If you are filling a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 82 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the product mindset. The questions are derived from my sixteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master, and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients. So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 10,000 times. According to the Scrum Guide, Product Owners have a vital role in the value creation process of the Scrum team: Source: Scrum Guide 2020. (The aggregation is taken from the Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered.) There is a reason why some refer to the Product Owner role as the “Achilles heel” or the “single wringable neck” of the Scrum team. Take out the Product Owner, either by organizational design or choosing the wrong candidate, and Scrum mutates into a pretty solid Waterfall 2.0 process. Becoming an agile, learning organization focused on creating customer value is about developing a product mindset everywhere, from the individual to the C-level. Employing Scrum can be a major stepping stone on this journey when the management empowers Product Owners and is not merely regarding Scrum as a delivery means to ship more features, products, and services within the constraints of the iron (project) triangle. Again, a fully formed and empowered Product Owner is crucial for a transformation success at that level. The following set of questions regarding the product mindset is designed to better understand a candidate’s perspective: Do they probably have what it takes to fill the shoes of the Product Owner role? « Looking back at your professional experience, can you name some first principles of a Product Owner with a product mindset? » This question allows the Product Owner candidate to reflect on their core beliefs of product management in general and the Product Owner role in particular. My top three choices of the first principles of the product mindset are: « You have worked with Product Owners (and product managers) in the past. How did the successful ones master the challenges of the role? Moreover, where did the less successful ones fail? » In my experience, successful Product Owners manage to split their time between different responsibilities and stakeholders without getting lost in details or failing to communicate appropriately while guiding everyone in the right direction, accomplishing the product vision.
