Please walk us through a time when you nearly missed a deadline. How did you pivot your approach to ensure success?
Deadlines are often critical in product management; however, so is product quality. The interviewer wants to hear evidence that you can turn a project around when a deadline is looming. They also want to know that you can maintain product credibility during these times. Show the interviewer that you can cope well with the external pressures of a looming deadline.
When asked a 'Walk us through a time when...' question, it's important to remember that the interviewer is looking for a specific story-based example that highlights your behavior in challenging situations. Using the STAR interview method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), you can form a story-based response that the interviewer can follow with ease.
- Situation: Set the stage with the background information the interviewer needs to make sense of your story.
- Task: Continuing to set the stage, give the interviewer an idea of your role and responsibilities in this story.
- Action: Next, offer a detailed description of the steps you took to express your point of view with your manager.
- Result: Last, talk about the specific outcomes that resulted from your actions.
"I fully believe that as a Product Manager my job is to assess and manage risks rather than take them. This mindset also applies to projects where we are close to missing a deadline. (Situation) Last quarter the team was working on a global roll-out for a significant product feature update. We were on track until we reached some bugs that presented significant threats to the project timeline. My team and I thought we had tested the product thoroughly enough, and we were not expecting any new issues, at least not major ones, to pop up. (Task) The time came where we were to present the product to the stakeholders. We realized that some of the code quality was poor, which was a situation that would be time-consuming to fix, but we could not ignore the issue. We knew that our stakeholders would consider the issue a deal-breaker, but I had to be honest with them. (Action) I held a discussion explaining the trouble that we ran into. One option was to scratch one of the product features to focus on the MVP and ensure it was perfect by the deadline. The other option was to extend the deadline by one week and move forward with all features as originally planned. The stakeholders agreed that we would roll out the product with a perfect MVP and add the scrapped feature to the next version. (Result) In the end, the product was a great success, and we received excellent feedback from our customers. Now, we are working diligently to introduce a product update with the originally missing feature."
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