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Why do hiring managers ask about failures?

It’s okay to fail. We fail all the time - it’s just a part of life. What’s important is how we react to it, what we learned from it and how we used those learnings to improve ourselves.

Hiring managers ask about your failures to check that you have the,

Humility to admit mistakes.
Courage to Self-Reflect.
Ability to adapt and course-correct.
And finally, how effective you are at drawing lessons from failures and use them to improve further.

Framework to follow:

Now, let’s walk through a framework for discussing failures,

Step 1: Context

Provide the context and the situation that led to the failure.

Hiring Managers are assessing how quickly you can bring others up to speed, even if they had no prior context to start.

Step 2: Impact

Discuss the failure and its impact on the organization.

This is to demonstrate that you have the ability to survive a catastrophic failure.

Step 3: Ownership

Highlight your contribution to the failure. You want to show that you can handle the pressure and that you have humility.

Step 4: Mitigations

Walkthrough how you mitigated the impact and extracted maximum learnings from the situation.

Step 5: Growth

Demonstrate that you’re a fast learner and that you understand how to prevent situations like this from happening again.

To help you with your Product Manager interview preparations, we have compiled a complete list of the most asked Product Management Interview Questions and Answers at companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, etc. answered by PMs at FAANG.

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Sample Answer #1:

Context:

As a part of our effort to increase transaction rates on our product (a b2c EdTech platform). We planned to introduce purchase components on high traffic (100K visits every day) page on the App. Now, there are different segments of users (say 3) who visit the page every day, and component pitching for each segment would be different in order to upsell them.

Based on the initial data that we had, we knew that the ratio of free users on the platform is more than the ratio of paid users. We assumed a similar ratio will also be on our target page.

Impact:

We designed the components (the majority of which were made keeping the free user segment in mind) and went live with them.

Post-launch, when I checked the data I found that the majority of the traffic (80%) on that particular page came from the paid user segment.

So, the components we built were not of any use to the majority of the traffic that visited the page.

Ownership & Mitigation:

As soon as this was identified we released a hotfix, where, the component visibility was mapped to each user segment. So, now each user segment was able to see the components mapped to them only. This way we were able to increase our CTR for each component and increased our Transaction Rates.

Learnings:

We have implemented a new check on our data research phase where we back every small decision with data rather than assumptions. This helped us, make more confident and informed decisions.

Sample Answer #2:

As a product manager, it is inevitable that you will encounter failures and setbacks at some point in your career. These failures can be frustrating and disappointing, but they can also be valuable learning experiences that help you to grow and improve as a product manager.

One of my biggest failures as a product manager was a project that I led that failed to meet its goals. The project was a new product launch, and I was responsible for overseeing the development and launch of the product. Despite extensive planning and preparation, the product did not perform as well as we had hoped upon launch.

There were several reasons why the product failed to meet its goals. One reason was that we did not conduct sufficient market research before launching the product. As a result, we did not fully understand the needs and preferences of our target market, and the product did not resonated with them.

Another reason for the failure was that we did not adequately test the product before launching it. We rushed the product to market in order to meet an aggressive timeline, but this resulted in a number of issues and bugs that negatively impacted the user experience.

In hindsight, I realized that I made several mistakes in my approach to this project. I focused too much on meeting the timeline and not enough on ensuring that the product was fully tested and ready for launch. I also did not involve the team enough in the decision-making process, which led to a lack of buy-in and ownership among team members.

This failure was a major disappointment, but it was also a valuable learning experience. It taught me the importance of conducting thorough market research, properly testing and debugging products before launching them, and involving the team in decision-making.

Since this failure, I have applied these lessons to my work as a product manager and have had more success in launching and managing products. I have also learned the importance of being open to feedback and learning from my mistakes, as this is essential for growth and improvement as a product manager.

Overall, my biggest failure as a product manager has been a valuable learning experience that has helped me to grow and improve as a professional. I believe that failure is a natural part of the learning and growth process, and it is important to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to improve and succeed in the future.