Why Are Product Interviews Important?
Explore the significance of product interviews in technology careers, focusing on the collaborative role of data scientists within product teams. Learn how product questions test business intuition and are essential for roles at major tech companies. This lesson helps you grasp why mastering product interview questions is key to succeeding in data science and analytics positions.
The product team and roadmap
In the technology sector, we have a team behind every product launch.
The team consists of:
- A group of engineers who code or design the project.
- A product manager who sets up the roadmap for the product and manages major decisions that affect the project.
- Data scientists who measure product performance.
A typical timeline of the team’s decisions may look similar to this:
The unique role of the data scientist
The data scientist often collaborates with major product decision-makers and builders, so these product data science questions often test our business intuition and ability to influence the product. A data scientist acts as a conduit of the data and is tasked with conveying the internal processes within the product to the product manager. The product manager relies heavily on this, since it is a key component of contributing to the product roadmap.
When working on a product road map, we need to know what we’re investigating and the methods to measure the success of a product. As a result, product-based questions have become an increasingly important part of the interview process.
When and at what companies do product interview questions come up?
Depending on the role, product interviews come up at various frequencies. For instance, product interviews will seldom come up for machine learning roles. The inverse can be said about product analyst interviews, where we’ll probably encounter more than one product-based question during the entire interview process.
Nevertheless, if we’re talking about big tech companies, almost every data science role at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on, will ask a product interview question. This is because the very nature of the role requires one to work closely with product owners.