7 Questions You Can Ask During A Developer's Job Interview

Q: "Should a Product Manager interview a developer during hiring?"

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Yes, they should. A PM is a primary stakeholder, after all.

The interview questions, however, need to be tailored to understand a candidate's approach towards breaking down requirements, sizing them up & detecting gaps.

The most common mistake I see is when Product Managers start asking engineers questions like:

• Brainteasers
• Coding questions
• Algorithms
• Technical concepts

Leave these for the technical interview where other senior engineers will likely ask them such questions anyway.

Instead, think about how you would be working with this developer. Attempt to simulate that relationship & gauge how it would fare in the future.

A Product Manager & a developer interact on matters involving requirements/specs, mockups, releases, testing, technical debt & troubleshooting. Direct your questions on those areas.

For example, ask questions like:

• How do you like to consume requirements? Mockups, PRDs, Specs?
• How have you received specs in the past? What's the best PRD template you've seen?
• Have you worked with a product manager before? What do you think a PM does?
• What do you expect from a product manager? What should they expect from you?
• When's a time you disagreed with a Product Manager? What was the outcome?
• Talk about a situation where you raised flags regarding technical debt. How did you express the concern to a non-technical audience? What was the result?
• You push a release to live. The order volume/lead gen/traffic/[insert value metric] on the site tanks the next day. Walk me through how you'll troubleshoot the problem.

Then, you can role play situations.

Typically, I'm looking for how curious they are about the requirements I'm sharing.

Describe a user story in detail and ask them to attempt to estimate it. The number isn't as important. You're looking for their ballparking skills. The idea is more to see the kind of questions they ask to go about preparing an estimate. What's the thought process? How's the attention to detail?

Show them a flowchart that has a few missing nodes and see if they would be able to convert that to code.

If they highlight unclear areas, you know you have someone who's thinking on their feet. Hand-raisers in the dev team are great assets.

If this is for a senior architect, describe a system to them (e.g. a search mechanism) and let them ask business/domain questions they would need answers to before nominating a tech stack for the problem.

How do they tackle non-functional requirements? If you told them that you needed an API service that needed to deliver results in 200 ms (a 5x improvement over existing benchmarks), what would they ensure?

In the end, you want to envision how this engineer will work alongside the Product Manager to deliver an exceptional product. You have a winner if you can foresee that relationship thriving.