Datadog Product Manager Interview Guide

The first interview with the recruiter is an overview of your background, and why you're looking for a new job.

During this stage, the interviewer(s) will dive into your previous work experience, abilities and past successes to assess your potential fit for the role. 

If you are found suitable, you will move to the next round.

The phone interview round of the Datadog Product Manager interview typically involves one or two members of the product team, usually the hiring manager. 

They will dive into your previous work experience, abilities and past successes to assess your potential fit for the role. The questions asked will be fairly standard, for instance,

• Tell me about your experience managing a product from ideation to launch
• What drew you to the Product Manager role at Datadog, and how do you think your skills and experience align with the company's mission and values?
• How do you prioritize features and decide which ones to pursue?

You will soon learn that your primary recruiter is an invaluable resource across the interview process; they will be helpful, supportive, and responsive, all the while answering any questions you might have about the interview process ahead. They will also provide guidance about how you can prepare for the upcoming onsite round.

The onsite interview round for a product manager role at Datadog is fairly rigorous; it is designed to assess your knowledge, skills, and experience in a comprehensive manner.

You can expect to go through up to four, one-hour domain-specific interviews, conducted over 1 to 2 days, by a panel of interviewers that includes Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Marketers, and even senior leaders.

The focus of these interviews is to evaluate your abilities related to product strategy, roadmap planning, technical expertise, and problem-solving skills, among other things. Therefore, the onsite interviews are typically divided into four segments:

Let's look at these in detail.

1. Product Round
2. Analytical Round
3. Technical Round
4. Behavioral Round

If you are appearing for a senior PM role, you can expect a case study round, where you may be asked to present a case study or other materials related to a product you have managed in the past. 

Let's dive deeper into the virtual onsite round:

Product Design

This round is conducted to evaluate your ability to think critically and strategically, as well as your understanding of the product development process. Therefore, the interviewer will likely ask questions related to your experience with product design, strategy, improvement, launch, and more. 

For product design, you can expect questions that assess your target user understanding, creativity, and how you approach product designing. 

Here are some questions you can expect:

Product Design Questions:

• What features would you include in the designing of a minivan?
• How do you design Instagram?
• What features would you include in the design of a smartwatch for athletes?
• How would you design a mobile app for a restaurant?
• Design a personal finance app for millennials.
• How would you design a weather app for a busy commuter?
• What features would you include in the design of a smart home system?
• Design a chatbot for customer service in an e-commerce website.

Analytical and Estimation Round

Analytical and estimation questions assess how well you understand available data. It is typically conducted by the hiring manager or a panel of interviewers that may include senior product managers, engineers, or product designers.

Interviewers will look for your ability to define the target market, understand customer needs, prioritize features, and develop a product roadmap. You may also be asked to estimate the effort required to build a product, the cost of the product, and the timeline for development.

The analytical round usually involves a case study or problem-solving exercise that assesses the candidate's ability to analyze complex situations and develop effective solutions. A good PM should be able to determine the KPIs for a given product and leverage them to deliver results.

Here are some questions you can expect:

• Estimate the total number of cars in the US.
• How much money does Amazon lose each year due to items being stolen?
• Estimate the number of active users on Instagram in the next 5 years.
• Should Google enter the ride-sharing market?
• Estimate the number of active gamers in the world.
• Should Tesla enter the electric bike market?
• Estimate the annual revenue of Amazon's AWS service.
• Should Apple create a search engine to compete with Google?
• Estimate the annual revenue of the online education market in the next 5 years.
• Should Google build a native job search platform?

Technical Round

The technical round of a Product Manager interview assesses the candidate's understanding of technology, even though they don't need to be developers. Datadog interviewers will ask technical questions in this round to evaluate the candidate's ability to work with engineers to build software products. 

There are two types of technical questions: Theoretical questions and Coding questions.

The theoretical technical explanation questions are designed to gauge the candidate's technical knowledge and communication skills while coding questions are asked to test the candidate's ability to think like a developer. 

The latter involves writing pseudocode rather than production-level code since the interviewer is mostly interested in your problem-solving approach and how you think through complex technical problems.

Here are some example questions:

• How does SSL work to secure online transactions?
• What is a RESTful API and how does it work?
• Explain how a CDN (Content Delivery Network) improves website performance
• How would you design an algorithm to personalize content recommendations for a streaming service like Netflix?
• A company has an e-commerce website with a shopping cart feature. Walk me through the technical process of how the shopping cart data is stored and retrieved from the server.
• Can you explain the technical architecture behind a ride-sharing app like Uber or Lyft?
• How would you design an algorithm to detect and prevent fraudulent activity in a banking or financial app?
• A mobile app has been experiencing slow load times and crashes. How would you go about identifying and troubleshooting the technical issue?

Behavioral Round

Here, you can expect a range of questions related to your product management experience, including some that may challenge your thinking around hypothetical product scenarios.

Some examples include: 

• Tell me about a time when you had to navigate a difficult or ambiguous situation.
• Describe a project or initiative that you led and what challenges you faced in bringing it to fruition.
• Tell me about a time when you had to influence someone who didn't report to you.
• Describe a time when you had to make a change or pivot to a project you were working on.
• Tell me about a time when you received critical feedback and how you responded to it.
• Describe a time when you had to prioritize competing demands on your time and resources.

This round is pretty straightforward; Datadog will be looking to assess if you are a potential fit for hyper-growth culture. So, questions that evaluate your vision and mission, passion for technology and the specific PM role, work style, career goals, etc will be asked.

• Do you work well independently or in a team?
• Why are you interested in working at Datadog?
• What is the most important thing a PM does?
• Do you stay up to date with the tech industry? 
• What do you do to get inspiration for new ideas?