What technical questions can we expect for product marketing interviews?

This will depend heavily on the kind of product you are interviewing to market. The more technical the product, the more "technical" questions you might get.

Even so, you should be 100% prepared to:

• Talk about what their product does (use cases)
• Talk about who their product is for (audience)
• Understand that context their product lives in (market + technical specs)

You should know these things regardless of whether they're being asked in an interview. These are all important to know before signing up as their new PMM.

At Retool, our product helps developers to build business software. My core audience is developer-focused, and use cases include a lot of complicated internal processes (e.g. helping banks manage loan applications). 

So when I'm hiring, I need PMMs who can:

1. Understand how developers build software today
2. Sell to developers

That does not mean you have to be an engineer. You do, however, need to prove that you can learn and teach really hard things.

You should use technical interviews to show that you have unlimited learning potential. When I was interviewing for my role at Segment, they worried that my background (ad-tech, B2B SaaS) might not be technical enough for a developer product.

But I shared the steps I took to learn about programmatic advertising and data privacy laws at AdRoll, and how I used that knowledge to help inform great product decisions and product launches. I made the case that I could learn hard things and earn my seat with a hard-to-impress audience, and it made all the difference.

For interviews for tenured PMMs (e.g. team leads/managers, or principal PMMs /senior ICs) , it is a common practice to ask for a case study or presentation based on a real-life business situation. Some of them require data analysis as well

The most technical aspect of product marketing is ‘messaging’. I expect every PMM candidate to be able to describe a product’s value proposition in their unique way. This is a common question in most PMM interviews - “How would you describe your product to a layperson ? “

In my experience, the technical questions I think you can expect will be around your methodology for ramping up on technical products, and your ability (and examples) where you marketed technical products or features in a way that elevates the story outside of functionality and into value. Be able to demonstrate your ability to partner with product, engineering and design teams, providing feedback and input into product decisions while also being a solid partner to Marketing and bringing the product voice to life in marketing materials. 

Being able to speak to how you think about data and insights will be a big value add as well. What metrics have you tracked and influenced in your previous PMM roles, and how. How have you used data to influence decisions - but qualitatively and quantitatively? 

You should always have a few case study-style stories in your back pocket for a product marketing interview, such as an example of a launch, a sales enablement program, a growth project, and more. This gives you a chance to showcase your craft knowledge (frameworks, processes, collaboration, etc.), along with an opportunity to tell the story about how your work drove commercial outcomes (pipeline, ARR, conversion rates, etc.).