15 Questions You Should Be Ready to Answer in a Product Marketing Interview

So you’ve landed an interview for a product marketing role—congrats! Now, it’s time to prepare. But where do you start? And how can you ensure you’ll be successful in the interview and land that product marketing job?

If you’re wondering these things, know that you are not alone! I experienced this myself when I was preparing for my very first product marketing interview. But now, not only am I an experienced product marketer, but I’ve also hired product marketers and coached aspiring product marketers through the interview process. With the right understanding of the role and the right preparation for the interview, you too can be successful in landing your first product marketing job.

Product marketing can look slightly different at every company, but it often sits at the intersection of a number of disciplines and functions, including, but not limited to, customer success, marketing, product management, and sales. If you’re thinking of switching into a career in product marketing, experience working with these teams or serving in these roles can be extremely valuable and marketable.

Regardless of where you’re coming from, there are certain skills and competencies that can make you a great product marketer:

• Communication skills: Product marketers must be effective communicators. Whether it’s preparing launch communications, writing a great new blog post, putting together a customer presentation, or working with a cross-functional team, product marketers must know their audience and communicate with them in a way that resonates. Product marketers also need to know how to create tight, clear, and compelling messages that sell products or communicate a vision to stakeholders.
• Customer insight and empathy: Product marketers must know the customer inside and out. They must use empathy to deeply understand what their customers do, what they care about, and what challenges they face. And they must use this research and knowledge of the customer to work with product and development teams to build products that solve these customers’ challenges and craft messaging that resonates. They also must understand the market or industry as well as the competitive landscape, so they can help the team stay one step ahead. While you’ll develop customer insight over time, you can bring empathy to the table even as an entry-level candidate.
• Collaboration skills: Product marketers are constantly working with stakeholders across organizations and must be effective at collaborating with diverse groups of people to achieve a goal or objective. To do this, they must have a working knowledge of what different roles entail.
• Process and project management skills: PMMs must be good at managing processes and projects. During a product launch, there are lots of different activities and deadlines to hit. Having good project management skills—including organization, time management, and leadership—ensures you can stay on track and help others do the same.
• Prioritization skills: Product marketers often have multiple projects and demands on their hands. Whether it’s launching a product, conducting customer research, or working on sales training, there are always going to be multiple competing priorities. Knowing what’s most important and how to focus your efforts is critical to success.

If you have these skills, or can develop them, and have a desire to be a product marketer, how can you nail your interview and land that first product marketing role? As the saying goes, “failing to prepare is preparing to fail,” which means you’ll need to start with all the important aspects of interview preparation such as:

• Conducting thorough research on the company
• Conducting informational interviews with employees to learn about the company culture and the team
• Reviewing your past experiences and skills, and developing some stories to bring to the interview

And finally, you’ll want to make sure you prepare to answer common interview questions, but also product marketing–specific ones. To help with this, I’ve come up with some questions that you might expect in a product marketing interview as well as advice on how to answer them and example answers.

This is a classic marketing question often asked in interviews. The purpose of this question is to get a sense of your marketing knowledge as well as your creativity and thought process.

How to Answer

The goal here is not to try to be “right,” but to have a point of view that you can back up with supporting details or insights in order to demonstrate your understanding of a company or product and its marketing, messaging, and positioning of products. Think about why the product is marketed poorly. Maybe its messaging is wrong for the target customer, or maybe you think it doesn’t tie to the brand’s overall promise. As a rule of thumb, it’s important to come with a few ideas of different products or companies to talk about, as these questions can often lead to further discussions or conversations where more examples will be helpful.

You Might Say:

“I’m a big fan of Debbie’s Delicious Sandwiches. I love how it’s gone from a mom-and-pop shop to a country-wide brand and the sandwiches are delicious, especially the bread. However, I think the brand is missing a huge opportunity with its messaging. The ‘sandwiches delivered fast’ tagline doesn’t speak to the high-quality nature of the bread and other ingredients, which I believe differentiates Debbie’s from the competition. I associate ‘speed’ with fast food, which isn’t typically high-quality food. I think that if Debbie’s reevaluated their messaging and updated it, speaking more to the high-quality nature of the ingredients, they could be viewed in a different and more premier category, which would pull even more people in to taste their delicious sandwiches.”

“I love asking this question because I want to understand their intellectual curiosity. What kinds of campaigns spark their interest? What do they pay attention to? What does ‘good’ look like for them?” says Shyna Zhang, a product marketing consultant who has built PMM teams at enterprise technology companies and high-growth startups and taught product marketers through Real World Product Marketing. For this question, there isn’t a right or wrong answer, there is only your answer.

How to Answer

Make sure to focus your answer on the why. There are lots of marketing campaigns out there, so be sure to talk about why this one stood out to you and why it’s different from the others.

You Might Say:

“Recently, I saw an ad on TV from my local energy company. I was caught by surprise because energy companies don’t typically strike me as doing a ton of marketing or engagement with their customers. The campaign was creative and effective because it made the company feel human. In the ads, they featured actual field technicians who spoke about why they liked their jobs and how they felt like a part of the fabric of our community. I think that any time a company or a brand can find ways to connect with customers in a way that feels personal, people-driven, and relatable, it’s effective and memorable. And this was one ad that did that and it really hit home for me.”

Product launches are a critical responsibility of a product marketer. Whether you’re launching an entirely new product or perhaps a new feature, they require a combination of strategy, process management, and strong execution. So hiring managers will want to know about your past experience with launches, including what your role was and what the results of the launch were.

How to Answer

The key here is to talk about both process and outcomes: Provide an overview of the process, the key milestones, and your specific role in the launch, and then make sure you talk about the results as well as any important learnings. Finally, while there are lots of steps in a product launch, remember that another key skill for product marketers is delivering succinct messages. So you don’t need to spell out every single detail—make sure you get to the point!

For all behavioral interview questions, using the STAR method to structure your answer will help you provide a concise and relevant response. STAR stands for situation (what the context was), task (what you were responsible for), action (what you actually did), and result (what the outcome was and what you learned). Hit on each of these in order as you tell your story.

You Might Say:

“Last year, we had an idea to launch a new collaboration software product aimed at our small- and medium-sized business [SMB] segment. My job was to work with a cross-functional team with colleagues from product management, sales, and other departments to execute a timely launch and to hit our goals surrounding pipeline generation for new revenue and opportunities. My specific responsibilities included creating the messaging and positioning of the new product and then testing it with customers. From there, I also led the creation of internal and external content for key stakeholders such as our account executives. Finally, I was the point person for training and enabling our entire 50-person sales team on the product. The launch was a success, in that it was on time and we exceeded our opportunity pipeline and marketing qualified leads [MQL] goals. I’d be happy to dive in deeper to any of the specifics of my work if it’d be helpful.”

Product marketing roles can look different from company to company. This question is meant to help the interviewer understand how you have previously done product marketing and what you’re hoping to get out of your next role. It’s also your chance to demonstrate your abilities as a product marketer.

How to Answer

You should be sure to highlight the specific aspects of your previous role that are relevant to the one you are applying for. This is also your chance to speak to the specific aspects of the job description that you’re excited about or feel you’re a great fit for.

If you’re interviewing for your first product marketing role, you can start by talking about how product marketing worked at your previous company or how you yourself engaged with product marketers (if you held a different kind of role at another company or even if you had a chance to see product marketers at work during an internship you did). And if nothing else, you should speak to what parts of the job description resonate with you.

You Might Say:

“I recognize that product marketing is a little different at each company, but in my previous role, we separated product marketing into two areas: inbound product marketing, or building, validating, and launching the product, and outbound product marketing, or getting the product in the hands of customers. As a product marketer that was outbound and market-facing, I had three responsibilities: The first was go-to-market planning, working with a cross-functional team to create marketing qualified leads that turned into opportunities and drove pipeline. The second was sales enablement, ensuring that all of our sales teams got the training and resources they needed to properly position and sell our products. And the third was competitive analysis, understanding our competitors and industry. Given that this job description talks about responsibilities including leading sales enablement and launching new products or features, I think this job aligns well with some of the past experiences I’ve had, but I would love to learn more about some of the projects you had in mind for someone taking on this role.”

Without measuring your impact, it’s hard to know how effective you are as a product marketer. This question gets at your understanding of how to A) identify the right metrics to measure your work and B) drive results.

How to Answer

Metrics and measurement are important for understanding what outcomes or goals you’re working toward and whether you’re on track to achieve them, so be sure to talk about which ones you’ve focused on in the past and why. “Since product marketing can also look different at different companies, it’s important to share how you’ve previously measured the impact and outcomes of your work. That way, the hiring manager can understand the skills and experiences you would bring to the role,” Zhang says, and how you might approach measuring success at their company. So make sure you also articulate enough details about your past roles that it’s clear why certain metrics were important to your specific position.

You Might Say:

“In my most recent role, I measured my success by the adoption of new features. Each quarter, we’d launch a set of new features and my goal was to create campaigns to drive adoption of those features with our customers. We specifically looked at metrics like overall adoption, feature usage, and feature adoption over time. These campaigns used content—such as videos, knowledge articles, and FAQ documentation—so we also measured the reach of and engagement with that content. In addition to evaluating and reporting on these quantitative metrics, we conducted surveys and focus groups with our customers and took that insight into consideration, especially when thinking about future releases of new features or updates to existing features.”

Building relationships at work is critical for many jobs, but it’s even more critical for product marketers because they regularly work on projects with team members from other parts of the company. “The best product marketers spend time building relationships with their peers, so when they work together, there is a sense of trust and credibility,” Zhang says.

How to Answer

For this question you should talk about what you think makes a good professional relationship and how you’ve built strong relationships in the past. If you’re an entry-level candidate, you might draw on experiences from projects, internships, volunteer work, or even extracurricular activities. This is also a chance to provide some specific ways that you would build relationships with your coworkers, if you were to get the job.

You Might Say:

“From my experience, good working relationships with your peers are based on trust, which takes time and effort to build up. A tactic that I’ve previously used that I think could help me in this role is reaching out to people to learn about their roles or about a specific topic that they have domain expertise in. In my last job, I was able to learn all about customer success by getting coffee and speaking to customer success managers who were more than happy to tell me about what they did each day. This gave me a great understanding of their job, as well as their challenges, before we had any reason to collaborate on any specific launch or product. And this allowed me to build a rapport with some folks I could later go to for guidance or feedback on future projects. I can see myself using a similar approach in this role.”

Jason Perocho, a senior director of product marketing who has hired and built product marketing teams (and, full disclosure, a colleague of mine), likes to ask this question to better understand how a candidate works with other people and how they’re able to make an impact on a large team. “When you are working on a cross-functional project like a product launch, oftentimes it requires a lot of people to make it successful,” Perocho says. “I want to learn not only what the team did to achieve success, but specifically, what the candidate did to contribute to the success of the project.”

How to Answer

When you answer this question, make sure to mention the nature of the project, the key stakeholders, and the end objective. But you also need to talk about the role you had and the part you played in helping achieve the team’s ultimate outcome. A common mistake in answering this question is talking about the project, but failing to get into the specifics of what you did. You can use the STAR method to help ensure you include all the relevant information in your answer.

You Might Say:

“During the early days of COVID-19, we recognized that our customers were looking for help as they began to predominantly work from home. We realized that this could be a great opportunity for us to provide value to them in a time of crisis, as our company’s product is a digital collaboration software, which helps companies communicate from anywhere. We decided to create a resource hub and to provide content and best practices for how to use our products in order to drive productivity and effectiveness, especially in an environment where teams were newly remote. However, we’d never dealt with a pandemic before either, so we needed a cross-functional team of top product experts to work together to create something fast.

“My job was to identify the types of content to create based on data and strategic direction, and then to work with the SMEs [subject matter experts] to gather their insight and help turn it into content by providing messaging and storytelling direction to our content team. The result was a website with more than 20 different assets—such as videos, blog posts, podcast interviews, and recorded demos—breaking down how to use our products to collaborate better in a virtual environment during COVID-19. We multiplied our monthly website traffic by 10 and got hundreds of requests from our sales teams to have our experts do live virtual demos for our customers because they were interested in learning more.”

An interviewer asks this to hear what you think as well as to understand how you think about messaging. Since creating good messaging is a core tenet of product marketing, it’s important to have a good answer to this question. Furthermore, implied in this question is that you’ve taken the time to actually research the company and to review the products they sell.

How to Answer

Before your interview, spend time reviewing the company website and information on its products, so that you can base your response to this question on your analysis. “Nothing is worse than asking this question and having a candidate stumble over an answer because they didn’t take the time to do the research, especially since this is preventable,” Perocho says.

Make sure to articulate a clear point of view on the company’s messaging based on your own analysis. It also helps to come with ideas or suggestions for how you would make it better or other ideas which demonstrate your creativity. This can feel difficult because you might be afraid to criticize the company you want to work for—a very fair concern. Rather than being negative about the company in your response, you can frame your suggestions as opportunities to be even more creative or to consider new possibilities. Good phrases to use might be ones like “another idea could be to…” or “what would make this even stronger…”

You Might Say:

“What stands out most about your website is that you speak directly to your buyer and their pain points. You talk a lot about privacy, security, and protecting employee technology so it is very clear to me that you are targeting an IT security leader or professional. One thing I noticed was that you often reference the awards your product has won. This is a good way to show customers that your product is in fact a great product. But another idea might be to have users speak directly to how great you are by featuring a customer testimonial saying how much they love your product or how it helped improve their business. This way possible customers aren’t just seeing messaging from your perspective or learning what the organizations that have given you awards think, they’re seeing what people like them think.”

One of the challenging parts of being a product marketer is that you don’t always have the authority to make a decision even though you are responsible for achieving a goal, which means you will need to influence a decision maker or leader within your company. For example, as a product marketer, you might not be in charge of developing the product, as that is the product manager’s job, but you may need to influence the product manager on the features that resonate with a customer. Your interviewer wants to see if you can articulate your point of view in a persuasive way and accurately represent the voice of the customer to advocate for their specific needs.

How to Answer

Explain how you influenced another key leader to drive a decision or outcome in your favor. Influence can come in many forms. Perhaps you had a good relationship with the leader and used data you knew would speak to them. Make sure to highlight the specific way you were able to get someone else to see your point of view that led them to listen to your perspective. This is another question where you can lean on the STAR method.

You Might Say:

“The sales team needed a new training program around products they were being asked to sell this year. They wanted to use the same training format as for a past product we launched in a previous quarter and asked me to create it. I knew the format we’d used the year before was very time- and resource-intensive to execute. Furthermore, some of the materials I’d created lived on our sales training portal and when I looked at the usage statistics, they were very low, which led me to believe that it was not effective.

“Knowing that it would be a huge effort to create the same type of program and that evidence suggested it wasn’t as helpful as it could be to the sales team, I offered a different solution. I proposed a shorter training program of bite-sized, engaging videos as opposed to a live workshop and numerous additional PowerPoint presentations, data sheets, and training materials. The sales leader pushed back, but we compromised and agreed to try it out this new way and, if it didn’t work, I promised to provide training materials in the previous format.

“But the new approach worked. In addition to receiving high scores on the feedback surveys from the training, the metrics around usage were significantly higher—a 30% increase in the number of views and downloads. While the sales leaders were initially skeptical, after they saw the feedback and the usage results, they were pleased we had reimagined the training and agreed to scale out the new version for future products.”

“As a product marketer, part of your job is to accurately represent the voice of the customer, which means product marketers need to know the customer very well,” Zhang says. Interviewers ask this question to make sure you’ve taken the time to research this company and as an indication that you’d take the time and have the insight needed to get to know the market if you were to land the role.

How to Answer

Make sure to take the time to get to know the company, its products, and the customers that it serves. You can do great research by taking the time to conduct informational interviews with employees at this company or even interviewing people who have used the product that the company makes. You can also read through the company’s website, social media feeds, or anything else they put out themselves as well as research reports and product reviews.

Share what you’ve learned from the research that you’ve done and tell the interviewer what that research was to show what you might do as a product marketer. “Anytime someone in an interview can share with me specific research they read, reviews they found, or that they spoke to a handful of our customers and can provide specific feedback, it’s a signal that they grasp a critical component of the role,” Zhang said.

If you have transferable experience or knowledge related to the company’s product or market, this is also a great chance to share it and show that you already have relevant expertise.

You Might Say:

“Since you sell customer relationship management software, it’s clear your target audience is salespeople and those in the departments that manage the technology, such as a VP of IT. Sales leaders need to be productive and they need to drive revenue. IT buyers want something that is going to generate ROI, but also implements quickly and integrates with their existing infrastructure. In fact, based on research my previous company conducted on buying preferences, integration is one of the key criteria for CRM software buyers. And considering that all of the customer success stories on your website are from financial services and healthcare companies, I think that you probably have a strong presence and are specifically targeting customers in those industries. Finally, after reading through reviews on G2Crowd and the App Store, it’s clear your users love how easy your product is to set up and use while they are on the go, but it also sounds like they want more functionality, especially around the dashboards and reporting features.”

This is a chance to share your experience, expertise, and knowledge of your past roles’ customers and industry and to show that you’ve thought about how you’ll make the transition to a new company or industry.

How to Answer

In your answer, demonstrate your knowledge of the industry that you’re in by highlighting key trends or interesting insights from your experience. But you’ll also want to make sure that you speak to the specific industry trends and insights relevant to the company you are interviewing with—and make a connection and draw parallels between your previous role or industry and the one you are transitioning into. Perhaps the industries are facing similar challenges. Or perhaps the buyers of the product have similar needs.

You Might Say:

“Currently, I work in the HR technology sector, selling HR compliance solutions to HR leaders who are looking to drive productivity and cost savings. Over the course of my time in this role, what’s been interesting to me is just how much HR leaders are using technology in their business, as this is a shift from when I started a few years ago. Since your company sells training and development software to businesses, I think this is an interesting time to join your organization. As companies face pressure in their respective industries to get ahead or stay competitive, they need their employees to learn and grow their skills to keep up. From my current role, I know that many HR leaders are increasingly looking for tech-based solutions for compliance, and would extrapolate that they’d do the same for training and learning solutions as they look to find unique ways to upskill their employees, which puts your company in a good position. So I’m excited about the opportunity to join your company as the market shifts.”

“I like asking this question because it gives the candidate a chance to differentiate themselves from other candidates,” Perocho said. What you choose to talk about can give the interview a glimpse into what you’re most passionate about. And this question also gives you the chance to show off something that you’ve done that made a significant impact and share what you did to drive that outcome.

How to Answer

This is your opportunity to get personal and to brag a little! Identify the project you worked on that you’re most proud of and make sure to share the outcome and impact. To make it personal and help differentiate you and show what you value, you can also share why you chose it.

You Might Say:

“At my last company, one of our core values was championing the customer. However, I felt like we were missing something in our external marketing messaging and content because we only featured a limited number of customers. I brought this up to my manager, who encouraged me to find a solution and gave me a two-month deadline to make it happen in order to coincide with a big company-wide revamp of the website. I proposed a customer heroes program, for which we would find customers who were having success with our products and basically make them the ‘hero’ in our marketing content, whether that meant quoting them in a blog post, featuring them on our website or in our webinars, or telling the entire story of how they were using our product in email communications.

“The launch was a huge success across numerous key metrics in terms of increased downloads and visits. Furthermore, the customers we featured were very excited to see their faces on our website, in our blogs, in our webinars, and in our newsletters—over 90% of those featured are still customers. I’m proud of this because I was able to launch a program that was not only successful, but also truly aligned with our core values, and because other teams within our company adopted the same approach to their own marketing materials, demonstrating the true impact and value that it had added.”

While launching products is important, if nobody ends up using them, all is for naught. This question tests a product marketer’s ability to understand key metrics and goals around adoption of a feature or product. This question also tests your problem solving and data gathering and analysis skills.

How to Answer

Ideally, if this problem arose in your job, you would go out and identify the data to evaluate, analyze the data, and come up with a set of recommendations for a workable solution. Make sure to highlight some of the aspects of a launch you would want to review and to include the types of data you think are important to evaluate. In your answer, you’ll also want to explain why you think it's important to review that data and what kinds of clues it might provide.

You Might Say:

“The first thing I would do is to reevaluate the launch plan, goals, and metrics to see if there are any signals or indicators of potential causes for concern such as misalignment. Next, I would review the launch communications and the efficacy of those communications, especially around content we sent to our customers. For example, did our open rates on the email communication seem in line with our typical open rates for email launch communications? Perhaps when we take a look at the launch emails we might uncover that the email was too long and we lost users’ interest. I would also look at other launch content that is critical to driving adoption, such as our instructional videos and knowledge articles. If people aren’t viewing them at all, perhaps they don’t know that they exist. But if they’re finding them and viewing or reading only the first 25% on average, maybe they’re not engaging or helpful. I would also talk to our customer support agents—is there a pattern to the questions customers are calling to ask about the new feature? This information could help us realize that customers are not understanding how the feature works and pick up on exactly what they’re confused about. Finally, I would also want to speak to customers directly to ask if they heard about the new feature, if they were using it, and if not, why not.

“I would also want to convene the launch team to do a post-mortem, where we all get the chance to share our own insights and come up with solutions for how to move forward. As a product marketer, I would be thinking about additional ways to reach customers and educate them about the feature based on all of my findings about where the sticking points were. I would also want to come up with some communications that we could share with our customer-facing teams, such as sales and customer success, so they could help us recommunicate the value and benefits of the new feature and how to use it.”

Nobody is perfect, including product marketers! This question is meant to understand some of the challenging experiences from your past. More than that, it’s also meant to uncover how you respond to difficult situations.

How to Answer

Using the STAR method, articulate the goal of the project, why it failed, and what you learned from the process. In addition to acknowledging the failure, you should also speak to how you responded and what you learned. We all fall down, but it’s about how we get back up.

You Might Say:

“In my last role, we wanted to launch a new sales program where some of our customer success managers would help us identify upsell opportunities with customers who had purchased a specific product. We felt this made sense as the CSMs had built incredible trust with these customers and deeply understood their business needs, so they could position the right products that would help the customer and drive revenue.

“Before rolling out the program, we talked to a few of our customer success managers, but in hindsight, we did not spend enough time getting their feedback—as well as their buy-in and support. Ultimately the program failed, as many of the success managers refused to participate. We learned afterward that while customers appreciated the help they were getting from the customer success managers, many of them weren’t thrilled to be asked to purchase more products while they were struggling to use what they had. Furthermore, customer success managers understood the importance of revenue, but did not feel comfortable trying to push a product onto a customer in the very same call where they were clearly frustrated with another product. Overall, it was a good lesson about the importance of not only asking for feedback but also actually taking the time to truly involve all stakeholders in the creation of a program.”

Product marketers must communicate effectively and create messaging that resonates with their audience. This often requires meeting with stakeholders, gathering a bunch of important information, and distilling it down to the most important points.

How to Answer

Give an example of a time when you needed to explain something difficult, including how you made sure you fully understand the concepts yourself and how you broke it down while taking your audience into consideration. Once again, you can use the STAR method here to help you organize your answer.

You Might Say:

“Last year, we launched a new set of features that were technically complex even for the product marketing team to understand. We knew if it was confusing to us, it was going to be confusing to our users, unless we had clear, succinct messaging that was easy to grasp.

“As the point person for the launch messaging and communications, I met with the technical experts to understand the intricate details of the new features. I would often say, ‘Explain this to me like I’m a 5 year old,’ and, ‘Tell me how this makes it better for our users,’ to get them to use simple language and phrases. Once I fully understood the features, I wrote up a few basic explainers with our core audience in mind and I showed them to the tech team to check for accuracy. I referred back to these basic explainers while crafting the messaging we’d use for the launch. I also turned to our customer advisory board to get feedback on my early drafts of the communications around the launch—to find out what was working and what wasn’t—and tweaked them accordingly.

“The end result was a launch communications kit, including a demo video and FAQs. We ended up exceeding our adoption metric by 20% and the FAQ document in our customer knowledge portal had the highest rating of any of our documents last quarter.”