Product Owner Interview Questions

When you are preparing to hire a Product Owner you are looking to evaluate 4 key characteristics:

• Strategic thinking — the ability to integrate a lot of information and from that generate a path to value.
• Strong communications skills — the ability to motivate the team and the management.
• Remarkable execution — the ability to thrive in a fast moving environment, to take decisions with limited information, to be always available and to get things done.
• Personal integrity — in such a key role you need someone who is honest with themselves and others.

Below are the thematic areas to explore in the interview that can help you get a sense of these. For each, reflect after the interview whether the candidate was strong, weak or average. If they are weak in any of these areas, make sure you believe that this is a dimension you think they can grow in because the candidate will need them all.

1. Customer perspective & business understanding. Ask about a recent project. Do they take a customer centric view of their work? Do they automatically start with the customer, or start talking about tasks? Do they have an understanding of their customer’s context? Can they clearly describe the business problem they’re trying to solve? Do they understand their role in the larger business framework?
2. Independent thinking. Probe for how they developed the requirements. Do they show an ability to think for themselves and take their own perspective? Are they just passing on the requirements of customers or stakeholders, or are they integrating a much bigger picture? Can they speak to an example where they went against the direction of a key stakeholder because they felt bigger issues were at stake? Can they point to examples of individual initiative at scale?
3. Impact focus. In the project discussion, did they focus on the impact of the work, or just the work? Do they have an understanding of metrics? Do they automatically think of feedback loops? Do they talk in terms of learning?
4. Communications skills. Ask them to explain both the customer problem and the technical solution. How easy is it to understand them? Can they rapidly describe their situation in an easily understandable way? Do they answer the question directly? Show some level of uncertainty. Do they test for understanding? Can they probe where you need further explanation?
5. Mental models. Ask them how they go about doing their work. Do they have solid mental models of the customer, the development process, the technical solution? Do they have any education in different systems of working? Can they explain how they apply the frameworks to the problem at hand?
6. Stakeholder management. Ask who their stakeholders were. Do they understand the roles? Do they know what motivates their stakeholders and what defines success for them? Do they have experience working at the executive level?
7. Market domain knowledge. Ask some detail questions about your market. Do they have the necessary experience and knowledge? Did you get new insights from the conversation? Do you expect to learn a lot from this person?
8. Technical domain knowledge. Ask some detail questions about the technologies you use. Are they familiar with these? Are they sufficiently technical to have in-depth conversations with technical teams and understand the impact of different solution options?
9. Product Owner knowledge. Ask them to define the role. Are they trained as a product owner, how well do they understand the job? For those that are in a different career path, are they just testing this job, or are they committed to it? Are they interviewing for other job types?
10. Agile. Ask them how they apply agile in their environment. How sophisticated is their knowledge? Is it just sprints and user stories, or do they show a deeper understanding of a learning mindset and bringing teams closer to the customer context? Will they bring new perspectives and techniques to the team?
11. Culture. Ask what they liked and didn’t like about the culture of their last workplace. Are they blaming others for problems, or self-aware of their own role? What values do they focus on — do these correspond to the values in your own company?
12. Feedback. Provide some critical feedback. Talk openly about where you see there could be gaps. See how they respond. Do they acknowledge and welcome it or does this put them on the defensive? Do they start engaging with you on how they could develop these areas together with you? You want someone who sees individual development as a continuous journey.

The above provide a guide for the getting-to-know-you interview. You should always also do a case study with them where you see them show their skills in action. I will add an example in a future post.