Product Interview Questions for Data Scientists (2024 Update)

Product interview questions are now trending in the analytics and tech industries. When I first encountered one, I was interviewing for a data science role at LinkedIn a year out of college. The interviewer asked me how I would determine if a new feature on LinkedIn messaging would affect the user experience.

I was pretty confident in telling them that we could conduct an A/B test on this new feature and monitor LinkedIn feedback channels to conduct usability tests. However, the interviewer rejected the idea, citing resource constraints.

So now what?

I froze because, honestly, I had no idea.

Product interview questions are designed to assess your ability to understand, design, and improve products. These types of questions usually involve understanding the users’ pain points, generating innovative ideas, and using data to reinforce your decision.

Big tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft rely mainly on data and product analytics for decision-making and product improvement. The need to have an acute sense of how users perceive a product and how you could improve it if given the opportunity makes product interview questions critical for data roles.

In this article, we’ll discuss why product questions exist and how to tackle a product interview.

Product data science interview questions stem from companies testing how you would respond to the natural life-cycle of a product.

When looking at the general roadmap for any kind of product in technology, there’s a team. This team usually includes a group of engineers, a product manager that sets up the roadmap and controls the major decisions, and one or two data scientists that measure product performance.

A typical timeline of the team’s decisions may look similar to this:

1. The product manager asks the data specialist for product insight
2. The two collaborate on building this feature based on data
3. The feature is built, tested, and launched
4. Further work is done to improve and analyze its successes or failures.

The data scientist role collaborates quite often with major product decision makers and builders, so these product data science questions often test your business intuition and ability to influence the product. A data scientist acts as a guardian of the data and is tasked with conveying the internal processes within the product, which the product manager relies on heavily as a key component of contributing to the product roadmap.

Many times, you’ll have to know what you’re investigating and the methods to measure success of a product, so these product data science questions have become increasingly important in the interview process.

Depending on the role, product interviews will come up at various frequencies. For instance, for machine learning roles, product interviews will almost never come up. The inverse can be said about product analyst interviews, where you’ll probably encounter more than one product interview.

Nevertheless, if we’re talking about big tech companies, almost every single data science role at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.. will ask a product interview question. And many times multiple times. This is due to the very nature of the role being one that works with product owners very closely.

Here are a few more reasons why product questions are asked:

Evaluating Strategic Thinking

Product interviews help assess your ability to think strategically about products. This includes understanding the market, identifying opportunities, and envisioning the long-term roadmap of a product. It ensures that the candidate can contribute to the overall strategy and direction of the product.

Understanding User Needs

One of the primary goals of product sense interviews is to gauge how well you can empathize with users. This involves understanding user pain points, needs, and behaviors, which is critical for building products that truly solve problems and deliver value.

Creativity and Innovation

Innovation is key in the tech industry. Product interviews allow you to showcase your creativity in conceiving new features, products, or enhancements. This helps companies identify individuals who can bring fresh ideas and innovative solutions.

Prioritizing and Trade-Offs

Developing products often involves making tough decisions about what to build and what to delay. Product interviews assess a candidate’s ability to prioritize features and make trade-offs based on factors like user impact, technical complexity, and business goals.

Communication Bridge

Clear communication is essential for product roles, as they often involve collaborating with various stakeholders, including engineering, design, marketing, and executives. Product interviews test how well you can articulate your ideas, present your reasoning, and persuade others.

Frequency of Product Interview Questions

If we’re talking about big tech companies, almost every data science role at Meta, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc., will ask at least one product interview question, often more. This is because the role involves working closely with users.

To effectively answer product interview questions, it’s crucial to take a deep dive into the product by following a structured approach that examines various facets of the product, user needs, and potential solutions. Here’s a detailed guide on how to do this:

Fall Back on Product Research

Let’s switch things up and imagine that I’m the interviewer in the earlier scenario where I failed the interview. I work at LinkedIn and spend 8+ hours a day thinking about how to grow and improve messaging between users. I ran A/B tests, determined growth benchmarks, tested different designs, ran thousands of SQL queries and analyses, and now have just been pulled into an interview.

What would I expect from the candidate?

Considering the product as an employee at the company is entirely different from just using the product regularly. While you may use LinkedIn to browse articles and connect with other professionals, your interviewers don’t use it that way.

Ask yourself:

• What is the core purpose of the product?
• What key problems does the product aim to solve?
• What value does the product provide to its users?

You need to look at a company and understand its product from a business perspective. This is imperative to understanding and connecting with employees in technical and product sense discussions during the interview. You must be aware of its value proposition, core functionality, target market, key competitors, and business objectives.

Identify and Segment Users

Identifying key user segments and addressing their specific needs and pain points is critical to responding successfully to product interview questions.

LinkedIn, for example, caters to both job seekers and recruiters seeking to build a professional network and stay up-to-date with industry trends. As a candidate, you must know both parties’ pain points to do product research well.

Ask yourself:

• Who are the primary users of the product?
• What are the different categories or groups of users who interact with the product?
• Are there any secondary or tertiary user segments that also benefit from the product?
• What common challenges or pain points do users in each segment experience?
• Are there any specific frustrations or obstacles that users encounter when using the product?
• How do these pain points affect the overall user experience for each segment?

Evaluate Solutions

Your interviewer is likely to assess your innovative approach to the presented challenges and scrutinize its feasibility. Being able to brainstorm solutions to generate multiple ideas for the problems and assess their impact on users and business values is critical for product interviews.

Prepare for your upcoming product interview by finding challenges and training yourself to think analytically and come up with fresh solutions. To find the viability of your potential solutions, ask yourself:

• How will this solution benefit the users? What specific pain points does it address?
• Which user segments will be most impacted by this solution?
• What are the technical requirements for implementing this solution?
• Does the current technology stack support this solution, or will significant changes be needed?
• Is the solution intuitive and easy to use for the target users?
• Does it require a significant learning curve or a change in user behavior?
• What are the potential challenges associated with implementing this solution?
• How can these challenges be mitigated?

We’ve compiled product interviews into about six distinct categories. While some questions may get reworded, most of these recur in different product role interviews. Here are summaries of each type of interview question before we dive into more examples below.

Change in Product Features

These types of product sense questions assess your ability to think critically about existing product features and propose improvements. They evaluate your understanding of user needs and how changes can enhance the product experience.

Question: “How would you redesign the search functionality in Spotify to improve user discovery of new music?”

Identify different user segments, such as casual listeners, music enthusiasts, and curators. Analyze the existing search features and pinpoint their limitations, such as insufficient personalization or lack of advanced filters.

Consider what enhancements could address these issues and align with user needs. Think about how the proposed changes will improve the overall user experience and define success metrics to measure the impact of these modifications.

Market Expansion and Growth

Your strategic thinking and ability to adapt a product to new markets will be assessed with these types of questions. They test your understanding of market research, local adaptation, and growth strategy.

Question: “How would you expand Uber’s service to a new city with a different cultural and economic environment?”

Begin by understanding the goal of launching Uber in a new market, focusing on adapting the service to local needs. Research the new city’s transportation needs, economic conditions, cultural norms, and regulatory environment to tailor your approach effectively.

Analyze Uber’s current services and identify how they need to be adjusted for the new market. Develop strategies for entry, such as localized marketing and partnerships, and define metrics to track the effectiveness of your expansion efforts.

User Pain Point Investigation

This type of question assesses your ability to identify and address user experience issues. It evaluates your skills in user research, problem-solving, and improving the overall user journey.

Question: “What steps would you take to identify and address pain points in the checkout process of an e-commerce website?”

To identify and address pain points in the checkout process of an e-commerce website, start by understanding the goal of improving user experience and reducing cart abandonment. Identify key user segments, including online shoppers, first-time buyers, and repeat customers.

Analyze the current checkout process by reviewing user feedback, analytics, and usability tests to uncover common issues such as lengthy forms or payment errors. Propose solutions like simplifying the checkout process, offering multiple payment options, and adding a progress indicator to help users track their progress.

Measuring Success

These questions ask for methods to measure the success of the feature or product.

Question: “How would you measure the success of a new feature added to a social media app?”

Define success criteria based on the feature’s goals, such as increased engagement or user satisfaction. Identify key metrics that will help you evaluate success, such as adoption rates, engagement levels, and user feedback. Compare them to pre-launch benchmarks, and analyze user feedback. Use this data to assess if the feature meets its objectives and make necessary adjustments.

Competitive Analysis

The interviewer will evaluate your ability to analyze competitors and identify strategic opportunities. They are testing your understanding of market positioning and differentiation.

Question: “How would you assess the competitive landscape for a new online learning platform?”

Assessing the competitive landscape for a new online learning platform requires a strategic approach to understanding market positioning. Begin by defining the goal of differentiating the platform within a competitive market. Identify key competitors, including direct and indirect players in the online learning space.

Analyze their offerings, pricing models, user experiences, and market positioning to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Identify what makes the platform unique and how it can stand out from the competition. Develop strategies for differentiation based on your analysis, and evaluate the feasibility of implementing these strategies considering available resources and market conditions.

Metric Trade-Offs

These questions are extremely common, especially for huge platforms such as Meta, Google, and Amazon, where there are causal effects on other features when the site updates or new features are released. A product manager in this situation would need to decide which metrics matter, understand why this change might have occurred, and tackle the severity of the change.

Question: “If you are the product manager for Facebook and you see that comments are down by 10%, yet reactions are up by 15%, how would you deal with it?”

Evaluate the impact of each metric on overall user satisfaction and business goals. If performance issues are significantly affecting comments, prioritize performance improvements. Conversely, if comments are low due to feature shortcomings, focus on enhancing user engagement. Measure success based on the prioritized metric’s impact.

To get a better sense of similar questions asked in a product data science interview, check out this article on Product Analyst Interview Questions and Answers.

Here are a few more product sense interview questions that you’ll find indispensable:

1. Determine whether adding a feature identical to Instagram Stories to Facebook is a good idea.
2. Let’s say you’re a Product Data Scientist at Instagram. How would you measure the success of the Instagram TV product?
3. A product manager decides to add threading to comments on group posts. We see comments per user increase by 10% but posts go down 2%. Why would that be?
4. What data points and metrics would you look to see if YouTube amateur content creators also do well?
5. How would you measure the success of Uber Eats?
6. How would you adjust your product roadmap with unexpected technical limitations?
7. How would you decide whether to invest in developing a new feature for Netflix’s recommendation engine or improving the existing user interface?
8. How would you handle conflicting feedback from different user segments about a feature update for Google Maps?
9. If a competitor like Zoom releases a similar feature to one you’re planning for Microsoft Teams, how would you reassess your product strategy?
10. How would you approach designing a new feature for Amazon’s Alexa to accommodate diverse user needs and varying levels of technical expertise?

We hope this article helps you with answering product interviews effectively! For more resources to learn more about metrics, this course below is designed to help you understand how to use product metrics and analytics to influence decisions.