7 Essential Product Marketing Interview Questions to Ask Candidates

The people you’re hiring are arguably your business’ most important asset.

Sure, you could have the best product marketing strategy in the world. But if you don’t have a talented team to execute it, you won’t see groundbreaking results.

It’s important to find product marketers that have existing skills. Whether they’ve launched a new product before or overhauled an onboarding process, you need to check if they’ve got the skills you’re looking for before handing them an employment contract.

How can you do that without asking them to work on a trial basis?

The answer: By asking these product marketing interview questions. You can use them to dig deeper into your potential candidates, and pick the best person for the job.

1. Describe the products you’ve previously marketed

A great product marketer knows how to talk about the product in layman’s terms… Even if it’s a complex piece of software.

This interview question can give you a rough understanding and insight of how well they can communicate how a product works.

Do they jump back and forth on different features? Or can they explain the product in a way you understand, without needing to ask follow-up questions? Your ideal product marketer would do the latter.

2. Which product or products do you think have been marketed incorrectly? Why? And how would you fix it?

Think about how much experience your new hire needs to have. If the answer isn’t much, you can use this product marketing interview question to judge whether they’ve got the skills and knowledge to help you.

Let’s say your candidate has a degree in marketing, but no relevant work experience. If they can provide you with a product marketing example they’d improve on, it allows you to get to grips with their experience.

Plus, this interview question helps find candidates who know right and wrong. They might pick a product that’s launched, but not got the results expected. Can the candidate you’re interviewing spot that—and provide a solution for the problem?

3. How do you determine whether an onboarding process is working?

Onboarding is a key part of product marketing.

If you aren’t convincing customers to stick around after they’ve handed over their credit card details, you won’t stand any chance at turning them into lifelong fans.

That’s why this is a great interview question to ask product marketers. The answers can range from “asking customers what they’d improve” to “measuring churn”. But so long as your candidate knows how to measure the success of an onboarding sequence, you can consider hiring them.

4. Which metrics are most important to you during a new product launch?

Successful marketing campaigns happen through monitoring and improving. It’s important that your future project marketing manager knows this—and this interview question can help you find out.

Launching new products or features will be a huge part of their role. So, ask them which metrics they’d measure if they were doing a new product launch. Their answers might be:

• Product usage
• New customer revenue
• Demos requested

The bottom line? If your product marketer knows what metrics they should be tracking, it’ll be easier for them to determine whether a product launch was successful. (And if not, what they should focus on next time.)

5. How would you encourage customers to use our new feature or update their software?

Your product marketing strategy doesn’t end once a new product has been launched. You’ll likely be adding new features and updates as the months go by. Your new hire needs to know how to market those and promote engagement.

Judge whether they’re able to do that with this product marketing interview question. Keep a close eye on candidates who can confidently give ideas on how they can work with existing customers as your product develops.

6. Which other team members would you need to collaborate with?

One of the most important skills a product marketer needs to have is communication. Chances are, you’ll have several departments that fall under the marketing umbrella. It’s crucial for your product marketing team to collaborate with them.

Ideally, your candidates will prove they’re a team player. They should also be willing to communicate with other departments, such as:

• Customer support: Product marketers can chat with support teams and find out the right questions, bugs, or problems your customers are experiencing. It’s their job to prevent new customers from asking the same thing.
• Sales: Are leads asking certain questions before they hit buy? Product marketers need to know this so they can answer those FAQs in their marketing campaigns.

7. Which resources do you use to learn about product marketing?

Best practices for product marketing are constantly evolving. Just like an SEO strategy from 2012 won’t work today, go-to-market strategies will be wildly different ten years from now.

You can ask this interview question to make sure your potential new hire is future-proof. It’s good to hire someone who already demonstrates knowledge—but even better if they’ve always got their finger on the pulse.

For example: Your candidate might say they read product marketing books, or subscribe to podcasts like PIMtalk, to stay up to date with the industry.

Regardless of the answer, make sure your potential hire stays up to date. It doesn’t matter whether blogs or books are their source of information—so long as they’re committed to learning.

Your next product marketing manager is waiting

Are you ready to interview your next addition to your project marketing team?

These job interview questions are designed for any project marketer, whether they’ll be managing your strategy or simply helping to execute.

Sure, it can sound intrusive when you’re asking in-depth questions. But it’s better to spend time digging into each candidates’ experience—and check if they’re the best person for the job—before trusting them with a product launch.