Product Analyst Interview preparation

In this article, we will give sneak peak on product analyst position, what is expected from them, and preparation tips for product analyst roles.

What is role of product analyst?

Product analyst is entry level position in Product department in any company.

Product development lifecycle involves various stages where involvement of different teams is required (like marketing department, product department, technology department, sales department, etc). The core of this development process is product team which plays an important part in handling this process.

What is expected from Product Analyst in job?

Companies expected  a product analyst to take up following responsibilities

Requirement gathering/Discovery stage

This step involves gathering requirement for new features to be built or old features to be modified.

• Product Analyst should conduct market research/consumer research/competitive analysis
• He/she should interact with internal teams like sales, marketing, operation, technology and find flaws in existing processes and also take their inputs for adding new product features
• He/she should track key metrics of existing products, and find out possible improvement scope

Maintaining Product Roadmap

This step involves documenting feature list by discussing and finalizing with important stakeholders.

Product Analyst should have excellent communication skills. He/she is required to communicate ideas and tell the stakeholders why a feature is required to be added or not.

He/she should have excellent writing skills, as detailed product requirement documents need to be prepared.

Having knowledge of technical development process

Product development people works closely with technical people like Software developer, Designer, Manufacturer etc. They need to have understanding of working of technical process. Some of the commonly used technical processes are:

• Creating product specifications- This is basically handbook for technical development. Product analyst need to prepare detailed product specifications, flowcharts, error handling cases, approved designs and layout.
• Involved in technical sprints: Technical work follows agile methodology like Project sprints, Kanban system, JIT, Lean system etc. This process breaks down each task such that resource time is utilized properly with minimum wastage. In IT project, product analyst needs to be aware of scrum system.

Measuring your product metrics

Once the product development is done, you need to constantly monitor key metrics of your product. You need to see how your customers are using the product, whether there is rise in complaints from customers or whether your infrastructure is handling the product properly. You need to monitor revenue side metrics like change in sales, customer satisfaction etc with new product launch.

Commonly asked questions in Product Analyst job

During your interview process for product analyst job, you will be judged based on your creative and rational approach in designing the product which suits the business of the company. One of the question that is commonly asked in product analyst job is that you need to develop a new product for a particular segment, what will be ideas on that. Now to answer this, you need to break down question in following step.

1. Find out who are your key customers and their demography
2. Find out what product/service are they using currently on which you want to improve or which you want to replace
3. Find out what are the key challenges faced by customers in using existing product/service

You can ask these questions to the interviewers, and if they are not answering, you can tell your assumption on these questions. These questions help you in identifying product need and key features that will goes into it.

Now, once you decide on what you are going to develop, you need to think from company prespective, on which internal teams will be using products from their end. For example, for every customer facing product, there is delivery team which support customer need, for any edtech product there is academic team, for any ecommerce product there is merchant team who is handling delivery and many more. Your product should link the customer end to delivery end.

Once, you create an idea on end to end product, you need to mention key performance metrics. For example, for an ecommerce product, key performance metric is no of order build and process (shopping cart). Your follow up question will be based on enhancement of key performance metrics.

Lot of time, you are asked questions, straight into enhancement/improvement of key performance metrics like company want to reduce drop outs, or company want to build micro funnels etc.

Some frequently asked questions in product analyst interviews are:

1. If you have to improve any of Google product, what will that be, and what is your suggestion?
2. If you have to build an Uber clone for people having no knowledge of English or smart phone usage, how will you proceed?
3. If you have to reduce to Cash on Delivery usage in an ecommerce website, what product modification will you do?
4. If you have to increase the usage of search functionality in an ecommerce platform, what changes will you suggest?
5. If you have to increase the lead funnel of a platform, what product changes will you suggest?
6. Questions around usage of measurement channels like Google Analytics, Webmasters, and others
7. Questions around prioritizing features in product roadmap
8. Questions around project measurement tools like basecamp, trello, JIRA, asana, etc
9. Questions around digital transformation of physical set up like manufacturing plant or pharmacy unit
10. Questions around optimizing software developers time during and after product sprints

Do you need help in preparing for Product Analyst job?

Getting a job in product development is a good career choice. It involves working with multiple departments and directly under higher management. Lot of time, due to unpreparedness, candidates find themselves in difficult situation during their product analyst job interviews. Their answers are not satisfactory, which often lead to rejection in that company interview process. Now, you can prepare for your product analyst job interview with Xamnation, and get yourself trained by best of industry professionals having 10+ experiences in product management. We are offering live mentoring for product management jobs and mock interviews for product management jobs. Our product experts will review your CV, will take mock interviews for the company on which you are applying, and will point out key improvement areas for you. This will boost your job preparation and will provide you necessary confidence in facing real life interviews. Contact rakesh@xamnation.com for more information on this.