# Structured Interview Guide: Senior Product Manager (PM) ## Competency Focus: Data-Driven Decision Making ### Question 1 **Primary Question:** Tell me about a time when you had to make a critical product decision, but the data you had was incomplete or contradictory. How did you proceed? **Probe:** What specific metrics did you rely on as a proxy, and looking back, was that the right choice? ### Question 2 **Primary Question:** Describe a situation where your intuition about a feature completely conflicted with what the A/B testing data was telling you. How did you handle the situation with your team? **Probe:** How did you communicate the pivot to the engineers who had spent weeks building the feature based on your initial intuition? ### Question 3 **Primary Question:** Walk me through a time when you used user behavior data to kill a feature that was already in production. **Probe:** How did you calculate the maintenance cost versus the value it provided to justify sunsetting it? ## Scoring Rubric: Data-Driven Decision Making - **High (Strong Hire):** Candidate provides specific examples of defining success metrics *before* launching. They clearly separate vanity metrics from actionable metrics and demonstrate how data directly influenced the roadmap and revenue. - **Medium (Borderline):** Candidate mentions using data (e.g., "we looked at Google Analytics"), but their decision-making process still leaned heavily on consensus or qualitative feedback. They struggle to tie the data back to a concrete business result. - **Low (Do Not Hire):** Candidate speaks in theoretical terms ("I would look at the data") rather than giving past examples. They show confirmation bias (only looking for data that supports their idea) or blame the data team for lack of insights. ## Culture Fit Assessment: Fail Fast and Learn **Question:** Tell me about a product or feature you launched that completely failed. What was the hypothesis, why did it fail, and how did that failure change your approach to the next launch?