Ace Your Product Sense Interview: 10 Essential Questions Decoded

Don’t let the product sense interviews stand in the way of your dream job!

Here are the 10 most common product sense questions — and how to answer them:

The basic framework, as you will see, in all of these questions is to:

• Tie it back to a recent story so you can be solid
• Bring it back to principles to answer their question
• Showcase a level of wisdom and expertise that is beyond the generic right answer

If you enjoy this, check out the 8,000 word deep dive on product sense interviews. (This also includes 45 min case questions)

1. How would you prioritize features for our next release?

• I’m open to a range of prioritization frameworks
• One I really like is
• I find it better than other options because
• It led to this impact in a prior role

2. What methods would you use to gather user feedback for an existing product?

• Nothing replaces talking to customers regularly
• I would also work with the user research + analytics teams
• Here’s an example of user feedback that I used to drive impact recently

3. How would you identify the target audience for a new product?

• I did this recently
• I started with understanding the competitive strategy
• Then I prioritized options based on: segment size, severity of problem, competition, and ability to solve
• Here was the impact

4. Walk me through how you would design a new feature to enhance user engagement.

• A recent example of this was
• I helped lead the problem definition and metrics to make a good decision
• From there, I empowered design
• The impact was

5. Describe your approach to iterating on a design based on user feedback.

• I make usability testing a part of the process for big features
• Here’s an example where we used X advanced methods to inform the design
• The user feedback contributed to this big impact

6. Describe a situation where you had to solve a complex problem at your previous company.

• A complex problem with big impact I had to solve was
• It was complex because
• The advanced problem solving techniques I used were

7. What steps would you take if the key metric for a feature suddenly dropped?

• A time when this happened was
• I started with understanding the metrics more deeply around it in a MECE framework
• Then I chased down top hypotheses across a range of areas like

8. Explain how you would measure the success of a new feature.

• A recent feature I launched that had a complex metrics framework was
• Our framework was
• This worked well because

9. What would you do if you had to cut a major feature due to time constraints?

• This happened to me recently
• Here’s how I minimize the negative impact to the business and team
• Here’s why it worked

10. What tools and methods would you use to analyze user behavior?

• Data, research, and talking to users are all important to me
• Different tools work well in different stages of the lifecycle
• A recent project I drove with because of analyzing user behavior was

Note: The bullets shared below each question are a basic structure of an answer.

These are just to give you inspiration.

Of course, never lie and always customize to your situation.