How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question
How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview questionHigh-signal-to-noise interview questions inspired by my 150+ podcast guests👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. P.S. Don’t miss Lennybot (an AI chatbot trained on my newsletter posts, podcast interviews, and more), my PM recruiting service (helping you hire Sr. PMs and VPs), my swag store (great gifts for your favorite PM, or yourself!), and The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter book (all proceeds going to charity).
In most hiring processes, you’re lucky if you get 45 minutes to chat with a candidate before you have to make a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision. How do you use that precious time to get the most—and most important—information? For over a year now, I’ve been asking my illustrious podcast guests to share their favorite interview questions (nearly 150 guests now!), and the collection of questions that’s emerged is like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. These are not just great questions—they are exceptionally good at pulling out the essential insights about the candidate in the least amount of time. Below, I’ll share my 25 favorite high-signal-to-noise interview questions, including what to look for in a great answer, grouped by theme. If you’ve found any other questions that are super-valuable in your interview experience, please share in the comments! Thank you to Jeremy Jerschina for encouraging me to write this post, Gün Karagöz for consolidating a lot of these questions for me, and all of my podcast guests for sharing such amazing questions! As you read through this list, pick a few that resonate with your process and goals, and try them out in your next interview panel. How do they handle the hard stuff?You can learn the most about how a person operates, thinks, and collaborates by exploring times when things didn’t go as planned. If they get hired, you can guarantee they’ll face unexpected challenges, so you’ll want to know how they’ll handle these moments before they have to tackle them on your team. 1. Talk me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?
2. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?
3. Tell me about a time you’ve been in a challenging or highly ambiguous situation, and how you navigated that ambiguity.
@lennyrachitskyPause it and try before she reveals what she’s looking for! #productmanager #productmanagement #jobinterview #interviewquestions #interviewtips best job interview questions, job interview examples, product manager job interview, how to become a product manager, product manager jobs, product manager test 4. Describe a time when you were part of a controversial product decision, and what you did.
5. Tell me about a time something went wrong. What happened and what did you do about it?
6. What is the worst product that you’ve ever shipped?
7. Tell me about a time when you needed to disagree with your manager or fight for a position against higher leadership.
How do they think?The strongest and most valuable candidates are people who are good at self-reflection and can approach problems differently. They break norms, they challenge assumptions, and they think from first principles. These questions can help you find lateral and “out-of-the-box” thinkers. 8. What’s something that everyone takes for granted that you think is hogwash?
9. What’s an unfair secret you’ve learned to improve a product team’s velocity and energy level?
10. Tell me about something you did that worked out but not for the reason that you thought it would.
11. What is an experiment you launched that had a very unexpected result? And what did you do after that?
How do they build, ship, and drive impact?You’re likely asking questions along these lines already, but here are some clever ways to get to the juiciest bits... Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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