Question Page

What product marketing interview questions and resources do you recommend to prepare for from both hiring managers and cross-functional partners?

Jenna Crane
Jenna Crane
Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Drift, Dropbox, UpworkNovember 17

I'd recommend having on hand:

  • Your story. Be prepared to give a brief walkthrough of your background and experience. I always like to see when someone has a strong narrative about their career — why they made each move, the highlights of their experience and what they learned, and what they're looking for next. 
  • An example of a product launch or major project you led that you were particularly proud of. Be prepared to talk about the process of putting it together, any difficulties you faced and how you overcame them, and what the impact was (with actual metrics like revenue, product adoption, or awareness / engagment lift if you can!). 
  • Examples of how you've worked with each of the functions represented on the interview panel. If you're speaking with a PM, a sales director, and a performance marketer, for example, prep stories about how you've worked with product, sales, and performance marketing. 
  • A few companies that you think are doing product marketing well. The first time I got asked this question in an interview, I didn't have an answer prepared, and it was super tough to think of a few on the spot. You may not get asked this question, but you'll be grateful to have an answer in your back pocket if you do. 
  • Questions for each of the panelists. Even if they're basic ones like 'how do you envision the person in this role will work with your team?' or 'what are the characteristics of people who are really successful at this company?' you don't want to be left without any questions for the interviewer. 
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Kevin Garcia
Kevin Garcia
Anthropic Product Marketing LeaderMay 4

One way that I like to prepare for an interview is to go in with the mindset that you are an investor (which you are, with your time!). As an investor, you want to learn everything you can about the company:

  1. Who are they? (homepage, fundraise announcements, careers page descriptions)
  2. What do they do? (docs, G2, TrustRadius, Twitter, support forums, YouTube videos)
  3. Who are they solving for? (main nav website, titles on G2/TrustRadius, blog posts)
  4. How big/interesting is that market? (industry sites, Twitter, influencers, analyst reports)

Why all the preparation? The same reason you research your audience when launching products: the more you know about the context around the company and who they target, the more you can cater your career story to what matters for them.

At a bare minimum, every PMM should read a company's website, blog, and (if applicable) technical docs. 

This preparation is more valuable than memorizing generic answers to interview questions! Take, for example, if you wanted a career at AdRoll (one of my former employers who offers software to run ads, emails, and growth experiments). 

They mostly generate business through product-led growth (aka self-serve signups) and cater to SMB businesses. If you know that when talking to the head of sales, you can cater your conversation to how you've helped create launches that expand self-serve users to annual contracts—which is much more relevant to them simply because you know how the company acquires most of their customers. 

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Christine Sotelo-Dag
Christine Sotelo-Dag
ThoughtSpot Senior Director of Product MarketingApril 19

Outside of researching common product marketing interview questions and generic interview prep like that, I think the best resources probably live on the hiring organization's website and resources. Learn as much as you can about the organization, how they position themselves, who their core audience is, the competitive landscape. This is going to take your interview to the next level and really help the hiring manager see you in the role as you already have a baseline knowledge of the organization. 

The best preparation you can do is to have really clear examples ready for your work. Think of the STAR example. Situation, Task, Action, Result. Keep those elements in each of your examples and it will help you prepare concise answers to your cross-functional partners questions. Be prepared to talk about how you've worked cross-functionally in the past and cover both highs and lows of those working relationships. 

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Mary Sheehan
Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRollOctober 17

I wrote a blog post on this - linked below! 

Here are some questions that help me find the "A" players - 

Do you have a product marketing philosophy?
What’s the biggest project you’ve led? What worked/ didn’t?
Challenge: If you had $5k to spend in any way you wanted, how would you spend it and why?
Will this be the same type of role you’ve done before or something different?
Have you been promoted in your previous role?
How did you manage success in your last role?
What new skill have you learned lately? (personal or professional)

I explain a little more in my post, but the idea is that you want people that are curious, always learning, ready to tackle big things, and understand where they can grow. 

Blog post - how to hire a rockstar product marketer 

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Lisa Dziuba
Lisa Dziuba
Lemon.io Head of Growth Product Marketing | Formerly LottieFiles, WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold)December 3

Great question! 

Before going to your PMM interview absorb all available information on the role & company & product, run several mock-up interviews with PMM peers and draft your portfolio. Let's cover all these in more detail:

  1. Learn from product marketing communities, like Product Marketing Alliance and Sharebird.
  2. Review the PMM job description and requirements to understand the specific skills and experience that this company is looking for. This will help you identify your strengths and areas for improvement, and will also give you a better sense of what to expect in the interview.
  3. Practice interviews with other PMMs or mentors. This will help you get comfortable with the types of questions you are likely to be asked, and will also give you an opportunity to receive feedback and improve.
  4. Get together your PMM portfolio and case studies. So you will have practical examples from your part experience for many potential questions.

In terms of the types of questions you can expect in a PMM interview, these might include (but are not limited to 😃):

  • Questions about your experience and qualifications, including any experience with positioning, GTMs, content, sales enablement, analytics + much more depending on the PMM role focus.
  • Questions about your product marketing approach, including your process for positioning and promoting products, your approach to market research, and your strategies for driving product adoption.
  • Questions about your communication and collaboration skills, including how you work with other teams, how you handle feedback and objections, and how you present and sell ideas to others.

Some of the typical questions you can train to answer could be:

  • Can you provide an example of a product that you have successfully launched or repositioned?
  • How do you gather and use customer feedback to improve your product marketing efforts?
  • Can you describe a situation where you had to handle a difficult objection or challenge in your product marketing work?
  • How do you work with other teams, such as Product Management, Sales, and Marketing, to drive user acquisition?
  • Can you provide examples of how you have used data and analytics to inform your product marketing decisions?
  • Tell about your failed GTM and what you have learned.

This was a very long answer. 

In short: prepare, prepare, prepare.

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Abdul Rastagar
Abdul Rastagar
GTM Leader | Marketing Author | Career CoachJune 11

Product marketers are bound to get the “describe a successful product launch you’ve done” question (or some other iteration of it). Be prepared to answer with outcomes rather than going through a checklist of activities. What were you trying to achieve and how did you measure progress?

I think Sharebird is a great resource for learning. I’d try to absorb as much as possible here. But honestly, the best thing you can do to prepare for interviews is to practice over and over again with more senior marketers, someone who has a lot of experience in conducting interviews. I cannot overstate the value you will get out of it. Find a colleague, an old boss, or a mentor to work with you. By the way, I do these types of practice interviews with people all the time so find me on LinkedIn if you want, happy to help.

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