One of the traits/skills interviewers are looking for product managers to display is prioritization. Many PMs naturally prioritize but just as many struggle with the task. Sometimes product managers must answer unrealistic questions on prioritization to get into many of their roles.

The most frustrating part about prioritizing for interviews is you can’t include one of the most crucial aspects of prioritization: politics. So many decisions PMs make take into account cross-functional (xfn) discord. There, I said it. Now you can start to think past the reality of your day-to-day and learn what you need to pass interviews.

The following are some frameworks you can consider using in your next case interview.

Common Sense - Most people get hung up on memorizing frameworks, and so forget the four most important things we actually consider day-to-day.

• Business value

• User Impact

• Level of effort & cost

• Urgency

R.I.C.E. - This is perhaps the most famous of the prioritization frameworks. Your biggest problem with this one sounding too mechanical or robotic.

• Reach

  • How many people will you reach

• Impact

  • How much will you impact your user’s problem or day-to-day

• Confidence

  • How confident are you in your estimates

• Effort

  • How much engineering or team effort does it require?

If you need to keep it simple, down to no more than two variables (think pain points in a design case) it frequently boils down to Reach and Impact or Frequency and Severity.

• Reach - How Many

• Impact - How Bad

• Frequency - How Often

• Severity - How Bad

Extra Notes

• Sometimes when people say they are looking for tradeoffs, they are looking for prioritization calls. In other cases, they are just looking to hear you acknowledge your ideas have some flaws in it. Read the room to learn what is needed.

• Sometimes you need to talk about your hypothesis. The stage of the product and/or external factors could significantly change how you might rate/rank any of the aforementioned frameworks. State that upfront, and you don’t need to tie yourself in knots during your interview, making a list of exceptions based on stage or external factors.

Additional Reading

You might find this article helpful: How to be more decisive.

• Why I like it:

  • It reminds us of the one-way vs two-way door Jeff Bezos is famous for reminding us about.

  • They talk about how to get a handle on indecision.

Other Articles on Prioritization

For Case-Based Prio Questions: A Framework

Beachhead Framework