Behavioral

Tell me about a time you screwed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?

Product Manager

Reddit

Netflix

3M

Adyen

Evernote

Oracle

Did you come across this question in an interview?

Answers

Anonymous

7 months ago
3.8Strong
At the beginning of my career when I began as a Product Owner, I was asked to make the case as to why we should/should not build a mobile banking watch app (we were working on a full Front End redesign and a full BE restructuring, we were keeping scope and timelines pretty tight). It was my first time presenting to the leadership team, I  quickly prepared a spreadsheet looking at what would have to be scoped out, specific feature list for the watch app, and sizing for each feature. I had my math wrong in my excel sheet calc and leadership noticed. I definitely learned to check my work, share it with 1 or 2 people who helped me gather the data to double check my numbers. Now even when I pull my own data, I like to discuss with either my manager or prefereably someone from the analytics team. 

Anonymous

8 months ago
4.2Exceptional
I was leading an online store platform for SMBS and noticed that the many of the small sellers were struggling to complete all the steps required to get the online store launched. This hurt the plan subscription and hence our SaaS revenue.

So, I proposed to streamline the online store setup by incorporating the best practices of eCommerce and default enabling certain features including 'Free Shipping' rule on all orders. The shortned setup process would lead to more stores launched quickly. We made this change and included a notification in the onboarding step.  We assumed that sellers would turn off the Free Shipping' option, if they were not planning to offer. 
After we launched the change, the online store setup rate indeed moved up and we were happy about it.  But, we started to hear from few sellers that they were surprised about "Free Shipping' being turned on and now they are loosing money on orders.
I realized the mistake we made with our assumption. We were quickly turned off default enablement of the 'Free Shipping' , but made it super easy for sellers to discover this option during store setup process and turn it on with a single click.
I learnt a lesson to do further user research or A/B testing to mitigate such issues in the future.
 
  • As a product manager, tell me a time when you messed up or failed. What did you learn from the situation?
  • Can you give me an example of a time when you failed as a product manager or screwed up? What did you learn from the experience?
  • Have you ever failed as a product manager? What did you learn from it?
  • How did you react to a time when you failed or screwed up as a product manager? What did you learn?
  • Tell me about a time when you screwed up as a product manager, and what were the lessons you learned from it?
  • Tell me about a time you messed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?
  • Tell me about a time you screwed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?
  • When have you screwed up as a product manager? What have you learned from it?

Interview question asked to Product Managers interviewing at Samsung, Wipro, Zetwerk and others: Tell me about a time you screwed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?.