Atlassian Product Manager Interview Guide
The role of an Atlassian Product Manager
A product manager is the person who understands the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfil, sets the metrics for easuring product success, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality. The Product Manager takes care of the product planning and execution process throughout the Product Life Cycle, including gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, defining the product vision, and collaborating with a cross-functional team of engineering, sales, marketing and support to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction. Similar roles are detailed in the Google Product Marketing Manager and Meta Product Marketing Manager Interview Guide guides.
Atlassian is a major software company that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. The company is known for products like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. The company's success hinges on the success of its products. Hence Atlassian is looking to onboard some of the most enterprising minds for its Product Manager role.
Role and responsibility
- Define and execute the roadmap for Intelligent Automation teams and work with Delivery and other Team leads.
- Work with a myriad of different technology experts in areas like NLP, no code/low code, Integration and business process automation (eg. Workato, NLP, Camunda, RPA) to solve real-world business problems faced by internal teams.
- Articulate and educate on business value, technical and architectural concepts to a variety of audiences, including business users, developers, architects, IT operations professionals, and senior IT management
- Partner with Business Process owners, Engineering, and designers for delivery.
Skills/Qualifications required
- Minimum 4 years of product management experience with a focus on platform.
- Experience in leading / prioritizing product roadmaps and effective partner engagement
- Partner closely with other Product Management leaders to build a roadmap for the team.
- Experience working with cross-functional and cross-geo teams to build product roadmap from initial idea to launch including product limitations into a roadmap.
- Excellent communication skills: you've got extensive experience collaborating with executives, Engineers, Product Managers, and Designers to build great experiences.
- Experience in some/combination of the following markets: Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Business Process Automation (BPM), Low-Code / No-Code Tools, Backend Integration, NLP, AI, Chatbots.
- Solid understanding of the changing nature of the citizen developer experience
- Strong functional design experience.
- Proven data-driven decision-making skills and agility to solve business challenges, handle competing priorities, and maintaining an attention to detail
- Good understanding of modern enterprise software technologies and solutions skills that involve such technologies.
Atlassian Product Manager salary
- Entry-level salary :USD 122,000.
- Senior positions :USD 255,000.
- Median salary :USD 156,000 with the base component being USD 93,000, stock component being USD 50,000 and bonus being USD 13,000.
Atlassian Product Manager Interview Guide
Usually, the interview process for the Product Manager role at Atlassian consists of 4-5 rounds as under:
- Recruiter Screen
- Phone Screen
- Take-home challenge
- Onsite Round
Recruiter Screen
Overview
The recruiter screen is a 45-minute interview with the HR recruiter. Here, the recruiter is going to assess your cultural and experiential fit for the role & company. Most of the questions will be based on your previous experience/resume. So, be very familiar with everything in your resume. Remember to keep answers short, crisp & structured.
Have a prepared answer on how you ideate, prioritise & experiment ideas. Also, prepare short and crisp answers for questions such as "Why Atlassian?"
Phone Screen
Overview
Once you have cleared the Recruiter Screen, you will be facing the phone screen. The phone screen is a telephonic interview round with Atlassian Product Managers. This interview will last for about 45 minutes.
What the interviewer will assess
- How innovative & customer-centric you are
- In-depth knowledge about A/B testing experimentation & prioritisation
- Familiarity with agile methodologies
- Ability to manage engineering team & other stakeholders
- Your approach to solving customer problems
Tips
- Make sure you prepare at least 3 improvement ideas for the existing Atlassian products such as Jira and Trello. This will nearly always come up.
- Preferably suggest simple improvements that are easy to execute instead of big complex improvements
- Be clear on each improvement idea you suggest what customer problem you are solving, how will you estimate impact, what is the success metric?
Interview Questions
- Out of all your suggestions for improving Trello, which would you prioritize first, and why?
- Have you ever used data to influence an important stakeholder? Share your experience.
- How would you improve your favourite product?
- What’s your approach to prioritizing tasks?
Practice more such questions with an Atlassian Product Manager
→ Book now!Take Home Challenge
Overview
After the phone screen, the interviewers may hand over what is known as a take-home challenge, which is an assignment on a product management topic to be completed in a stipulated amount of time. Typically, the topic for the assignment is either product design or product strategy. It's recommended candidates spend no more than 3 hours on this assignment.
Candidates have the flexibility to complete the take-home challenge in more than one way-such as a Powerpoint presentation or a document. The basic aim of this exercise is to test the candidate's product analytics and product strategy skills.
This interview is quite similar to the one which occurs for the Instacart PM.
Onsite Round
Overview
On clearing the phone screen, you will be called for the onsite round. The onsite round for the Product Manager role at Atlassian consists of 2-3 interviews, each being an hour long.
Technical interview
The first interview will be conducted by 2 senior product managers from Atlassian. n this interview, you will be asked to prepare a business case. Business cases are usually improvement ideas for an Atlassian product (ex: Jira, Bitbucket, Trello, Confluence). But, sometimes interviewers may go beyond Atlassian's products and ask questions on product improvement from elsewhere, for example and enhancement model for Uber Eats.
Here's what the interviewers will be looking to assess:
- Product strategy, Product Design, and Product analytics skills
- How innovative & customer-centric you are. (Primarily based on the quality of your ideas)
- In-depth knowledge check about A/B experimentation & prioritisation
- Ability to think long-term, build a roadmap, and break it down into smaller action items
Tips for this interview:
- Start your business case with a vision & have a clear understanding of the ‘why’ & ‘success metric’ for each idea you suggest in the case.
- Think beyond basic metrics like conversion and revenue. (ex: cancellations, customer support tickets)
Behavioural interview
The second onsite interview will be a non-technical round conducted by people from Atlassian's senior management. This interview will also be about long.
Here's what the interviewers will be looking to assess through this interview:
- Culture fit for the company.
- Stakeholder Management & Leadership skills. For preparation tips, review the Instacart Product Manager guide.
- Awareness about Atlassian's business model.
Tips for this interview
- Be very thorough with your past experiences.
- Be familiar with Atlassian's business model, have an opinion on how you see it evolving over the next few years.
Most asked questions in the onsite round
Technical questions:
- If you were the PM of Jira for mobile, what would be your roadmap?
- There is a data point that indicates that there are more Uber drop-offs at the airport than pick-ups from the airport. Why is this the case and what would you do within the product to change that?
- What metrics would you use to measure the success of our Map Search product?
- Do you know any company that has great customer service? What is it that they do to achieve such excellence in customer service?
Behavioural questions
- How would you inspire a high-performance tech team to deliver results? Can you give some examples of where you’ve done this in the past?
- What do you love about being a Product Manager?
- Share an experience where you faced failure and how you bounced back.
The above guidelines and tips should be enough to see you through this interview. Give your best effort and we are sure you would come out with flying colours.