people who are into the Product Owner role. A quick scan through the current job openings reveals that top companies are looking for Product Owners. Right now, there are more than 300 open job positions for Product Owner only in Spain in Linkedin. Research states that the average annual pay for a product owner in the United States is $105,158 a year. And as per Indeed the average salary for a product owner is 9,97,286 per year in India.
So, If you’re considering switching to this extremely in-demand career path, just get familiarized with these top Product Owner interview questions. These interview questions on Product Owner will provide you with in-depth knowledge and help you ace the interview. Prepare well with these interview questions on Product Owner and take your expertise to the next level.
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Case Study: The Role of a Product Owner in Your IT Project
From the point of view of the outsourcing company’s client, the role of a Product Owner is both crucial and difficult. Why?
The Product Owner shapes the vision of the product. On the other hand, they try to maximize its value and use technical resources in such a way as to create a product satisfying the customer’s needs.
I would say that the Product Owner is an ambassador among the developers. They represent you or the specialist working for a software company who may represent the needs of all stakeholders in the Product Backlog. I will discuss here a Case Study of a project in which a client decided to outsource their Product Owner.
Scrum Guide describes main Product Owner’s responsibilities , such as:
- Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal.
- Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items.
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible, and understandable.
- Ordering Product Backlog items.
What does it mean?
Let’s see what it looks like behind the scenes when you decide to entrust the role of the Product Owner to someone from the software house.
1. Defining Project Vision
This obligation requires close cooperation between the customer and the Product Owner.
Product Owner should manage product development from a strategic perspective. This means that they should know what their purpose and goals are, without necessarily having to know the way to it from the very beginning.
To know the purpose of your project, the Product Owner needs to communicate with all the stakeholders, sometimes including your customers, your employees, and your business managers, so everyone involved in product development can present their perspective on the product.
Thanks to this, the Product Owner can confirm whether the objective of the project expressed by the stakeholders is consistent with the business objectives of the company. In the nutshell, the purpose of the product is defined in the product vision and all the knowledge gathered is presented in the form of road maps.
Next, another Product Owner’s responsibility is to communicate the goals to the rest of the Team.
2. Product Backlog Management
This obligation requires regular cooperation.
The Product Backlog is a list of tasks to do. To make the work effective, the Product Owner is responsible for maintaining it. So, they must create stories and tasks for the Team, updating them when it’s necessary.
To create an effective product backlog, they must:
- Describe features of an application using user stories.
- Plan the most efficient sequence of development.
- Create tasks with the Development Team.
- Create test cases with Testers.
The product backlog can’t be immutable, because it’s not just a suggestion, it’s a signpost. If it is NOT properly maintained and optimised, it will cause inconsistency of work, delays, and confusion. If it happens to you, that means you don’t have a real Product Owner.
Let’s move on to the next responsibility of the Product Owner.
3. Ensuring Backlog’s Transparency
This obligation does not require your effort.
Product Owner must make the backlog accessible to all parties involved in the product development. It means that both the developer and the client should understand it. This is the duty that takes up the most time and requires preparing clear descriptions of intended effects, understandable tasks for developers, and flow characteristics for testers.
And one more responsibility described in the Scrum Guide.
Read more: How to Choose a Tech Stack for Your Next Project?
4. Prioritising the Needs
Product Owner is responsible for prioritising needs according to the scope, time, and your budget, keeping in mind your main objectives. This is quite a difficult task because priorities can change, which is why Product Owner:
- Prioritises the user stories by relative importance for each iteration.
- Defines any constraints.
- Locates and proposes tasks with fewer constraints.
- Determines what feature can be deliverable at which time.
Overall, Product Owner must deliver the maximum outcome to achieve goals and missions.
What other responsibilities does the outsourced Product Owner hold?
5. Evaluating Product Progress
Once the priorities are set, a Product Owner should oversee the product throughout the development cycle. So, they are a key player in product development, process refinement, and product review. Their responsibilities are:
- Working with the Development Team and stakeholders to identify requirements for next iterations.
- Refining the development process.
- Inspecting product’s increment to make sure that the Team delivers the expected outcomes.
- Identifying improvements.
- Supporting the Team in design, development, and tests to be able to answer or guide the Development Team.
Product Owner can inspect and adapt product participating in Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning Meetings, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives . Thereby, Product Owner is updated, informed about priorities, and understands the perspective of any impediments.
6. Liaison Between the Teams and the Stakeholders
Outsourced Product Owner role consists of acting as a primary liaison between the Team and the stakeholders to work on:
- The information flow, which must be quick and clear with no misunderstandings.
- Setting goals which should be correctly aligned with the work items on the Product Backlog.
- Determining whether user stories meet their expectations.
- Precising any doubts arising during the project implementation.
All relationships should be based on trust between the Product Owner and the stakeholder (client). In my humble opinion, the trust is built on frequent relations, clear messages about the developments, precise communication of needs, demonstrating commitment, suggesting solutions and taking care of the client’s interest.
Establish a Fruitful Cooperation Thanks to the Role of a Product Owner
For cooperation between Stakeholders and outsourced Product Owners to succeed, both parties should respect their decisions and trust each other. The decisions of the Product Owner influence the content, the Product Backlog and Increment at the Sprint Review, whereas Stakeholders’ decisions are necessary when setting the goals. If they manage to find common ground, there’s no stopping them.
Explore All of the Benefits of IT Project Outsourcing
I believe that anything I do, I do for the end-user. I maximise value by:
- setting a path to the product's goal, helping developers do what they need to do
- frequently inspecting the result of their work to confront assumptions with reality
- adapting to the changing needs of Stakeholders based on feedback and measurable data.
I manage IT products agilely and know how to make your vision a reality. Would you like to work with me?
Table of Contents
How to solve a product manager case study in 4 simple steps.
- August 12, 2020
Richard Chen
We cannot emphasize the importance of Product Manager case studies in interviews enough. Companies rely heavily on this step to assess your critical thinking and problem-solving skills as it closely mirrors the day-to-day activities. However, you don’t have to be a Product Manager with years of experience to come up with impressive case studies that will get you hired. Like the job itself, a Product Manager case study should be situational and contextual—getting it right is about tailoring your answer to the company you are interviewing for and the context behind the question.
So, how do you make sure you hit the nail on the head? There are four steps to solving the Product Manager case study. Our case study instructors recommend the following:
- Evaluate the need
- Validate the need
- Set a goal for the feature
- Decision making
From startup case studies to whiteboarding questions, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about tackling the notorious product management case study using these simple steps. Practice this approach with the various examples we provide and you should be ready to ace your next Product Manager case study interview .
How to Approach the Product Manager Case Study
Let’s say that an e-commerce furniture company wants to implement a feature: free returns. Take a minute to think about this case study question . How would you go about implementing this? What is your first step?
If there’s one thing we know from working with thousands of aspiring Product Managers, it’s that more than 90% of the candidates fail the product manager case study interview one way or another. And not because the candidates lacked the required skills! Like we mentioned above, a successful case study is tailored to the situation and context.
Before we dive in, here are some pointers you should remember to get you into the right frame of mind as you tackle the case study assignment you are given.
Ask Questions
This is where to start: Always approach a case study assignment with the assumption that you know nothing. Never dive into solving the problem with little to no information on it. Don’t be afraid to ask your interviewer everything you need to:
- Determine the user of the product
- Narrow down and identify which problem to solve
- Find out the specifics of the question to establish your edge cases
Making assumptions could lead you down the wrong path, but on the other hand, remember that being a Product Manager involves solving ambiguous real-life issues. Keep calm and creatively and strategically acquire more information for clarity of the situation. You’ll be one step ahead of fellow candidates.
Prepare for Anything
Many novice candidates believe that the case study round always involves a take-home assignment, which would allow them to do extensive research on the question at hand. But while take-home assignments do come up often enough, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Prepare for your case study interview to involve on-the-go questions. You should also expect to whiteboard and solve problems on the fly during the interview. When that’s the case you’ll have only seconds — or minutes if you’re lucky — instead of days to tackle the problem.
There Is More Than One Correct Answer
The Product Manager case study interview is a way for companies to evaluate your problem-solving skills. They want to see how you identify product users, measure product performance, navigate technical aspects, and so on. You can demonstrate these competencies with a variety of answers.
Don’t Spend More Time Than You Need To
The take-home Product Manager case study can be especially time-consuming and you might spend all your time working on these assignments if you don’t have support . Remember that job hunting is a numbers game and allocate your time and effort accordingly.
Need more time to prepare for your next case study interview? Take your prep to the next level with this video by Product Gym co-founder Cody Chang:
How to Solve Any Product Manager Case Study in 4 Simple Steps
Without further ado, here are the four steps you need to follow to solve your Product Manager case study:
Step 1: Evaluate the Need
To understand the need in the Product Manager case study, you need to ask a series of questions. Here are a few of them to get you started:
- How did the company come up with this feature?
- Was it suggested by executives, or by customers?
- Is the goal of this feature to drive revenue or increase loyalty?
- Are we assuming that leadership has already signed on board to this feature?
- Or are we assuming that this is just a small product that we have been given to test?
Essentially, you need to figure out the bounds and constraints of this question.
You may not be an industry expert on the business that your interviewer is in, or you may lack that domain knowledge. So in order to create an informed answer, you have to know what your answer is not .
Step 2: Validate the Need
You have to start on the pre-question. Let’s take the example of a furniture e-commerce company.
Some of the questions you would ask yourself are:
- What are your assumptions, knowns and unknowns, and where is the data?
- Do we have data on this, and is the data right?
- On free returns, do we know how many people already trying to return?
- Are there specific types of products that we know customers return?
- Are there some parts of the world where customers expect free returns? Do we have data on that? (The company isn’t going to necessarily know that from the data because customers might not provide that feedback.)
- What do we not know?
When you focus on these unknowns, what you’re really focusing on is time and resources. This gets into the business side of asking questions. If you are not a domain expert in furniture e-commerce or are not familiar with their business model to give a nuanced response, what are these Product Managers looking for in your answer?
The company you are interviewing with is likely operating in another domain that you are not familiar with. That’s okay. As long as you can lay out the roadmap for your product with sound reasoning, you’ll be good to go.
Step 3: Set a Goal for the Feature
In this specific example, you want to focus on time and resources, which is money. This means explicitly profitability . What are all the areas that might factor into profitability? Here are some questions to consider:
- How much is it going to cost, and how do you evaluate that cost?
- Will priorities in regards to other features change?
- Would we have to focus on other resources?
- Would we have to deal with interstate laws based on shipping?
- How about shipping internationally or shipping interstate? Will it be taxed?
Check out these guides to help you determine the essential metrics for your company’s business and the product you are developing:
- 16 Startup Metrics by Adresseen Horowitz
- Startup Metrics You Need to Monitor
- Facebook Metrics: Key Benchmarks for PM Interviews
Step 4: Decision-Making
Based on the business requirements, how do you want to evaluate these unknowns? The rabbit hole of questions can go on and on. You may need to spend these resources and push back the engineering deadline. Is the company okay with that?
It also depends on how you communicate “Yes” or “No” answers. If you say, “Yes, I want to prioritize this feature,” then know your reasons:
- The manager has signed off on the strategy .
- I know who the customers are.
- I have the data to back it up.
- I have the stakeholder consensus to do it.
- I have a timeline that I feel confident executing on.
Or, if you say “No,” have your reasons why to address the same areas:
- No, I don’t have a clear strategy from management.
- No, the manager wants me to validate this before we spend extra resources on it.
- No, we don’t have enough engineers or resources for this.
- No, we have to use the sales cycle for another feature — if we try to implement this now, we will lose the seasonal sales cycle.
These are all moving parts that you want to evaluate and then communicate to the PM interviewing you in the Product Manager case study. The best thing to do when you ask these questions is to get specific. Use examples of times when you had to make these decisions yourself based on these factors.
Remember to communicate competency on how you evaluate whether or not you implement a feature. Ask questions to create constraints and boundaries to the case study, and control its scope. Once you have this information, you will know how to best approach the questions based on the Product Management knowledge you possess.
BONUS Step: Get Your Case Study Presentation Reviewed by a Professional
You’ve worked through the case study and put your solution into a slide deck to present to a panel of interviewers: congratulations! But if you want to go above and beyond to impress the hiring team, take some time to get your case study solution reviewed by a professional.
A fresh set of eyes may catch typos and grammar errors, but will also be able to point out the areas where you can improve the solution overall. A Product Manager who’s gone through multiple case study interview rounds is going to be able to assess your solution from the perspective of the interviewer and use their experience to help you polish it.
At Product Gym, our interview coaches routinely check over members’ case study presentations, offering insight, constructive criticism, and tips on how to make their technical interview round a success. Solving case studies isn’t just a good practice for acing your interview — it’s also an excellent way to develop applicable Product Manager skills. That’s why we include classes on case studies in our program. Our case study curriculum was developed and continues to be taught by Senior Product Manager for Atlassian, Roman Kolosovskiy .
Because we’ve been working with Product Manager job hunters for the past five years, we’ve had ample opportunity to test and perfect the case study strategy we teach our members. We’ve even compiled a bank of case study prompts that aspiring Product Managers have received in their interviews so that members can exclusively access to hone their problem-solving and storytelling skills.
What to Expect from a Product Manager Case Study at a Startup
The type of company you are interviewing for is a key consideration when determining the context for your case study. It’s highly likely that you will interview for a Product Manager position at a startup—there were 30.7 million startups in the US in 2019, and the numbers will only keep growing.
No doubt, the expectations, and responsibilities differ immensely in a startup role as compared to being an enterprise PM.
Here’s what you should keep in mind when interviewing for a PM position with a startup:
- Product Managers are expected to wear multiple hats : Startups, especially early-stage ones, don’t have all the resources they need. Because of this, your responsibilities may include roles away from the standard PM job description. It’s also likely that you will be responsible for more than one product.
- Be ready for some confusion : Many of these companies don’t have a recruiting team or a full-fledged HR strategy, and therefore chances are they are also exploring interviewing as they go.
- Prepare for niche markets : If the startup operates in a niche market, you might have little to no knowledge and resources for understanding the competitive landscape and creating a useful product. Our case study prep guide can help you sound like a seasoned expert no matter your background in such cases.
So how do you show your interviewer that you are ready to take on the challenge?
1. Demonstrate Fast Execution
First and foremost, you should show that you are quick when making decisions and taking action. Unlike established companies, you will not have many tools or practices to help you make decisions and organize your and your team’s tasks. You should be comfortable with communicating decisions and last-minute action items with the rest of your team.
2. Be Ready to Take Risks
Executing decisions takes a sense of responsibility and ownership, which brings us to our second point. As a Product Manager, you should be a leader who isn’t afraid of taking risks. When needed, you should be ready to take the driver’s seat. There is no doubt that your responsibility will exceed a single product, and you will soon be expected to come up with ideas that will impact the whole company.
3. Prove You Can Multitask
Limited resources mean you may find yourself wearing different hats. For example, you might not have a UX designer and end up designing the wireframes yourself. Regardless of the situation, get ready to prove to them that you can multitask. How do you show this skill in your Product Manager case study?
- By thinking about how this company can make money — or in Product Gym terms, by becoming a wartime Product Manager. Think about how the product in question will contribute to the company’s short-term and long-term goals.
- Many startups are still in the funding stage, so any work you design should generate revenue with minimal costs.
- Think about all the ways you can create a product that the market currently needs and lacks.
- Include wireframes in your case study presentation to show them that you already thought about how the product should look.
- In your documentation and presentation, describe the resources you will need and how you budget this product.
4. Learn About the Company
A case study assignment is a simulation of the real job, especially in startup interviews. Leverage it to learn as much about the company as possible. Assess how they treat you and try to figure out how the company culture is.
Are they ignoring your emails and acting like you don’t exist? Or are they making a genuine effort to make the interview work for you despite the lack of resources? Are you expected to solve a complex case study on the go during an interview?
Answering these questions can give you a good feel of your possible future employer.
5. Prioritize, Prioritize, and Prioritize
As we mentioned, startup companies operate with minimal resources and are under a lot of stress. So, remember to focus on the essential features needed to create a fully functional MVP ready for the market in the least amount of time.
Make some realistic estimations and come up with numbers to help your interviewers with the budget, resources, and time you need to create this product. Roadmap the steps required to get to the MVP and clearly define everybody’s responsibilities to build it.
How to Solve Whiteboarding Case Study Questions in 4 Steps
Along with the commonly assigned take-home assignment and the presentation that follows, the product management case study is notorious for its technical and whiteboarding interview questions. Here are four simple steps our instructors developed to help you master the dreaded whiteboarding interview questions in your case study round.
Step 1: Keep Calm and Embrace the Fact that You Know Nothing
Most aspiring PMs fail the Product Manager case study not because they do not have experience, but because they panic over a lack of information.
In practice, Product Managers rarely have enough information about the problem they were asked to solve. Having seen many candidates interview, we can confirm that interviewees often disqualify themselves by showing the interviewer that they are not ready to tackle ambiguous real-life issues.
So, remember to keep calm and accept the fact that you have insufficient information about the problem that’s thrown at you.
Step 2: Try to Understand What the Question Wants You to Achieve
Companies ask whiteboarding interview questions to see if you can create or improve a product that can accomplish a specific goal. When you take on any product management case study question, start by taking a step back. Think about what the question wants you to accomplish.
In most cases, you should be able to divine the purpose of the question from how the interviewer forms it. Our case study instructors have identified four specific purposes:
- Prioritization
- Product Design
- Target Market Identification
- Product Launch
Determining the purpose behind vague questions and finding the right approach to address them requires a lot of focused practice with real case study questions.
Step 3: Nar row Down the Question as Much as Possible
You need to narrow down the case study questions as much as possible to come up with some real and data-driven conclusions. Given that you have little to no resources available to you, you have to make some realistic estimations. Accurate estimations are only possible if you get to the heart of the question.
Think it through and ask as many questions as you need.
Step 4: Keep the Conversation Alive
Communication is an essential part of the case study interview: you should keep your interviewer informed about every aspect of your thought process. After you identify the whiteboarding question’s purpose, clearly inform your interviewer what direction you want to take and your reasoning.
Check your reasoning with your interviewer by asking them if this is something on their mind or if this is something they would consider. In most cases, they would either have an answer key or a direction on their mind and would be able to help you.
Once you agree on the direction you take, ask more specific questions to extract as much information as possible and get a confidence vote from the interviewer that you are on the right track.
Last but not least, make your interviewer’s life easier by suggesting options and giving details while asking questions. See how we used these four steps to work through a Facebook Product Manager Case Study question: Should Facebook enter the dating market?
Product Manager Case Study Presentation Best Practices
You have worked hard and finally finished your Product Manager case study assignment, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax—your case study presentation is as vital as solving the question.
Not only is it the time to demonstrate your excellent communication skills, but a good presentation shows your interviewers how you collaborate. Here’s a breakdown of how to give a winning presentation:
- Design and Brand Your Presentation Materials: The best way to prove that you are a big fan of the company and have the spirit to join the team is to use company colors, logos, and any media related to them. A good design always draws attention, and you want to grab as much attention as you can.
- Have the Right Amount of Content: Have just enough content to ensure that people know enough about your product to be convinced that it has potential. Include all the relevant details about the fundamental aspects of the product. But, leave them curious about the finer details. This will keep them engaged throughout the presentation.
- Include Visuals and Media to Spark Feedback from the Audience: Activating the brain’s visual cortex will keep your interviewers engaged throughout your presentation. The best way to ensure that everybody understands your product is to include wireframes and preliminary designs in your presentation.
- Make Sure Everyone Has a Positive Experience With Your Presentation: A good rule of thumb is to make sure you can explain your product to a five-year-old and a Ph.D. simultaneously. Start simple and allow the audience to ask questions as you progress. Allocate a considerable amount of time to go over your designs and ask the interviewer for feedback: Ask them questions, see what they think, and learn about the things they would have done differently.
- Paint a Clear Picture of the Product With Your Wireframes: When you are sketching wireframes for your product management case study, be sure to include anything you can explain in terms of functionality. Given that many of the products are digital, it’s crucial to explain the transitions between one screen to another. For example, you should explain what happens when a user clicks on something and which screen comes next. If the next screen is an integral part of the feature, you should include it in your case study deliverables.
List of Product Manager Case Study Question Examples
Before we dive into the most common examples of Product Manager case study interview questions , let’s solve one together. Check out how our Case Study Instructor, Roman Kolosovski, tackles the popular FAANG case study question “How would you build a product for pet owners?”:
1. Product Design Case Study Questions
These are the most common types of questions. They range from designing a product from scratch to improving an existing product. Some questions will explicitly tell you to focus on a specific OKR, while others will leave everything ambiguous to challenge you to think more.
Product Design Question Examples
- Design a product to help users find doctors on Facebook .
- How would you improve Google Maps?
- You’re a part of the Google Search webspam team: How would you detect duplicate websites?
- Name any product you love and any product you despise and explain your reasoning for both cases. ( Amazon )
- You’re the Product Manager of a team that focuses on financial products for our Uber drivers. You’re tasked with designing a financial product (or suite of products) that addresses our drivers’ needs in Brazil.
2. Product Strategy Questions
Unlike product design questions, strategy questions require you to think about the bigger picture. You’ll either be asked to find ways to make a product better—and hence define success for the product, or to complete the overall organization more successfully.
To solve these questions, you need to be well informed about the company and its products or services. Consider the company’s business model, competitors, and the recent developments in that industry. The essential skill you need to demonstrate here is analytical thinking.
Product Strategy Question Examples
- If you were Google’s CEO, would you be concerned about Microsoft?
- How would you improve Google Maps? (Google)
- How would you set goals and measure success for Facebook notifications?
- How would you monetize Facebook messenger?
- How would you determine the right price and method to promote product XYZ, and why? (Amazon)
3. Estimation and Analysis Questions
These are used by interviewers to measure how comfortable you are making decisions with limited data, so show them how you use data to derive the KPIs you need for your product. These questions are mostly asked during the interview. To solve them without internet access is only possible by learning the fundamental values of the company beforehand. This includes the revenue it makes or the approximate number of users it has. You should also be able to calculate their critical KPIs.
Estimation and Analysis Case Study Question Examples
- How many queries per second does Gmail get?
- As the Product Manager for Google Glass ‘Enterprise Edition’, which metrics would you track? How do you know if the product is successful?
- How much revenue does YouTube make per day?
- How would you go about estimating the number of gas stations in the USA?
- How would you track user engagement in an app, and what KPIs would you use to improve it?
4. Scheduling/Operational Questions
These types of case study interview questions are few and far between. Interviewers ask these questions to assess the candidates’ ability to turn ideas into deliverable tasks. Note that for most operational Product Manager case study questions, the interviewer will require you to write a detailed delivery schedule and write user stories and tasks.
Scheduling/Operational Case Study Question Examples
- Write the Jira ticket(s) for engineering for the idea you want to execute. (Upwork)
- Outline a brief (1-2 page) launch plan that would cover the activities and tasks needed to launch the feature successfully. Be sure to touch on both internal and external stakeholders, and include potential launch goals. (Stitch Data)
Product Manager Case Study FAQs
The short answer is yes. You should always have a couple of screen designs ready for your case study interview. Why? It’s probably the best way to spark any reaction from the interviewing committee. Plus, it’s also way more comfortable for your audience to understand what your product looks like with a solid prototype.
Given that it’s not your job to develop the actual design, low fidelity seems more appropriate. That being said, the bar for low fidelity designs has been relatively high over the past couple of years. So, low fidelity designs are more than pen and paper sketches: they are expected to be digital.
Detail the solution you came up with a presentation that states: Here is what the solution is. Here is what the solution looks like. Here is how a user would go through the process within this solution.
There are four common types of Product Manager case study questions: Product design questions Product strategy questions Estimation and analysis questions Scheduling/operational questions
Unlike larger companies, startups do not have as many tools and resources at their disposal. This means that not many will have a recruiting team or a full-fledged HR strategy and are interviewing as they go. Many Product Gym members that have taken the startup route have noted how disorganized the Product Manager interview process can get at a startup, so prepare for some confusion. No matter the size of the company, be sure to assess how they treat you and try to figure out how the company culture is in the process.
Put Your Product Manager Case Study Skills to the Test
Put your case study skills to the test with our free online training course. Access to instructor-led whiteboarding sessions with real FAANG interview qu estions to take your prep to the next level.
Don’t forget to call us for free career coaching to learn more about how Product Gym can help you land the Product Manager job of your dreams!
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Hiring: 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters
TL; DR: 82 Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Imposters
If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 82 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients.
So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
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Download the 82 Product Owner Interview Questions Ebook
The free 82 Product Owner Interview Questions PDF is not merely listing the questions, but also contains background information on:
- Why the questions are useful in the process, and…
- A range of appropriate answers.
Two to three questions from each category will provide more than enough ground for an engaging initial 60 minute-long conversation with candidates.
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82 Product Owner Interview Questions
Scrum is not a methodology but a framework. There are no rules that apply to each scenario, just good practices that have worked in other organizations before. Hence, you have to figure out on your own what is working for your organization. Finding this answer is a process and not a destination.
The role of the Product Owner itself is making the hiring process difficult to handle. The Product Owner is the least well-defined accountability within the Scrum framework and—at the same time—the one Scrum role with the most facets. (Please note that I will continue using ‘role’ on occasions throughout this document, although the Scrum Guide 2020 now speaks of ‘accountabilities.’)
A Product Owner is an innovator at heart and thus a value creator for customers and organizations if given a chance to work in an agile manner. The Product Owner is also the most vulnerable Scrum role. Turn them into a [fill-in a ticket-system of your choice] monkey or deprive them of the ability to say ‘no’—as in being the guardian of the Product Backlog—, and the Product Owner quickly becomes the Achilles heel of any agile organization.
The Product Owner role depends on the size of an organization, the industry it is operating in, its culture, and the lifecycle stage of that organization’s product(s). Lastly, there is an overlap with the product manager role. (Spoiler alert: they aren’t identical.)
The following interview questions are neither suited nor intended to turn an inexperienced interviewer into an agile software development expert. But in a seasoned practitioner’s hands, they support figuring out who of the candidates has been successfully working the agile trenches in the past. Remember, “Agile” is a mindset, not a methodology. Hence, no checklist can drive your recruiting success to the desired outcome.
The Product Owner interview questions in this PDF are modeled after a holistic model of agile product development for software products:
In this model, product discovery is moved as far as possible to the left to keep costs of validating hypotheses—derived from a vision and strategy—low and increase the speed of experimentation. In this approach, the Product Owner needs to coach the Scrum Team on how to adopt such a holistic model, teaming up with the Scrum Master in the process.
Therefore, the PDF contains additional background and contextual information, how the following set of questions can be interpreted as well as guidance on desired or acceptable ranges of answers for each question. The questions themselves are grouped into six categories.
Product Owner Interview Questions: The Organization of Questions and Answers
The ebook provides both questions as well as guidance on the range of suitable answers. These should allow an interviewer to deep dive into candidates’ understanding of Scrum and their agile mindset. However, please note that:
- The answers reflect the personal experience of the author and may not be valid for every organization: what works for organization A is probably failing in organization B,
- There are not suitable multiple choice questions to identify a candidate’s agile mindset given the complexity of applying “agile” to any organization,
- The author has a holistic view of agile practices: agile equals product discovery (what to build) plus product delivery (how to build it).
Please find the following 82 Product Owner interview questions to identify suitable candidates for the role of Product Owner:
Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions Set 1: The Role of a Scrum Product Owner
This category addresses the meta-level of the Product Owner role and the Scrum process. Please keep the following in mind when asking the questions:
As the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” states, it is mainly about adaptability over following a plan. Or, to put it with Peter Drucker, it is about doing the right things, and less about doing the things right. Concerning product development, being agile is about postponing deciding to invest in the latest economically feasible moment. This is achieved by testing hypotheses as fast and as inexpensive as possible, thus mitigating risk and maximizing the development team’s work. It also means to have the courage to stop an effort in case the chosen course is no longer viable.
This is an open-ended question better to understand the candidates’ perception of their role. A Product Owner is a leadership role, yielding no authority in a traditional management sense. In that way, the Product Owner is featured a bit by all the labels mentioned in the question. The Product Owner role has also been dubbed as “bottleneck” or the “Achilles heel of the Scrum process”; any mentioning of that would undoubtedly be a plus. If a candidate is mostly referring to something like “I am the one creating the user stories,” I would dig into that.
Full-stack “product people”—covering the product manager & Product Owner role in one person—are rare. Often, it takes too much time to cover all responsibilities: from communication to stakeholders and customers to organize the operational work within the Scrum process. Depending on the product, Product Owners hence can quickly spread themselves too thin to become a meaningful player in the process. (Speaking of which: a Product Owner is not a requirements engineer, not a business analyst, and not a user stories expert either.) As a result, you may observe that large organizations split the responsibilities among two or more individuals. Here, the product manager is often responsible for strategic aspects, while the Product Owner is a more tactical role. For smaller or less complex products, Product Owners may very well cover both roles simultaneously.
There is a fine line between a product manager and a Product Owner role, and it depends on how the role is crystallized in the company’s structure and culture. Usually, besides product management duties, Product Ownership entails establishing the product vision and strategy, its alignment with the company’s goals and objectives, and managing any internal and external stakeholders in this process.
Saying “no” is an essential qualification—and empowerment—for each Product Owner. For example, it is required to protect the team from a stakeholder’s pet project of a doubtful value. Or to put an end to silo thinking and local optimization within the organization. Product owners create value by shipping the right product and maximizing the amount of work deliberately not done. Because of that, the organization has to respect a “no” from them. Otherwise, they will not fulfill their role: maximizing the product’s value across the whole organization. Applying “Scrum” without an empowered Product Owner creates a great “Waterfall 2.0” process. The Product Owner’s empowerment to decide over the Product Backlog can therefore act as a litmus test of the organization’s adoption of agile principles.
Suppose a person or a group of individuals, for example, a product council, exercises control over the Product Backlog. In that case, you’re not a Product Owner but a proxy. You’re probably more a product manager that happens to work with an agile team that uses a subset of Scrum. That may work fine, depending on the organization’s nature, culture, and product. But it cannot be called Scrum.
CEO of the product, product visionary, strategic thinker, servant leader w/o authority, entrepreneur/intrapreneur, innovator, systems thinker, single wringable neck.
Early, often, respectfully, transparently, being available regularly, and responding with adequate speed and attention. As the Scrum Guide 2020 states: “The Scrum Team is responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required.”
Self-organization is at the core of any serious agile framework, Scrum included. Suppose a candidate feels uncomfortable with the concept that the Scrum Team or the Scrum Master have ideas on how product discovery and delivery might improve in the future. In that case, you should dig deeper into that. It’s not a good idea to substitute silos at the department level with “functional silos” within Scrum, when communication, sharing ideas and creating a shared understanding are paramount for Scrum Team’s success.
The best way of collaboration for PO and Scrum Master is embracing Scrum Values. Both serve in leadership roles without yielding any authority. Both depend on each other for the Scrum Team’s success, for example, accomplishing a Sprint Goal. They are both also allies concerning coaching the organization to become agile. Daily, the Product Owner is responsible for promptly providing feedback on product matters, clarifying goals, and ensuring that everyone on the Scrum Team understands the product vision. The Scrum Master, in return, needs to support the Product Owner in building an actionable Product Backlog while facilitating an effective collaboration within the Scrum Team in general.
Generally speaking, in an ideal world, the members of a cross-functional team cover all skills that are required by the Scrum Team to deliver value to customers independently. This may work for a product at an early stage when one team is handling everything. When the organization needs to scale, dealing with interdependencies—here: other teams—becomes a necessity. Depending on that, the actual composition of a team highly depends on what the team is delivering. Typical roles in cross-functional teams are business or data analysts, UX and UI designers, Developers (front-end, back-end), QA Developers, and probably DevOps engineers.
The Product Owner is expected to participate in all events: Daily Scrums, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospectives. Otherwise, the Product Owner cannot answer possible questions quickly, and impediments cannot be solved in a timely fashion, which would contradict the core of being agile.
Absolutely. Or, to cite Lewis Carroll : “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” The agile product stack starts with the vision and strategy of the company. It then is broken down into a product portfolio—where applicable—and the product roadmap for each service and product, and ends with the corresponding Product Backlogs and Sprint Backlogs. The Product Owner needs to be familiar with all levels of the agile product stack.
This question deals with how Product Owners can mitigate the risk they pose to the Scrum Team. Often, they slow down the team because the Product Backlog management process is insufficient. There might be several reasons for that: Product Backlog items are created shortly before a Sprint is supposed to start. Or work items do not meet quality standards, as they cannot allocate enough time for their creation and refinement. Beyond the Product Backlog management, they might not be available on short notice to answer questions during a Sprint. A useful way of Product Owner risk mitigation involves the other Scrum Team members at an earlier stage. Or they are encouraging collective ownership of the product by the Scrum Team. This approach is much supported by creating a shared understanding of goals at the team level. (Start with the “Why are we doing this?”)
Adding user stories to the Product Backlog merely proves that the PO can handle the ticket system. Measuring real value to customers, however, requires a different approach. Suitable KPIs of the Product Owner’s contribution to the team would focus on the outcome, not output. Examples of such metrics are the lead-time from idea to an available feature, cycle time for valuating ideas, or NPS scores. (Learn more about Evidence-Based Management for Product Owners .)
Set 2: Product Discovery and External Stakeholders
This category of the Product Owner interview questions is branching out into the areas of product discovery and product management:
Lean UX, Lean Startup, Design Thinking, or Service Design are other agile practices that are much better suited for product discovery than Scrum. All that Scrum refers to is that the Product Owner is accountable for managing the Product Backlog. Supposedly, the Product Owner is the individual who knows what is valuable at any given time. But Scrum doesn’t elaborate on how the Product Owner gains this insight.
Here, Product Owner candidates should explain their ideas of a product discovery process: From idea, via hypothesis, and experiment and validation. There are various ways to come up with ideas: Through analyzing market needs, industry trends, your data (analytics, NPS, etc.), and the competition. Also, regular sessions with stakeholders, such as sales and customer care, and the Scrum Team(s) tend to be fruitful. Empowering team members to spend a part of their work-time on new ideas is also a powerful practice. (Think of Gmail.) Most importantly, observing customers regularly by running continuous user tests is an effective way of gaining insights for new features, products, and services. This approach is even more useful when the whole Scrum Team actively participates in the process.
The candidate should name a few of the leading agile frameworks, such as Jobs-to-be-done, Lean UX, Lean Startup, Design Sprints, Service Design, design ethnography, and lean user testing, NPS, Voice of the Customer, and others.
User research, or better: user testing, should be a continuous, regular exercise in any product-driven organization. It’s a vital part of the agile build-measure-learn cycle. Practically, this means that communicating with UX designers and researchers becomes an integral part of the work of the PO and the entire Scrum Team. (Ideally, they belong to the team itself.) Also, customer feedback is continuously gathered by running frequent user interviews and observations. Moreover, these ideas also apply to technical projects, for example, API services.
Spending 50 % of their time with customers would be great. However, if it’s less than 10 %, and if no one else is handling product discovery on behalf of the Product Owner, the product discovery process needs to be improved. For example, by relieving the PO from administrative tasks, such as user story writing. (Note: the Product Owner is not primarily a user story author.)
Actively involving stakeholders and members of the general organization in the product discovery process is a sound approach. People like to have a purpose in life and be a part of something larger than themselves. So, providing a possibility to contribute to everyone without regard for their position in the organization will make working as a PO easier. A process for this level of inclusion doesn’t require fancy technology. A simple, shared spreadsheet or form is enough to kick-start it. An initial template to suggest new product features could comprise questions that address the why, the what, and the for whom. It could handle the tactical or strategic nature of the suggestion, a possible time-frame, or an estimate of the expected return on investment. Most importantly, designing the process should be kept agile: start with a simple solution, then improve it once the first experience has been made.
It is highly recommended to involve the Scrum Team as early as possible in the product discovery process. There are mainly three reasons for that practice: (1) The sooner the Developers participate in the product discovery process, the lesser the chances are that solutions are pursued that are technically not viable or would not result in a return on investment. (2) An early involvement ensures that the Product Owner and the other Scrum Team members develop a shared understanding and ownership of what they will build. This helps significantly allocate resources to the right issues, maximize the customer’s value, and mitigate the investment risk. (3) Developers’ early involvement also ensures their buy-in, a higher commitment level, and the Scrum Team’s willingness to participate in all product development phases. This will provide additional motivation on the Scrum Team’s side to participate in any change needed to accomplish the goals defined for each Sprint/product release.
There are quantitative and qualitative categories, such as revenue increases, cost-cutting benefits by internal process improvements, increased customer satisfaction rates (NPS), sign-ups from customers for new products, positive customer feedback in customer care, etc. With this open question, Product Owner candidates should demonstrate their knowledge of determining what content constitutes an actionable Product Backlog, maximizing the value of the Developers’ work on behalf of the customers. It opens the area of product metrics broad. It allows for a discussion of outcomes vs. outputs, the escape from the feature factory, and how to overcome the industrial paradigm in general.
Product Owners can avoid misallocating resources by a firm decision at the moment when it is clear that a product or feature is not valuable or not feasible. This means that a continuous monitoring process, such as metrics or regular user tests, needs to be established. Once the build-measure-learn cycle provides proof that an idea or a product is unlikely to succeed, the resource allocation needs to stop. (Don’t allow the “sunk cost” fallacy to cloud your judgment: no matter how much has been already spent, it does not justify to continue working on the product.)
There are several stages in which a Product Owner should participate, starting at the portfolio level to the product stage, to the release planning, and the Sprint Planning. Participation during the vision and strategy stages is highly recommended, though.
Set 3: Internal Stakeholder Management
This category of the Product Owner interview questions deals with specific aspects of relationships of the Product Owners with internal stakeholders:
A good starting point would be working with the “Manifesto of Agile Software Development,” particularly ensuring that stakeholders understand that adapting to change over following a plan is paramount for the organization’s future success. Stakeholders also need to understand that “requirements” (and thus probably local optimizations efforts) are no longer a valid form of the product delivery process. Instead, continuous product discovery and iterative and incremental product creation become the guiding principles, elevating experiments, and accepting failure to good practices. Becoming agile means competing with other—probably more valuable—product ideas for scarce resources and accepting that the PO is the gatekeeper to the Product Backlog. It means that there are no more arbitrary delivery dates, but delivery intervals, projecting the knowledge of today into the future. Lastly, stakeholders will need to understand the magnitude of abandoning the command & control management style and empowering autonomous and self-organizing teams for product delivery.
Communication and transparency are critical to effective collaboration with stakeholders. There are various ways to establish and improve this communication over time. For example, institute regular meetings with each stakeholder or have stakeholders name product ambassadors, who then act as “liaison officers” and train them accordingly. Arrange workshops with stakeholders and ambassadors, and ask your Scrum Master and the Developers to join the effort. Team up with the user experience people and run, for example, user journey or user story mapping workshops. Or invite stakeholders to Product Backlog refinement sessions to explain a user story’s value to the rest of the Scrum Team. Sprint Reviews and user interviews are also well suited to improve collaboration and communication over time.
An often promising way to deal with uncooperative stakeholders is to win them over by demonstrating the value of agile product development. Early in the transition process, it is advisable to educate them with product-related workshops on agile principles. Proven examples are user story mapping or product roadmap planning workshops. (It is recommended to secure the help of an experienced coach at this stage.) It has also proven to help establish a close communication schedule with the stakeholders, for example, by having regular meetings. Also, educating members from stakeholder teams to act as “liaison officers” to the product organization significantly improves cooperation. It mitigates the usual feeling of losing control on the stakeholders’ side. At a later stage, typical agile events, such as Sprint Reviews, also work well by demonstrating what value the Scrum Team created for them. Generally, it is a process that will take time, and there are no shortcuts available. As a last resort, if everything else hasn’t worked out, the PO might need support from a C-level sponsor. (Read more: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics during an Agile Transition .)
Agile first principles require to adapt to change over executing a plan in the first place. If a project is late, it probably has lost some of its original value to the organization and its customers. In this case, reevaluating its benefit before pouring more resources into it is a necessity. If the project still delivers value, you should probably go for it. Keep in mind that there is always competition from the other investment opportunities comprising the Product Backlog. However, continue building it merely because of the prior investment means that the stakeholder has fallen for the sunk cost fallacy.
Submit the pet project to the usual, standardized process that every product idea has to master. Just continuously update the business case behind such a pet project and have it compete with valuable projects. Sooner or later, common sense will end this kind of misallocation of resources, as pet projects rarely provide a return on investment. Other stakeholders with valuable projects make good allies in this conflict.
This problem is generally comparable to the pet project problem and could be dealt with accordingly. However, the distinguishing factor, in this case, is the urgency and probably the party’s different status that’s demanding the features. In a sales-driven organization, the sales team can often secure sponsorship from the C-level for such suggestions. This tends to happen when sales forecasts are missed. In this situation, the Product Owner can often only rally support from other stakeholders to fight off the demand based on opportunity costs. If the usual process is overridden by executive intervention, the Product Owner needs to address this issue immediately. You can’t have the (agile) cake and eat it, too.
Usually, this kind of attitude is encouraged by the management in pursuit of meeting sales targets. It reflects a non-agile, opportunistic mindset that values instant gratification—more sales—over a sustainable product development strategy. To change this mindset, it certainly helps to reach out to the sales department and offer them support on the sales process’s technical side as early as possible. However, given the sales team’s usual incentives, a real change will only happen if the management buys-in to agile product development principles. These might include an adaptation of the remuneration scheme for sales.
Providing an idea management system is a good starting point. This can be a simple template for the suggesting party covering the what, why, when, for whom, and ROI questions. Start communicating with the person in question throughout the evaluation. If a suggestion is accepted for realization, include the suggesting person in the following process. (For example, invite the individual to a user story mapping workshop or user tests.) Lastly, provide continuous feedback throughout the whole development and delivery cycle with regular checkpoints against the original targets. Finally, 3-12 months after shipping, update the stakeholder whether the expectations—for example, ROI, cost savings, engagement, and other KPI—have been met out in the field.
Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions Set 4: Product Portfolio and Roadmap Planning
The questions in this set concern one of the most contentious topics in the profession: “How do we build agile product roadmaps that work?”
Yes, it would significantly impede the Product Owner’s work, as transparency is required to innovate most effectively within an organization. Nowadays, innovation is a team sport. The brilliant individual—creating great innovations single-handedly—is a myth. (Not even Mr. Jobs considered himself to be such an individual.) Such a joined team effort always starts with a shared understanding of product vision and strategy.
No, that practice is not anachronistic at all. A product portfolio encompasses strategic objectives and goals at the company level. These endeavors are related not only to the overarching goal. They are also associated with their sustainability from a financial point of view. One initiative, for example, can act as a source of investment for another one. Or all these endeavors have a common investment source. A portfolio plan helps structure investment sources, thus contributing to better financial management while illustrating business value sources.
In general, you would consider a top-down approach, starting with the company goals and the general product vision. Once several iterations with the leadership and stakeholders have been performed, it is usually advisable to combine the first draft with a bottom-up initiative. Meeting somewhere in the middle guarantees those crucial aspects, while probably of a more detailed nature, aren’t lost in the process.
Product roadmap planning is a continuous exercise to analyze products at all stages: live, in development, under planning, or on the brink of being phased-out. Depending on the organization’s maturity, the size of the product portfolio, its products and service, the industry, and its level of regulation, this can be a quarterly or even monthly practice.
The recommended way to achieve this goal is to include the Scrum Team in the product discovery process actively. Suppose Developers are merely confronted with requirement documents. In that case, they rightfully feel disrespected, as they only have limited options to become self-organized as they are told what to do. (Which leads to a cog-in-the-machinery syndrome, tempering with their idea of autonomy.) There are various ways how the Product Owner can include the Developers in the product discovery process, for example, by user story mappings with other stakeholders, inclusion in the portfolio and product roadmap planning, participation in user tests, to name a few.
Usually, it’s the internal stakeholders, Scrum Team members or their representatives, and the Product Owners. Adding customers to the mix is a bonus.
As a rule of thumb, 50% are supposed to be allocated to stakeholder communication of all kinds.
A Monte Carlo simulation is an algorithm-based statistical approach to obtain numerical results. Product Owners can use this approach to forecast probable delivery windows of releases or features based on the previous Scrum Team performance. (This question opens the discussion on how to deal with deadlines, forecasts, and other legitimate inquiries of stakeholders regarding product delivery.)
Set 5: Product Backlog, Refinement, Work Items, Forecasts, and Estimations
This category of the Product Owner interview questions covers the Product Owner’s home turf: the Product Backlog, its refinement, and work item creation:
The refinement is a continuous process to create actionable Product Backlogs that allow a Scrum Team to have a Sprint Planning at a moment’s notice.
The Scrum Team accomplishes this level of preparedness by regularly refining Product Backlog items in small groups or with the whole Scrum Team, and not just once every Sprint as part of the Sprint Planning. The idea behind the refinement is to create a shared understanding with all team members, why a particular work item is valuable, what the Developers shall create, and how to realize the work item technically.
While the Scrum Guide 2020 drop the previous guidance on the time allocation, it remains a practical rule of thumb that the Scrum Team should reserve up to 10% of its time for the Product Backlog refinement.
- What items are no longer relevant?
- What items need to be split?
- What items can be updated with new information?
- Does this update change previous estimations?
- Has the priority of specific items changed?
- Do we have any new topics or learnings that haven’t yet been considered? (If yes, these need to be captured as new Product Backlog items.)
It depends on several issues, such as the balance between stakeholder communication, customer research, and the Product Owner’s commitment to their Scrum Team. Working on more Product Backlog items than the team can handle in two to three Sprints at the same time might prove to be difficult, though. Often, if Product Owners cannot allocate sufficient time to a single item, they waste resources on half-baked work items of a questionable value.
From my experience, any Product Backlog that is larger than the scope of three or four Sprints is barely manageable if you want to maintain an actionable Product Backlog. Misusing a Product Backlog by adding hundreds of items to it is a clear sign that the Product Owner needs help from the Developers and the Scrum Master to better cope with the influx of ideas, suggestions, and requirements to avoid misallocating resources.
Lastly, beware of appeasing nagging stakeholders by merely adding their “requirements” to the Product Backlog. This does not solve the issues; it just postpones the inevitable discussion as the stakeholders will now expect that the Scrum Team will create their Increment.
When the foundation of a Product Backlog item is ready for that. The readiness isn’t easy to generalize since it depends on the nature of the product itself, the Scrum Team’s experience, and the organization’s leadership style.
From my experience, this influences the readiness and availability of a Scrum Team to contribute to the refinement process effectively. For creating a shared understanding of the why, what, and how of a work item among all team members, the precise moment of involvement is crucial. If the team is involved too early, the Developers may consider this a waste of their time. If the Scrum Team is involved too late—for example, all specifications have already been prepared—, they may feel not respected. If in doubt, the Product Owner should include the Scrum Master in the process.
Some proven categories to define value are projected revenue increase, cost cutting effects, a projected growth of the customer base, and an increase in customer satisfaction rates.
More metrics are available from Scrum.org’s Evidence-Based Management model .
Product Owners communicate value with any information suitable to further the Scrum Team’s understanding. That communication can be quantitative, such as analytical data describing how a process is utilized, financial projections, an increase in conversion rates, acquiring new customers, etc.) It can also be qualitative, such as transcripts, screencasts, or videos from a user testing session.
Preferably, the Scrum Team members already know in advance as they are regularly participating in user research activities.
Criteria to determine the order of a Product Backlog item, for example, are value, risk, work estimates, available expertise, and dependencies.
Focusing solely on shipping new features is a slippery slope that quickly leads to the build-up of technical debt. You trade a short-term win—shipping more features—for a long-term liability. Technical debt will inevitably slow down the creature of new Product Increments in the future, probably to a point where the product seems to be at a standstill.
In other words: By accruing technical debt, the very purpose of becoming agile—learning faster as an organization than the competition, thus being able to exploit market opportunities—is at stake.
Hence it is a good practice to allocate around 20 percent of the Scrum Team’s capacity to keeping technical debt at bay at any given time. Experienced Product Owners support this long-term thinking.
User story mapping a great way to visualize the “big picture” within a Product Backlog. Additionally, user story mapping is an instrumental means to improve communication with stakeholders and the Scrum Team. These workshops create a shared product understanding across teams, roles, and departments.
The best way to create Product Backlog items, particularly user stories, is a collaborative and iterative approach, using collective inspection and adaptation, including the whole Scrum Team. User story creation should not blindly follow a specific template but rather be a lively negotiation with the team, focusing on reaching a shared understanding of “why,” “what,” and “how” with all team members.
- The description is available,
- Acceptance criteria are defined,
- The story can be delivered within a Sprint,
- All UI deliverables are available,
- All (probable) dependencies are identified,
- Performance criteria are defined,
- Tracking criteria are defined and
- The story is estimated by the team. (I do believe that you cannot “not estimate” one way or another. Even the #noestimate approach includes a sizing model that is based on a kind of unspoken estimation.)
Product Owners should be familiar with Ron Jeffries Three-Cs—Card , Conversation, Confirmation—and Bill Wake’s INVEST principle .
The best way to discuss a user story is by doing so synchronously with all involved team members to ensure that a shared understanding is created. This approach works for co-located as well as distributed Scrum Teams.
Asynchronous discussions may be an option when team members cannot participate in a discussion or when the Product Owner is in the field, and feedback is required.
It would help if you avoided, though, lengthy discussions via comments on tickets. That’s a sign of a weak refinement process as it creates unnecessary queues of idleness.
This open question is an invitation to Product Owner candidates to share from their previous experience and how it influenced their current understanding of proper Product Backlog management.
There is an extensive list of anti-patterns available in the following article: 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns .
Generally, acceptance criteria define the functional and non-functional requirements that need to be met. The level of detail may vary depending on the nature of the task. Hence, it is a good practice to include the Scrum Team in their creation as some of those requirements may already be addressed by the team’s Definition of Done.
Borrow from XP and run a spike during the next Sprint. Once the team can provide better insights to its technical side, come back to the user story, and resume the refinement.
Product Backlog items are a token for discussion to create a shared understanding and secure the Developers’ buy-in. If the Developers are not involved in devising, disseminating, and capturing these, they do not see any ownership in such work items. This likely results in a lower level of engagement, which may negatively affect the value created for customers.
The best way to “remove” useless features is not to build them in the first place. Simplicity and radical focus on value delivered to customers is key to any successful agile product organization.
Should—despite all validation efforts during product discovery—a feature of lesser value slip into the Product Backlog and be delivered, it should be removed as soon as possible from the live product. The same applies to an existing feature that has outlived its usefulness.
Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions Set 6: Sprint Planning, Sprint, Sprint Review, and Retrospective
The sixth category that addresses the Sprint itself:
It is a negotiation with the Scrum Team. The answer depends on the team’s situation and experience: If the designers are likely delivering—they have always kept their promises in the past—, and the Developers could accomplish the user story nevertheless within the Sprint, and the Developers agree with the situation, it is probably an acceptable exception.
Ultimately, the Scrum Team’s decision is whether to pick the work item for the next Sprint.
That is unacceptable behavior, as the Developers are self-organizing. Hence distributing tasks among themselves is their prerogative.
Let’s have a closer look at the Sprint Planning:
The Product Owner presents the business objective of the next Sprint to the Scrum Team. Collaboratively, the Scrum Team creates the Sprint Goal. The Developers then pick— considering all circumstances, for example, available capacity—those Product Backlog items they deem necessary to achieve the Sprint Goal. The presence of the Product Owner during this part of the Sprint Planning is essential.
Often, the Developers now add details to the Sprint Backlog items, for example, splitting them up into tasks, identifying parts that need further clarification, or agreeing on who will be working on what tasks. Product Owners do not necessarily need to participate in this part of the Sprint Planning. But they need to be on stand-by for additional questions.
By all means, yes. That way, the Product Owner can answer quickly, thus avoiding unnecessary delays.
Trust is the beginning of all. And the Developers do not trust the process, or the line management, or the stakeholders. This mistrust might be rooted in the organization’s culture, a former experience, or the work item’s quality. The team might also be too junior to understand some work items’ implications fully. Or the product is suffering from technical debt, which makes estimates generally more volatile.
The candidate should name some reasons for the behavior and suggest joining with the Scrum Master to provide the team with a path to let this habit go. The issue would make an outstanding topic for the Sprint Retrospective.
This kind of stakeholder behavior is not acceptable. It is the Product Owner’s objective to understand the scope of a feature request in advance clearly. Sneaking in features through the backdoor a typical Scrum anti-pattern that needs to be investigated and addressed.
This question opens the discussion on how to deal with selfish stakeholders, particularly in organizations that haven’t yet fully embraced the Product Owner concept.
The Scrum Guide is not explicit about this situation. On the one side, the Scrum Team decides on when to release what Increment to the customers. On the other side, the Product Owner is “ is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team .”
This question opens the discussion on Scrum’s built-in checks and balances and how effective collaboration within the Scrum Team might work.
The Scrum Team decides on when to release what Increment to the customers. There is no automatism for the release.
It is not the Product Owner’s task to organize the Sprint Review, but the whole Scrum Team should be eager to experience it. The Sprint Review is a critical opportunity to inspect the previous Sprint’s outcome and adapt the Product Backlog to serve the customers with the next Sprint best.
This behavior is undoubtedly an anti-pattern of a successful Scrum Team as it violates several Scrum principles, for example, providing transparency or adhering to openness and respect.
First of all, Developers should never work on items the Product Owner does not know. Bypassing the Product Owner in that respect shows a significant deficit in understanding Scrum basics and should immediately be addressed in collaboration with the Scrum Master. ( Learn more : Gold-Plating Beyond Done — Making Your Scrum Work #7 .)
Absolutely, Product Owners are members of the Scrum Team. Hence they participate in the Sprint Retrospective.
PO Interview Questions Set 7: Product Owner Anti-Patterns
The seventh category of the Product Owner interview guide addresses PO anti-patterns from the management of the Product Backlog—including refining Product Backlog items—to the Sprint Planning and to the Sprint Review:
Product Backlog and Product Backlog Refinement
Question: What anti-patterns come to your mind when you think of the Product Owner’s responsibility to manage the Product Backlog?
Some of the typical Product Owner anti-patterns in handling the backlog are as follows:
- Storage for ideas: The Product Owner is using the Product Backlog as a repository of ideas and requirements. (This practice is clogging the Product Backlog, may lead to cognitive overload, and makes alignment with the ‘big picture’ at portfolio management and roadmap planning level very challenging for all participants, be it stakeholders or Scrum team members.)
- Part-time PO: The Product Owner is not working daily on the Product Backlog. (The Product Backlog needs to represent the best use of the Developers’ time at any given moment. Therefore, it needs to be “actionable” 24/7. Updating it once a week before the next refinement session or Sprint Planning does not suffice to meet this condition.)
- Copy & paste PO: The Product Owner creates user stories by breaking down requirement documents received from stakeholders into smaller chunks. (That scenario helped to coin the nickname “ticket monkey” for the Product Owner. Remember: Product Backlog item creation is a team exercise in most cases.)
- Dominant PO: Checks and balances: The Product Owner creates Product Backlog item by providing not just the ‘why’ but also the ‘how’ and the ‘what’. (The team answers the ‘how’ question – the technical implementation –, and both the team and the PO collaborate on the ‘what’ question: what scope is necessary to achieve the desired purpose.)
- Prioritization by proxy: A single stakeholder or a committee of stakeholders prioritizes the Product Backlog. (The strength of Scrum is building on the solid position of the Product Owner. The PO is the only person to decide what work items become Product Backlog items. Hence, the Product Owner also decides on the ordering of the Product Backlog. Take away that empowerment, and Scrum turns into a pretty robust waterfall 2.0 process.)
- 100% in advance: The Scrum Team creates a Product Backlog covering the complete project or product upfront because the release scope is limited. (Question: how can you be sure to know today what to deliver in six months from now—even if you believe you understand the scope today?)
- Over-sized: The Product Backlog contains more items than the Scrum Team can deliver within three to six Sprints, give or take. (This way, the Product Owner creates waste by hoarding issues that might never materialize.)
- Outdated issues: The Product Backlog contains items that haven’t been touched for six to eight weeks or more. (That is typically the length of two to four sprints. If the Product Owner is hoarding backlog items, the risk emerges that older Product Backlog items become outdated, thus rendering previously invested work of the Scrum Team obsolete.)
- Everything is estimated: All items of the Product Backlog are detailed and estimated. (That is too much upfront work and bears the risk of misallocating the Scrum Team’s time.)
- Component-based items: The Product Backlog items are sliced horizontally based on components instead of vertically based on end-to-end features. (This may be either caused by your organizational structure. Then move to cross-functional teams to improve the team’s ability to deliver. Otherwise, the Scrum team needs to strengthen their skills of writing user stories probably.)
- Missing acceptance criteria: There are work items in the Product Backlog without acceptance criteria. (While it is unnecessary to have acceptance criteria at the beginning of the refinement cycle, they would make the task much more manageable.)
- No more than a title: The Product Backlog contains item that comprise of little more than a title. (See above.)
- Issues too detailed: The Product Owner invests too much time upfront in creating Product Backlog items making them too detailed. (If a work item looks complete, the team members might not see the necessity to get involved in further refinement. This way, a “fat” item reduces the team’s engagement level, compromising the creation of a shared understanding. By the way, this didn’t happen back in the days when we used index cards given their physical limitation.)
- No research: The Product Backlog contains few to no spikes. (This often correlates with a Scrum team spending too much time discussing future problems instead of researching them hands-on as part of an iterative creation process.)
- What team? The Product Owner is not involving the entire Scrum Team in the refinement process and instead is relying on just the “lead engineer” (or any other member of the team independently of the others).
Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns
Question: What comes to your mind when you think of PO anti-patterns during Sprint Planning?
Some of the typical Product Owner anti-patterns during the Sprint Planning are as follows:
- What are we fighting for? The Product Owner cannot align the business objective of the upcoming Sprint with the overall product vision and the Product Goal. (A serious goal answers the “What are we fighting for?” question. It is also a negotiation between the Product Owner and the rest of the Scrum team to a certain extent. It shall be focused and measurable. The Developers’ forecast, the Sprint Goal, and the business objective go hand in hand.)
- No business objective, no Sprint Goal: The Product Owner proposes Product Backlog items that resemble a random assortment of tasks, providing no cohesion. Consequently, the Scrum Team does not create a Sprint goal. (If this is the natural way of finishing your Sprint Planning, you probably have outlived the usefulness of Scrum as a product development framework. Depending on the maturity of your product, Kanban may prove to be a better solution. Otherwise, the randomness may signal a weak Product Owner who listens too much to stakeholders instead of ordering the Product Backlog appropriately.)
- Unfinished business: UUnfinished Product Backlog items from the last Sprint spill over into the new Sprint without any discussion. (There might be good reasons for that, for example, a task’s value has not changed. It should not be an automatism, though; remember the sunk cost fallacy .)
- Last-minute changes: The Product Owner tries to squeeze in some last-minute Product Backlog items that are not ready yet. (Principally, it is the prerogative of the Product Owner to make such kinds of changes to ensure that the Development Team is working only on the most valuable tasks at any given time. However, if the Scrum Team is practicing Product Backlog refinement sessions regularly, these occurrences should be a rare exception. If those happen frequently, it indicates that the Product Owner needs help ordering the Product Backlog and communicating with the team. Or the Product Owner needs support to say ‘no’ more often to stakeholders.)
- Output focus: The Product Owner pushes the Developers to take on more tasks than they could realistically handle. Probably, the Product Owner is referring to former team metrics such as velocity to support their desire. (This behavior is a road to becoming a feature factory and deserves attention from the team’s Scrum Master. Furthermore, it violates both the Developers’ prerogative to pick Product Backlog items for the Sprint Backlog and Scrum Values.)
- No preparation: The Product Owner does not prepare the Product Backlog to provide valuable Product Backlog items in time. (Product Backlog needs to represent the best possible use of the Developers’ work from a customer value perspective at any given moment. In other words, your Scrum Team’s Product Backlog has to be actionable 24/7. By my standards, that means that you need to be capable of running a meaningful Sprint Planning instantly. Therefore, preparing a few basic Product Backlog items an hour before the beginning of the Sprint Planning is not enough.)
Sprint Anti-Patterns
Question: Could you please name some PO anti-patterns that might occur during the Sprint?
Some Sprint-related Product Owner anti-patterns are as follows:
- Absent PO : The Product Owner is absent most of the Sprint and is not available to answer questions of the Developers. (As the Sprint Backlog is emergent and the Developers may identify new work to achieve the Sprint Goal, this attitude might leave the Developers in the dark, risking the accomplishment of the Sprint Goal.)
- PO clinging to tasks : The Product Owner cannot let go of Product Backlog items once they become part of the Sprint Backlog. For example, the Product Owner increases the scope of a work item. Or, they change acceptance criteria once the Developers accept the issue into the Sprint Backlog. (There is a clear line: before a Product Backlog item becomes part of the Sprint Backlog, the Product Owner is responsible. However, once it moves from one backlog to the other, the Developers become responsible. If changes become acute during the Sprint, the team will collaboratively decide on how to handle them.)
- Inflexible PO : The Product Owner is not flexible to adjust acceptance criteria. (If the work on a task reveals that the agreed-upon acceptance criteria are no longer achievable or wasteful, the Scrum Team needs to adapt to the new reality. Blindly following the original plan violates core Scrum principles.)
- Delaying PO : The Product Owner does not provide feedback on work items once those are done. Instead, they wait until the end of the Sprint. (The Product Owner should immediately provide feedback on work items; that is essential for a good workflow with the team. Otherwise, the Product Owner will create an artificial queue within the Sprint, unnecessarily increasing the cycle time. This habit also puts reaching the Sprint Goal at risk.)
- Misuse of Sprint cancellation : The Product Owner cancels Sprints to impose their will onto the team. (It is the prerogative of the Product Owner to cancel Sprints. However, the Product Owner should not do this without a serious cause. The Product Owner should also never abort a Sprint without consulting the other team members first. Probably, the team has an idea of how to save the Sprint. Lastly, misusing the cancellation privilege also indicates a severe team collaboration issue.)
- No Sprint cancellation : The Product Owner does not cancel a Sprint whose Sprint Goal can no longer be achieved. (If the Scrum team identified a unifying Sprint Goal, for example, integrating a new payment method, and the management then abandons that payment method mid-sprint, continuing working on the Sprint Goal would be a waste. In this case, the Product Owner should consider canceling the Sprint.)
PO Interview Questions Set 8: The Product Mindset
Becoming an agile, learning organization focused on creating customer value is about developing a product mindset everywhere, from the individual to the C-level. Employing Scrum can be a major stepping stone on this journey when the management empowers Product Owners and is not merely regarding Scrum as a delivery means to ship more features, products, and services within the constraints of the iron (project) triangle.
Again, a fully formed and empowered product owner is crucial for a transformation success at that level. The following set of questions regarding the product mindset is designed to better understand a candidate’s perspective: Do they probably have what it takes to fill the shoes of the Product Owner role?
Q 77: First Principles of the Product Mindset
Looking back at your professional experience, can you name some first principles of a Product Owner with a product mindset?
This question allows the Product Owner candidate to reflect on their core beliefs of product management in general and the Product Owner role in particular. My top three choices of the first principles of the product mindset are:
- A successful Product Owner is an agile product manager at heart.
- Product Ownership is a leadership position in the first place. It is not about churning out deliverables at an ever-increasing speed to maximize the output of the Scrum team. Great Scrum teams abandon the feature factory early.
- Stakeholder collaboration is essential to becoming a successful Product Owner. Having the final say on the composition and ordering of the Product Backlog does not mean monopolizing the decision-making process. Successful Product Owners learn to lead and delegate early.
Q 78: The Product Focus of Successful Product Owners
You have worked with Product Owners (and product managers) in the past. How did the successful ones master the challenges of the role? Moreover, where did the less successful ones fail?
In my experience, successful Product Owners manage to split their time between different responsibilities and stakeholders without getting lost in details or failing to communicate appropriately while guiding everyone in the right direction: Accomplishing the product vision.
The key to achieving this level of alignment among the critical stakeholders is that they know how to delegate decisions while being transparent about the underlying system. Moreover, they include everyone at a meaningful level in the subsequent communication and collaboration, respectively, using the “vision, validation, value” approach.
A less successful PO typically fails to have a product mindset and act as a team player. They fail at being product leaders. Instead, they are typically stuck in the scribe mode, refusing to delegate work that others can perfectly handle for them. For example, there is no reason why a PO would create and write all Product Backlog items themselves. In my experience, Developers can author PBi very well.
Also, they tend to shield the rest of the Scrum team from communicating with stakeholders, namely customers and users. Establishing these team-internal functional silos — Developers develop and do not talk to customers — often lowers innovation and productivity. Generally, they tend to create a bubble for themselves where falling victim to confirmation bias is not uncommon. They start loving their solution instead of the customers’ problem.
Additionally, less successful Product Owners also tend to invest less in creating a product mindset throughout the organization. For example, they rely less on joined work sessions with stakeholders like user story mapping, value stream mapping, or impact mapping. Also, they are less transparent about the status quo and where the Scrum team is heading.
Q 79: The Product Mindset in a Quickly Growing Organization
Your new product proves to be very desirable in the market, and your organization—and hence the number of Scrum teams and stakeholders—is increasing rapidly in size. So, how do you preserve a product mindset as the responsible Product Owner?
Here, the candidate should point at the importance of embracing empiricism, self-management, and autonomy to deliver value to customers within the constraints of the organization while creating a sustainable return on investment for the latter:
- Embrace self-management as a good way to cope with increasing demands regarding the Product Owner’s contributions.
- Delegate work to other Scrum team members, particularly regarding Product Backlog management and refinement.
- Create a transparent system to structure product discovery by including stakeholders.
- Be transparent about the upcoming work and artifacts to allow for inspection and adaptation.
- Go the extra mile with stakeholders (internal and external) to ensure their active participation in Scrum events.
- Generally, foster alignment and collaboration among stakeholders and Scrum team members.
- Set up and support a training program for stakeholders to understand the needs and opportunities of the product department better.
Q 80: Growing the Product Mindset as a Product Owner in Your Organization
In what ways can you support your personal growth as a Product Owner if your organization is still stuck in the old ways and far from developing a product mindset?
Even the longest journey starts with the first steps. If the “Product Owner” position is currently that of a glorified scribe taking requirements from stakeholders, and you aim to move to the entrepreneur level, I would at least explore the following steps:
- Convince the organization that becoming a learning organization by applying Scrum in a complex environment is not just a hiring technique but a sound business decision. Achieving business agility will pay dividends for everyone.
- The best way to do so is to succeed as a Scrum team within the given constraints.
- Consequently, support your Scrum team on its path to fully embrace Scrum, namely self-management, as the entrepreneur level is focused on product leadership. The groundwork, such as Product Backlog item creation and refinement, will need to be handled by others.
- Invest in networking within the organization by including stakeholders in the Scrum team’s work, for example, regarding product discovery. The further towards the entrepreneur level a PO moves, the more support they need from the C-level.
- Be transparent in everything you do. Moreover, be unbiased and non-corruptible at the same time.
- Be generous in supporting stakeholders in whatever form is necessary, for example, by offering training classes, authoring internal newsletters, or promoting Scrum events within the organization.
Q 81: Spreading the Product Focus among Scrum Teammates
How can you help other Scrum team members, namely the developers, develop a product mindset?
Speaking with John Doerr, you want missionaries, not mercenaries on your team . To achieve that state, I would recommend taking the following steps:
- Encourage Product Backlog management by Developers, for example, by ensuring that Developers fully understand the big picture, starting with the ‘Why.’
- Possible other Scrum team activities are collaboratively working on Product Goals, customer and user personas, impact maps, user story maps, prototypes, marketing strategies, business plans and models, stakeholder maps/radars, etc.
- Involve Developers in product discovery activities, for example, user research. (Having Developers observe or talk to customers and users is highly beneficial in my experience.)
- Encourage everyone on the team to regularly work in customer care to better understand everyday issues our product or service causes.
Please note that not all Developers feel comfortable with the idea of investing much time in communicating or collaboration with stakeholders while neglecting to build the product or service. (Some just like to solve puzzles all day long — which is okay as you cannot force people to get involved in these activities.)
Q 82: Engaging with Stakeholders to Further the Product Focus
So, embracing a “customer problem first” perspective, thus developing a product mindset throughout the organization, seems to be a good bet to create value for everyone. How would you engage with different groups of stakeholders in the process? How have you done so successfully in the past?
The question is designed to provide the Product Owner candidate with room to share their experience and shine. Also, it is about understanding whether they have a holistic approach to stakeholder communication and what drives a stakeholder to interact with a Scrum team. Interacting comes in many different forms, from exercising control to pursuing goals (probably also personal agendas) to being kept in the loop. The candidate should have explored some of the following approaches to stakeholder engagement:
Engaging with users:
- Invest in continuous user research, including all Scrum team members.
- Invite users to Sprint Reviews.
- Invite users to collaborative exercises, for example, user story mapping, etc.
- Encourage Scrum team members to work in customer care to understand better user needs regularly.
- Create a transparent system to support continuous product discovery and invite your users.
Engaging with providers:
- Apply the same rules to providers and contractors that apply to everyone on the team or within the organization.
- Make providers and contractors “full” team members, down to the level of email addresses.
- Consequently, do not privilege internal team members over external ones if not mandated for legal or governance reasons.
Engaging with governance people:
- Understand the constraint they are working under; try walking in their shoes.
- Include the governance people as early as possible in the Scrum team’s work, for example, regarding creating a Definition of Done.
- Align with them on roadmaps, Product Goals, and other near- and mid-term planning exercises.
- Know your (governance) stakeholder: The best tech is not necessarily the best solution from a compliance perspective. (In my experience, for example, a continuous delivery capability can turn out to be unnecessary gold-plating and thus waste if a legally required audit takes a week anyway.)
- Be cautious, though, that some governance stakeholders may be tempted to use your openness to strengthen their position within the organizational power-play.
Engaging with influencers:
- Learn to distinguish between the formal role of “influencer” and the individual that genuinely exercises influence. Sometimes, the formal role bearer and the real influencer are not identical.
- Invest in networking within the higher levels of the organization to build rapport with prospective influencers and learn early about change coming your way.
- Keep your friends close, keep your opponents closer.
Update 2022-01-13: The Product Owner Interview Questions: The Product Mindset
This latest update to the interview guide addresses product mindset; see questions 77 to 82.
Update 2021-09-21: The Product Owner Interview Questions Enhanced by Product Owner Anti-Patterns
This latest update to the interview guide addresses Product Owner anti-patterns from Product Backlog management and refinement to the Sprint Review; see questions 72 to 76.
Update 2020-06-20: The Product Owner Interview Enhanced by Remote Scrum with Distributed Teams
How can we learn during the Product Owner interview whether a candidate has experience with facilitating remote agile events?
To figure out the candidate’s competence level, I like to run a Liberating Structures-based exercise during the interview. I use TRIZ to task the Product Owner candidate to come up with suggestions on how to sabotage a remote Scrum approach effectively when talking to teammates, internal stakeholders or customers. (Who is considering running user tests in person at the moment?)
These are some of the remote agile anti-patterns the candidate should be able to identify:
- Remote Agile is just standard work-life plus Zoom : Pretending that working remotely is the same as usual except for the video cameras. (This approach ignores all the challenges that distributed teams face, for example, not investing enough in getting to know each other better to build trust. We are Social animals and need to meet In person sooner or later to build lasting trust among teammates, thus creating psychological safety. Moreover, there are difficulties in reading the virtual room in general, which means that taking decisions to the team or calling out introverts manifest themselves differently in a remote working setup. Trust is the beginning of all; without it, transparency, inspection, and adaptation would be able to work their magic, and we end up as distributed feature factories.)
- Neither fish nor meat : Hybrid events create two classes of teammates — remote and co-located — where the co-located folks are calling the shots. (Beware of the distance bias—when out of sight means out of mind—thus avoiding the creation of a privileged subclass of teammates: “Distance biases have become all too common in today’s globalized world. They emerge in meetings when folks in the room fail to gather input from their remote colleagues, who may be dialing in on a conference line.” ( Source .) To avoid this scenario, make sure that once a single participant joins remotely, all other participants “dial in,” too, to level the playing field.
- Surveillance : Trust won’t be built by surveilling and micro-managing team members. Therefore, don’t go rogue; the prime directive rules more than ever in a remote agile setup. Trust in people and do not spy on them — no matter how tempting it might be. (Read more about the damaging effect of a downward spiraling trust dynamic from Esther Derby.) https://www.estherderby.com/the-future-may-be-remote-must-it-include-surveillance/
- Mindless rituals : Leadership belief and or facilitation practices turn once useful routines into mindless rituals. (For example, think of Groundhog Day-style retrospectives over and over again. Answering the same three questions every single time is the easiest path to kill any form of creativity and collaboration. While this is hard to avoid in face-to-face environments, it requires much more dedication and energy in a remote agile setting.)
- Death by PowerPoint : Meetings still revolve around an individual broadcasting a slide deck. (While you might get away with this approach for some time in face-2-face environments, it will not fly with distributed teams. Sessions need to inclusive, interactive, and engaging to entice collaboration, think Liberating Structures, and Training from the Back of the Room.)
- Unstructured communication : “Didn’t you get the memo?” (There is no clear practice on how to communicate which kind of information to whom. Are we talking about email, Slack, the team wiki, a Github comment, or the biweekly remote brow bag session? This lack of structure and agreement leads to stress—how can I avoid missing important news now that there is no longer a watercooler; do I have to monitor all Slack channels in real-time—and probably a feeling of being excluded. Maybe, this effect is just a missing update to the working agreement or team charter. But what if it is done deliberately? ( Honi soit qui mal y pense .) in a remote agile environment always requires to overcommunicate and be completely transparent.)
For a comprehensive list of anti-patterns, read Remote Agile (Part 4): Anti-Patterns — Pitfalls Successful Distributed Teams Avoid .
Conclusion: How to Use These 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions
Scrum has always been a pragmatic business, and to succeed in this mindset, candidates need to have a passion for getting their hands dirty. While the basic rules are trivial, getting a group of individuals with different backgrounds, levels of engagement, and personal agendas, to continuously deliver value by creating a great product is challenging. The larger the organization is, the more management level there are, the more likely failure in one of its many forms is lurking around the corner.
The Product Owner interview questions are not necessarily suited to turn an inexperienced interviewer into an agile expert. However, they support figuring out what candidate has been working in the agile trenches and who’s more likely to be an imposter. (You should avoid inviting candidates from the latter category to a trial.)
Hence it’s probably a good idea to look for a pragmatic veteran who has experienced failure—and success—in other projects before and the scars to prove it.
Regarding certifications of candidates, I recommend looking out for those with PSPO I , PSPO II , and particularly PSPO III certificates from Scrum.org.
📖 Related Posts
60 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Identify Suitable Candidates .
Product Owner Anti-Patterns — 31+2 Ways to Improve as a PO .
Peer Recruiting: How to Hire a Scrum Master in Agile Times
The Scrum Guide Reordered — understand the Scrum Guide’ patterns and concepts quickly to avoid hiring imposters .
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Published by
Stefan Wolpers
Stefan—based in Berlin, Germany—has been working for 17-plus years as an agile coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org and the author of Pearson’s upcoming “Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.” He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Agile Camp Berlin, a Barcamp for coaches and other agile practitioners.
4 thoughts on “Hiring: 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters”
Ok, that was really helpful! I am building a team of agile coaches to drive the transformation of my company. You saved me loads of times here. Thanks a lot & have a great day!
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My pleasure, Rupert… 🙂
Thanks for sharing these interview questions Stefan. They are a very helpful resource.
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What Are Product Management Case Study Interviews?
BY: Ellen Merryweather
Updated: January 9, 2023 - 11 min read
What is a Product Management Case Study Interview?
A case study interview, also known as a case interview, is a tool used by many companies to assess a candidate’s analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills. Similar to coding interviews for engineers, they allow the interviewers to simulate a situation that allows your skills to be put into practice.
Quite simply, you’ll be given a situation, and asked to make suggestions or come up with a hypothetical solution or improvement.
In product management, this can be about any number of things. The realm of product managers is vast, and covers many different aspects of product development. As product managers sit at the intersection of business, technology, and design, you could be asked case questions under these umbrellas.
This means that you could be given a case question based on product design, monetization, market research, user segmentation, trends, data, technical development, go-to-market , prioritization…pretty much anything product managers are into!
Example Case Study Interview Questions
What’s your favorite product? How would you improve its design?
Which company do you think we should acquire next?
How would you go about launching our product in an emerging market, say, India?
What new feature would you build for Instagram?
How to Ace a Case Study Interview
The product design case interview
No, they’re not going to hand you a wacom tablet and ask you to mock up an entire product in the room! Instead, you’ll be asked to think through some solutions to pretty common design problems. Things like:
How would you improve our in-app messenger?
If we tasked you with making our user interface more inclusive of those with disabilities, how would you approach that?
How would you redesign our homepage to make it more appealing for X demographic?
We’re finding that X number of users don’t make it through the entire onboarding process. What would you do/design to fix that?
The key when being asked a question about how you’d improve the company’s product is not to insult it too heavily. Remember, the people who built it are in the room with you, so if you come in hot with “well, for starters, your homescreen is absolutely hideous and needs a complete do-over”, you’re not going to endear yourself to them. A product manager is a diplomat, so be as diplomatic as possible.
Instead of focusing on how you’d fix what you see as glaring problems, try to come up with something that adds to the product. “I think a chatbot in your user onboarding process would help people to navigate through the process. Here’s where I’d implement it…”
How to ace it
Give your hypothesis:
Because everything in product starts with
Lay out your approach
: Briefly summarize what your approach would be, given your hypothesis. Include things like the research you would need to do, and the preparation the team would need to make.
Identify the user:
Companies want user-driven product managers, so definitely make sure you know which user you’re building for.
Describe the solution
: How would you actually build the solution? No need to get too technical if that’s not where your skills lie. If that’s the case, talk about how you’d lead the engineering teams to build the solution.
Suggest testing:
If you’ve got 2 ideas and you’re not sure which one is better, describe both and talk about the test you’d run to discover which one to roll with.
Prioritize features
: Show off your prioritization skills if you’re suggesting more than one feature.
Suggest features for an MVP and plans for a V1 launch:
Finish off by helping the interviewers to visualize what the finished MVP would be like, as well as the plans you’d have for a full release later down the line.
The business-thinking case interview
Business thinking is vital for product managers, as you’re the person that ties what’s being built to the needs of the business. This is why you may be presented with a business problem, so that the interviewer can assess your thought process, and how you approach product strategy.
Business case questions may include things like:
Management wants to build X because a competitor has launched something similar. How would you respond?
If we wanted to move more into the B2B market by launching X, what would you do first?
How would you increase customer adoption for the feature we released last month?
We want to become more product-led in our growth strategy. What recommendations would you make in terms of pricing structure/increasing customer adoption?
Establish market characteristics
: This is especially important if your case question is a go-to-market question. If you’re not sure what the market characteristics are, talk about what you would find out before starting the work.
Layout your approach:
Briefly summarize what your approach would be.
Prioritize your actions:
If you’ve been asked for a step-by-step approach, talk about why you’re doing things in that order.
Provide analysis
: Business decisions require a heavy amount of analysis, so be sure to include some competitor/customer/market analysis.
Make recommendations:
Talk about the end result in a business sense. Instead of getting into the weeds of feature building etc, give a step-by-step approach of how you’d take a new feature to market, or make business-oriented improvements to a product.
Remember that a business-thinking case question requires an answer that would make c-suite happy. Try to think through your answer for the eyes of management. Think about what they care about the most, and tailor your answer around that.
The technical interview
Here, by technical interview, we don’t necessarily mean the tech interviews that engineers can expect to go through. It’s very rare for PMs to be asked technical questions in an interview, unless they’re specifically applying for a technical PM role. You’ll usually get some warning in advance that your technical prowess will be tested, either by the recruiter or a hiring manager.
The chances of being given an in-depth technical case interview (aka, a coding interview ) is rare, so you’re more likely to be asked a few general questions to gauge your technical ability.
Things like:
What’s your experience with X or Y technology?
Do you feel comfortable managing a team of engineers?
Can you explain the most technical project you’ve worked on?
These are questions that you should be able to answer in the room, because they’re based on your direct experience. So you don’t need to put any special level of preparation into their answers.
You may also be asked some technical questions that allow you to show off your technical knowledge, but are open-ended enough that you can still answer even if you’re not very techy. The goal is to gauge how much technical know-how you already have, not to embarrass you and put you on the spot for not having a CS degree.
These questions might include:
What feature do you think we should build next? How should we approach building it?
Would you build X solution in-house, or would you outsource development elsewhere?
What partners do you think we should integrate with next? (eg. Slack, Trello)
These are questions that you can approach in your own way, from a technical perspective if you come from that background, or from a people-management/design/business perspective if you don’t.
Product Managers and Tech Skills…What’s the Deal?
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to go through a technical interview, as product managers aren’t the ones who physically build the product. They provide the direction and the insights, and the engineers provide the solutions and the finished product. So what’s gained by seeing how well you can code?
Well, some roles are more technical than others, so obviously in these roles you’d need either a CS degree or a proven record of technical work, like an engineering background.
But for a regular product manager, you’re less likely to be given a technical case interview, and more likely to just be asked a few very general questions to gauge your knowledge.
Check out our guide to coding interviews if you’re getting ready for this type of case interview. Or, if you want to brush up on your tech skills, check out Top 10 Courses for Product Managers .
Give yourself time to think
The worst thing you can do is panic, and rush in with an answer. It’s OK to give yourself time to think. An interview is not a first date, and silences don’t have to be awkward! So pause, and give yourself time to consider your answer before you start.
That’s much better than giving a sub-standard answer that you can’t take back. The interviewer will expect you to need a moment to gather your thoughts, so don’t stress.
Hack: The McKinsey Case Study
Now, you’re bound to go off and do plenty more research on case study interviews, wanting to find out everything you can. So let us give you this secret hack: check out materials for McKinsey case interviews .
“But I want to work at Facebook/Google/Amazon!” we hear you say. “Why would I prep for McKinsey?”
McKinsey is one of the most difficult interviewers out there. Reviews by some previous interviewees makes it seem like the process was designed to help choose the next ruler of Westeros. Their standards are incredibly high, and their case interviews are something that people prep weeks, even months in advance for.
This has a double result for you. One, there are swathes of resources out there specifically to prep for this behemoth of a case interview. Two, if you can give a McKinsey-standard answer to a case interview, you’ll outshine the competition easily!
Practice ahead of time
While you can’t be totally sure what you’ll be asked in a case interview, you can still prepare. They’re not going to ask you about something you know nothing about (eg, if you’re not going to be working on an AI product, they’re not going to ask you about AI.)
The smart thing to do is to practice case interview questions ahead of time. The way to do this is to pick apart the job posting you’re interviewing for, and identify what the main responsibilities are.
Case interview preparation is absolutely essential for acing PM interviews, as you’re bound to be asked a hypothetical question sooner or later in the interview process.
Don’t feel pressured to give a perfect answer
Companies know how much time, research, and information goes into making informed product decisions. So if they’ve asked you to propose a new feature for their product as part of your interview, they’re not looking for something they can actually implement from you. They just want to see how you think, and what your analytical and problem-solving skills are. It’s also a test of your communication skills, seeing how you present yourself and your ideas.
So don’t pressure yourself into giving an answer that’s on par with the work their existing product managers do. That’s like beating yourself up for not running as fast a Usain Bolt when you do your first ever 5K.
Prepping for Product Manager Interviews?
We’ve got you covered! Check out these great resources:
Master The Product Manager Interview Playlist
: We’ve collected together our best talks on acing the Product Management interview, from a look behind the scenes of recruitment, to how to break into the industry.
Check out the entire playlist here
, or enjoy this sample from Google’s Product Manager…
The Ultimate List of Product Manager Interview Questions:
Prepare yourself for every kind of question you could ever hope to be asked in a product manager interview!
Product School Pro:
If you really want to deep-dive into the best interview techniques, and become the master of any interview you walk into, you should check out the exclusive resources we have in our Product School Pro community. We’ve got cheat sheets, templates, and more!
Hired — How to Get a Great Product Job:
Tailored guide-to-go for PM positions in top tech companies. As this book will show you, some of the most successful product transitions originated from people in music production or finance, with full-time jobs or with no prior experience. The collection of stories of Product Management transition will show you how it’s done.
Updated: January 9, 2023
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The Digital Business Analyst
Jan 28, 2019
Your Product Owner Interview Guide — Solution
Practical guidance on how to prep for an interview as product owner or business analyst.
This post provides inspiration on how to respond to the exercise scenario as you may receive it in a scenario-based interview (introduction and context in the first first post of this series ). Even if the interview is not scenario based, this is the thinking you generally need to show.
While there is very clear ‘bad’, there is a wide spectrum of ‘good’ responses and approaches. So see this example solution as general direction rather than ‘the only’ way. Also keep in mind that interviews may go into different directions, different companies or interviewers may look for different things. Context is, everything. Be context sensitive!
General Approach
The approach as PO and BA is very similar, except that I would expect the focus of the PO to be more on business strategy, product, users and value proposition, while I would expect the BA to be more ‘in the weeds’ of the detailed analysis and nitty gritty feature delivery. The general themes do apply to both though. Further thoughts on this here .
What I would generally expect to see from a seasoned candidate is to elicit and articulate
- the challenge
- the problem domain and context
- related opportunities and risks
and then provide
- a contextually matching approach on how one in the role of PO and BA (together with a team) would go about delivering the subsequent project (with their team).
Do NOT jump to the solution right away, but
- understand the business strategy and objectives
- focus on business and user needs
put all this in the enterprise and technology context AND THEN propose the most fitting solution approach.
Response: Fashion Retailer
Replay the business problem.
Problems with the client’s supply chain tool require addressing. The system is not satisfying business user needs and is built on old technology. The system is making work in inefficient and there is considerable risk that the system may stop working, impacting the business’ viability. The system pretty much is the backbone of the client’s supply chain (cataloguing > forecasting > triggering orders > allocation ). Prices are provided from a (new(er)) SAP system and orders are also handled by a separate system. There are political challenges due to previously failed attempts to modernise the system.
Top level domain understanding
Without going too far into detail you will want to demonstrate that there is need for clarification in this brief and you may want to show how you would go about sourcing this information:
You will want to understand the business to which the client would say: We are selling fast fashion for young adults via a number of stores in Germany and other countries, as well as online. Our product portfolio covers the full range of clothing from party, casual to formal. We sell in 4 seasons per year, etc… Discussion with business stakeholders but also research (annual report, website etc) are good starting points.
You will want to discuss the wider business strategy and you would be told that: market expansion is planned, and while the sales tool under discussion is currently only used in Germany, there is an expectation for the modernised version to be used globally. There are no specific business milestones related to this project. Again, the annual report or press release can be a starting point, but the more interesting stuff is usually confidential and you will only get this directly from the clients.
You will want to clarify the context of the tool in the business and how well the overall process works. Also you should touch on why modernisation failed: the tool is the backbone of the supply chain. It is used by 30 staff to bring products from manufacturers into the stores. The tool works but is unreliable, not maintainable and source of frustration. It interfaces with SAP for pricing which works but is over-designed and hard to change or intercase with, an industry standard purchasing system with a well defined interface and an old store allocation system that is expected to be replaced within 2 years. It is unclear why previous modernisation failed, but while major analysis was done, first delivery was late and did not satisfy business needs at all so that the project was cancelled. Product Owners or architects can provide this information in a workshop or interview. At this point I would expect to see scribbles or drawings of a loose system landscape including people, process, data and systems.
You certainly will want to dive deeper into objectives and the business would tell you that they are reduction of risk, increased user satisfaction and efficiency. Budget is less of a concern as this is seen as key organisational asset. Again, this information will be provided directly by business stakeholders. Possibly the business case of this project. Mention that output of this will support our definition of ‘value’ and related prioritisation.
Finally you will want to understand major business concerns which are lost trust in capability of being able to deliver this and change fatigue. In the early stages you will get these from your project contacts, but ultimately you will want to do some user research (sales and marketing team, IT team, other business users etc). Mention that these will later inform your approach to this project, as these translate into risks that you need to mitigate.
Define your overall approach
Having understood what to achieve and relevant top level context the next ting to do is to illustrate the key structure or activities you would expect as part of this project.
I personally am a fan of a Discovery or some lightweight up-front analysis phase. So here is your chance to talk about your ways of working and related values.
For the project at hand such an analysis phase is imperative, as previous waterfall style approaches have failed and we need to find an approach whereby we can identify and mitigate risks as early as possible, while at the same time reducing mis-trust and change fatigue by delivering something of value that works. Consequently our goal of the next 4–6 weeks should be to identify areas of risk and value and define a roadmap that allows us to achieve these goals over time.
Analysis during Discovery
We want to analyse the following in more detail (you may want to elaborate who you want to do these activities with (your colleagues and client roles) as well as how you would go about doing these things):
- Project stakeholders and their impact and expectations from the project to know we are doing the right thing. This is also a point to start discussion around team shape, i.e. your, the clients and other resources, their availability and skills. A stakeholder map or onion diagram works well here.
- System users , their pains, gains and needs to understand where we can deliver value. We want to be close to these users and make sure we deliver the right ting for them. There is a risk with this project to rebuild the old system in new technology which may solve some challenges but miss a major opportunity: at this point it sounds as if business process follow the tooling, rather than tooling being optimised to support user needs. We need to shift to the latter. UX / CX specialists are usually good to pair with in this area. This is also a good point to start thinking about some NFRs, such as the expected performance of the system, reliability, throughput, etc… Empathy maps, Strategyzer’s pain, gains diagrams, but also experience maps or user journeys are artefacts that are worth mentioning. Hypothesis driven design, user research and testing are also valuable techniques at this stage.
- Business process and system landscape to understand how everything fits together. This should cover people, process, data, events and technology and would require a wide range of stakeholders in a collaborative exercise. As part of this we will also want to look more closely into products and data to understand variations and complexities. There will certainly be some reverse-engineering, especially in the areas that are complex and important, for instance the forecasting algorithm. At this stage we should possibly also talk about risk and dependencies , these mostly being around 3rd party system integration, as well as a tendency for the business to lean to waterfall. A mix of user experience, process and system maps will allow us to understand the interplay of people with technology and the various (sub) systems. You may want to mention dependency trees and risk maps / logs.
- From the above we can then derive a top level list of required capabilities and features . Which we can illustrate as requirements trees or storymaps.
- In parallel we should pair with a delivery lead to look at client values and culture to define ways of working . In this example the client clearly isn’t used to agile but looking at the challenge, an iterative incremental approach whereby we start with a high value part and then evolve from there is the most fitting approach as it reduces investment and technological risk, allows us to deal with change fatigue and (re)build trust.
Next we will have to define our delivery approach.
- First there is the question of fix / rebuild / buy. ‘Fix’ is clearly not an option, considering the old technology. The ‘build’ vs. ‘buy’ decision could be taken by comparing OTS offerings with the required capabilities and qualities and compare and contrast this with the benefits and cost of a custom solution. Assume in this case we conclude that for this client a system that is highly custom is the most appropriate. A classic scorecard is one of the tools that can be used. So might be the old — school SWOT or better Wardley map.
- Considering that we are replacing an existing solution and have concluded that we are adopting an incremental approach to rebuild, we can use our previous domain analysis to slice the system into parts that we can deliver against in a meaningful way. We base this on Domain Driven Design principles and define slices that are cohesive and valuable while sufficiently small so that we can analyse and deliver them ( more here ). Having identified such slices or ‘parts’ we then need to define in which order to deliver them. Again, this comes down to objectives, value and risk. You have two basic options: start simple to build trust and get to know the client thus reducing political risk, start complex to reduce technical risk. In this context one might opt for the former by building a cataloguing tool, rather than the latter which would have been the forecasting feature. Following similar logic you can build a slice or feature roadmap .
- In parallel you will expect to support your colleagues in technical analysis to define data structures, tech stack etc and your DevOps colleagues in defining infrastructure and path to production . Specifically considering any non functional requirements that may be relevant (in this case performance more than regulatory concerns).
Dependent on our approach we can then refine top level requirements and features, possibly with POCs, Wireframes, Prototypes to get a a point where we can provide a top level estimate for the entire solution and derive a prioritised backlog if we work semi-agile, or we can focus on the first ‘slice’ and only flush this out and head into delivery.
It is worth talking about ways of working and cultural values you believe in, specifically focusing on hour approach to communication and collaboration. I personally expect seasoned POs and BAs to talk about working iterative, lean, hypothesis driven and user centric (and really understand what these concepts mean in practice).
As far as PO vs BA are concerned I would expect the PO to focus more on the overall value proposition and business need, while a BA would be more in the detailed analysis of individual requirements, constraints and rules.
And During Actual Delivery
Where feature delivery per se is concerned I would expect a PO to focus on alignment with business objectives and context, providing clear guidance and goals, roadmaps and wider context, as well as a rational of why things are being done and why they are important. A PO would provide priorities and business level stories. A POs job is to facilitate the identification of business needs, finding solutions, assess and prioritise them in light of cost and value, facilitate related decision making and provide guidance for the delivery team.
A BA on the other hand would possibly be less interested in the justification of why a features is needed, but more in the details of providing stories with the right level of detail so that software engineers can deliver quality features. This means understanding data and business rules in detail and expressing them in form of acceptance criteria. A BAs job is to facilitate the elicitation of complex information and expressing it in a way as to facilitate related decision making and implementation.
It is maybe important to say that I believe that PO and BA are two roles on a continuum and cannot really be easily separated.
Do you have a real example?
I do, in fact: I have presented a real world case study very similar to the above example in a previous post (video) .
Is this it?
I am not saying the above is all that can be said or that should be said in an interview. But if you touch on these aspects (in the context of your interview of course), there is a very good chance that you are covering most of what is expected.
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Feb 11, 2023
Product Owner Interview
Anonymous Interview Candidate
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Revolut
Fue contactada por LinkedIn por un Recruiter, me pregunto si estaría interesado en hacer una llamada sin compromiso. Acepte, me envió un enlace para decidir un día para esa llamada. Me llamaron vía zoom en el día que había decidido.
Nov 21, 2022
Anonymous Interview Candidate in London, England
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Revolut (London, England) in Nov 2022
5 or 6-part process. Pulled out after the second stage as decided wasn't interested in changing orgs. The first stage was a call with the recruiter, second stage was an aptitude test.
- What is a metric I've moved. 1 Answer
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Anyone got any tips for the culture at Revolut in the UK? Heard some pretty negative things about the WLB as well as hours. Is this true? I have been offered a job there but not sure whether to take it. Interview process was super intense aswell.
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Oct 22, 2022
Anonymous Employee
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Revolut in Oct 2022
1. HR screening — typical questions 2. Home task to show how I dealt with various use cases in a recently developed product from my own professional experience — recorded a video 3. Call with senior designer — looked at my actual Figma designs for real products I've managed, asked how I manage relationships with designers 4. Product sense call — solved a real-life product development case like "how would you go about creating a loyalty programme", there are many guidelines on how to solve such cases online 5. Bar raiser interview — non-technical questions about my previous experiences and whether it corresponds with Revolut values 6. Team interview — checking the fit between me and the actual team Loved how involved my recruiter was throughout the whole process — we openly discussed salaries, work conditions, feedback from her colleagues about me, she prepped me to interviews. I felt great interest in myself and excitement during the interviewing stage.
- How do you make sure your designers work through all use cases effectively? How would you launch a new unsecured loan product at Revolut? Look at this IT architecture flow and explain how data moves. What data would you use to decide whether or not to develop this CJM stage? If your current boss was to rate you at 10 level scale — which level would you be at? Answer Question
Jun 4, 2022
Anonymous Interview Candidate in Berlin
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Revolut (Berlin) in Jun 2022
Company recruiters reached out via Linkedin and scheduled a call. Then we had an initial call with one of the internal recruiters and then they sent a pointless CCAT test. They immediately sent me a reply after I completed the test and claimed that my results were below the so-called benchmarks. The questions have nothing to do with the role itself and the test is literally a waste of time. I am a product professional with 8+ years of experience and I regret every second I spent in this process. I doubt the authenticity of the interviews.
- The initial online test has nothing to do with the role. Test has 50 questions that need to be answered in 15 minutes. There is basic problem solving, pattern analyzing questions, and many rare English vocabulary questions. Answer Question
Jul 7, 2022
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Revolut
I had got a dm from a staff recruiter who had reached out to me via Linkedin and scheduled a call at Revolut in 2022. The interview process was supposed to be of 4-5 rounds.
- Round 1: Screening round with a recruiter coordinator who checked about my background and experience - 30-40 mins meeting Round 2: An online CCAT test. Had to solve 50 questions in 15 minutes. This was to be solved and later validated across a certain benchmark. Answer Question
Jul 8, 2022
Anonymous Interview Candidate in Paris
I applied through other source. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Revolut (Paris) in Jul 2022
I was contacted via Linkedin. Had an online call interview of 30 minutes, and it stopped there. The interviewer was talking with a strong Indian accent, difficult to understand. The interviewer was reading a script to present the company, in a very mechanical way. I thought my experience matches pretty well, answered brillantly to questions, yet I received a generic refusal message. I asked for individual feedback, but she never reply to me.
- Can you write technical specifications? What's your background? Answer Question
May 26, 2022
I interviewed at Revolut
The interview process entails the following: - An Introductory call with a tech recruiter - Problem solver question - Product Skill - Bar Raiser The process takes about 3-4weeks. You have the opportunity to work with a tech recruiter through the process.
- There were no serious questions since it was an introduction - I was asked what I know about the company - I was also asked about the project I have worked on - I was asked how long notice does my current employer require - Am I available to relocate? Answer Question
Oct 4, 2022
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Revolut (London, England) in Jun 2022
Phone screening, problem solving interview and a few additional stages that are already shared below. The problem solving interview was really underprepared I feel, neither problem definition was well defined nor interviewer was prepared to hold a conversation.
- Which part of the onboarding funnel would you improve to increase CVR? Answer Question
May 16, 2022
had an Intro Call to Revolut with a recruiter. the interview served as first step of the interview process before going to problem solving interviews afterwards. The intro call was quick and was finished within 20 minutes
- - which KPIs do you work with? - How big is your product team? - Please describe the product management process at your company Answer Question
Jun 30, 2022
Anonymous Interview Candidate in Stoke-on-Trent, England
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Revolut (Stoke-on-Trent, England) in May 2022
I have never seen such as bad interview process for product than in Revolut (and I have given interview from biggest companies to startup). They will have one main product round and let me sum it up in easy language. They will give you a very very broad problem and 60 min to solve. And it gets messy from here. They want you to work out in excruciating detail on everything. Right from success criteria, to design, system architecture, building blocks, technical flow diagrams, payloads, API request structure, stability, reliability etc etc. And to top that up they want you to write in an online whiteboard as mandatory. Basically, what a company does in 3-4 rounds to check your different skills, they want to shortcut to do it in 1 round. And this solves ZERO things. It eliminated great candidates for them not because they were weak but because process was so bad. Your results are pure luck as if you choose areas to shortlist that the interviewer wants to know then okay. Otherwise problem is so big that despite whatever prioritization you do, there are hundred of things to be discussed and as I said, they want to go in all details in 45-50 min. Also, there is agency problem- they only give revolut related case study. In this they are the one with more knowledge than someone who is great PM but not from Fintech background. Normally, in Google and other good startups, they choose problems which could be on any product and need not be of that company so that everyone as equal knowledge about it. I was shocked that the process is so bad. Someone who created this should test the water and attempt other rounds in company and their own round [not see any recording but actually give an interview] Decided not to join this company because of this and the cultural feedback (no wonder culture is bad if this is how they are getting PM it means the people are not talented but lucky). PS: The interview is not difficult. Don't confuse it that way that it helps them to raise bar. If I give you weeks of work to do in one hour then its not smart but stupid. Nine woman won't deliver a baby in one month.
- example: Build whole product from scratch. Answer Question
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product owner Interviews
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Product owner Interview Questions
Product owners are key players in agile development projects. Often the most invested in the outcome of a project, product owners direct development teams towards achieving key goals. Teams looking for product owners will be searching for candidates who have the ability to create a clear vision for the future of the product, prioritise objectives and successfully lead a team to delivering results.
Top Product Owner Interview Questions & How to Answer
Here are three top product owner interview questions and tips on how to answer them:
Question No. 1: Who do you think is the essential product stakeholder and why?
How to answer: This open-ended question seeks to establish whether the product owner knows who the target market is. As a product owner, you should understand who the external stakeholders are and develop your product accordingly. Although each stakeholder plays a vital role in the process, you must also interact with the stakeholders and explain how each one contributes to the success of a product.
Question No. 2: How do you update your team about market situations or products?
How to answer: As part of your interview, this open-ended question helps the interviewer assess your communication and interpersonal skills when working with a team in product development. As the product owner, it is your job to ensure that the team is aware of any changes in market demands. You must make sure that all team members understand the vision behind your product. Explain the process of updating your team. Describe the information that is most important to share with your team and why.
Question No. 3: Which product discovery frameworks have you used?
How to answer: This open-ended question allows you to showcase your knowledge of and experience with various product discovery frameworks. You can demonstrate how you determine the applicability and efficacy of each and why you use the frameworks you do.
Top Interview Questions
Many questions on scenarios related to position requirements.
Did you study for any of the Assessment Tests? Thank you.
How long after the last interview did you wait for until they contacted you?
I got an email within a week
Case Study Based Questions
Any example? Was case study given in advance?
Yes it was given in advance and was discussed during meeting with founder
How do you handle conflict resolution between team members?
Interesting question for a Product Owner, I would generally consider managing the team dynamics (including conflict) as a key part of the Scrum Master role. Less
In response to the inquiry above, the Product Owner and Scrum Master role at Renovate America are considered one role. It's obviously not ideal since these two roles are supposed to balance each other, but that is the current setup at the company. Quite a bit of responsibility for one role. The PO manages the backlog (feature prioritization) and runs all retrospectives as well. Less
Did you have contact with [internal recruiter]?
Yes, she emailed me about the assessment
How long did it take them to tell you you were not getting an offer?
How much liquid capital i had
With proof of my liquid capital.
Found excellent read: bit.ly/faang100
Tell me how to calculate the cost and release date for an MVP?
MVP has to be defined first. Assuming you have a list of stories that are all groomed and sized, you can combine that with your estimated velocity of your dev team. This velocity should be based on a historical average. If you have roughly 100 points worth of stories in your MVP and you do 10 points of velocity a sprint, you should be done in 10 sprints. You then multiply the cost of the development per sprint (# of engineers @ rate) by 10. That's the cost, but you should charge your margin on top of that. Also, there's always "found" work so you should add 50% schedule slack so it really should take 15 sprints. Underpromise and overdeliver. Less
MVP has to be defined first. Assuming you have a list of stories that are all groomed and sized, you can combine that with your estimated velocity of your dev team. This velocity should be based on a historical average. If you have roughly 100 points worth of stories in your MVP and you do 10 points of velocity a sprint, you should be done in 10 sprints. You then multiply the cost of the development per sprint (# of engineers @ rate) by 10. That's the cost, but you should charge your margin on top of that. Also, there's always "found" work so you should add 50% schedule slack so it really should take 15 sprints. Underpromise and overdeliver if you can. Less
As a PO you met with two VPs who want their Biopham compliance documents in digital format. Describe how you would go about this in 10 minutes
I would ask them what exactly do they envision being able to do when this work is delivered. This is my way crafting acceptance criteria and success factors. I would ask why the current way is not working, why the change now? If the ask seemed like a ton of effort, I would ask if the team could produce part of this request, what would be the most critical piece in order for the digital format to be useful. I would just listen for the messages not said directly suchas, if they really know what they want and why. Less
Since the VPs want a digital version of their compliance documents, it is implied they have physical versions. I'd ask for a hard copy of the compliance document. Once I have a version in hand, I'd ask them what parts of the document tend to be the same doc-to-doc, and which parts change or require user input. Less
What would I do if time and money was no oblect ?
How much do you want to earn and by when ?
Spread knowledge
If I am fine with working in adult entertainment industry.
It was unexpected as we are in 2018!!!! Why would somebody care for a tech job in adult industry? Less
Thank you for your honest feedback. We feel it's important to thoroughly explain our business model with openness and transparency. Our websites have changed how people relate to and think of online entertainment market and we are the leader in premium adult content worldwide. Our award-winning brands have become a point of reference for the industry and we are very proud of the recognition we have gained. This would not be possible without the amazing talent we hire - anyone across our teams from marketing to technology - we ensure we hire the people who are passionate and comfortable with what we do. We feel by asking the right questions you get the right answers! Thank you! Less
How much risk does a business take on a given guaranteed price based on the price of the guaranteed product with the non-guaranteed product? This was given with actual numbers and I needed ot figure out the answer.
Guaranteed product in Booking.com's case refers its model (agency - where it doesn't guarantee rooms) to its competitors (merchant/guaranteed - where rooms are pre-bought like wholesale in advance). The risk calculation needs to factor in - What price can the rooms be pre-bought at? What price can it be sold at (i.e. margin) - What probability is it that they will get sold (here the risk is of buying the room but not managing to sell it forward) - How will they be placed in search when compared to rooms which aren't pre-bought (conflict risk?) And some more complicated angles to dig deeper might be how it affects other hotels, whether you need to prebuy for the whole year or for a season or for just a short period, or how long in advance you need to prebuy (since youre competing with other people also trying to prebuy) etc PS - I was actually asked this question in a mock interview on preptick.com, and got this answer from an ex-Booking guy, so I'm pretty sure its accurate ;) Less
My humble attempt: Analogy. Uber's scheduled rides vs. on-demand rides with a fixed price given source, destination and nature of taxi. Loss mostly boil down to (a) loss of new & existing consumers due to non-guarantee of taxis in scheduled rides (b) consumer security in the event of non-guarantee (c) more consumer cancellations affecting drivers due to learnt behaviour Less
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Product Owner Interview Questions
Product owners are responsible for advancing the needs of the customer as part of the development team in a company.
When interviewing product owners, look for candidates who can actively drive projects, and create and maintain the product backlog for optimum results. Be wary of candidates who do not have a solid understanding of the product lifecycle and Agile methodologies.
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Interview Questions for Product Owners:
1. can a product owner be the scrum master in a team.
Reveals technical knowledge.
2. Why is it important for the product owner to create and maintain the product backlog?
Demonstrates in-depth job knowledge and experience.
3. Can you describe a typical work week for a product owner?
Shows communicative ability and depth of knowledge and experience.
4. What defines success for a product owner?
Reveals technical knowledge and experience.
5. What is the most challenging project you have worked on? What was the outcome?
Demonstrates the candidate's tenacity and ability to solve problems.
Related Articles:
Business analyst interview questions, ux designer interview questions, business analyst job description, ux designer job description, product owner job description.
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Effectively interviewing for an available product manager position often entails highlighting your knowledge of product design, development, marketing and project management to a prospective employer. Hiring managers often create case studies to determine how qualified candidates might handle certain situations if hired.
This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the product mindset. The questions are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients.
The Case Study round is one of the qualifier rounds for any product manager interviews. It helps recruiters understand your product, problem-solving, and communication skills. Generally,...
A case interview is a form of an interview in which the hiring manager gives the candidate a business problem and asks them to suggest a solution to deal with it. Hiring managers typically utilise case studies for interviews in investment banking or management consulting.
A case study interview, also known as a case interview, is a tool used by many companies to assess a candidate's analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills. Similar to coding interviews for engineers, they allow the interviewers to simulate a situation that allows your skills to be put into practice.
Here are the four common types of Product Manager case study questions that you should expect in your case study interview, ordered from the most common to least common: Product Design Questions Product Strategy Questions Estimation and Analysis Questions Scheduling/Operational Questions Product Design Case Study Questions
Product Owner Interview - Case Study, Reservation Data Please note that you will need to bring a laptop & connect to a projector for your interview. We will have these 2 video inputs...
The Product Manager addresses this tough case by serving as liaison to stakeholders and working with Product Owners to decompose and prioritize. The Product Manager represents the stakeholders, prioritizes MBIs, decomposes MBIs into components, and represents the stakeholders to Product Owners. The Product Owner acts as the SME to the team ...
100+ Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers for 2023 Home Agile Management Product Owner Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers Agile Management 4.8 Rating 125 Question (s) 60 Mins of Read 11738 Reader (s) Are you planning to make a career as a Product Owner? Are you worried about the interview?
The Product Owner shapes the vision of the product. On the other hand, they try to maximize its value and use technical resources in such a way as to create a product satisfying the customer's needs. I would say that the Product Owner is an ambassador among the developers.
The Product Manager case study interview is a way for companies to evaluate your problem-solving skills. They want to see how you identify product users, measure product performance, navigate technical aspects, and so on. You can demonstrate these competencies with a variety of answers. Don't Spend More Time Than You Need To
A guy who knows a thing or two about preparation. To prepare for product management interviews, be sure to do the following: Product Research: Most companies ask product questions related to ...
Product Owner Interview: 82 Questions to Avoid Hiring Imposters Top Categories Agile and Scrum Agile Transition Books Downloads Lean and Product News Podcasts Resources Videos Webinars Workshops Top Articles Club Scrum: What Are You Doing all Day, ChatGPT — as a Scrum Master? The Scrum Master Salary Report 2023
Early Stage Read Case Study Slack - Initial Launch Strategy In this gripping interview, Steward Butterfield, CEO of Slack, explains the importance of prioritizing your product's unique features, knowing the metrics you are chasing, and shares tips to become essential to your customers right away. Early Stage Read Case Study Superhuman - Finding PMF
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Case interviews are most commonly used for investment banking or management consulting interviews. These types of interviews are used to determine a candidate's analytical ability and problem-solving capabilities. While preparing for a job interview is often an important step in the job search process, case interviews often require extra ...
Here are three top product owner interview questions and how to answer them: Question #1: Who do you think is the essential product stakeholder and why? How to answer: This open-ended question looks to establish whether the product owner knows who the target market is.
Interview. 1. HR screening — typical questions 2. Home task to show how I dealt with various use cases in a recently developed product from my own professional experience — recorded a video 3. Call with senior designer — looked at my actual Figma designs for real products I've managed, asked how I manage relationships with designers 4.
This video will prepare you for the next Product Owner/ Manager interview. 20 Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers Product HQ 54K views 1 year ago A super Realistic DAY IN MY...
138 "product owner" interview questions. Learn about interview questions and interview process for 292 companies. Sign In. Interviews. Search. Explore. Jobs. Companies. Salaries. Careers. For Employers. Post Jobs. Jobs. Discover Jobs. ... Case Study Based Questions 4 Answers.
Interview Questions for Product Owners: 1. Can a product owner be the scrum master in a team? Reveals technical knowledge. 2. Why is it important for the product owner to create and maintain the product backlog? Demonstrates in-depth job knowledge and experience. 3.