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Zalando Product Manager Interview Guide

Are you interested in Product Manager Roles in Zalando? Here's a detailed guide including interview tips and questions to help you out!

The role of a Zalando Product Manager

Product management is a job role that entails working on product creation and marketing with the primary goal of increasing sales, profits, and profit margins. A PM is in charge of assessing market dynamics, supervising product development, and determining their product's features. The amount of decision-making involved in the process is one aspect that makes a PM's job more difficult. This is one of the reasons the interviews are complicated, since they cover a wide range of subjects and contain a variety of questions.

The following interview guide will walk you through the process of interviewing for a Product Manager at Zalando, providing you with a number of tips and sample questions to give you an advantage.

The application is generally done online and involves submitting a resume and cover letter.. If you are shortlisted, the process usually takes about three to five weeks, but it can sometimes take longer. You’ll go through the following interview stages:

• Call with a recruiter
• A telephonic interview
• On-site interview

To be considered for the above measures, you must first have a well-written resume and cover letter that highlights your PM experience. Within a week of being shortlisted, you will be contacted for the interviews listed above.

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Relevant guides, zalando product manager - round 1.

Interviewing with a recruiter or hiring manager is usually the first step in the process. The interviewer will ask you questions based on your resume and cover letter, and it will be more informal. You should expect to be asked about your past experiences and to be questioned about the actions you took in these roles. The secret to success here is contact and communication. 

What the interviewer will assess

• Your hopes based on the job description.
• Your background and past experiences
• Your adaptability to the work culture
• Zalando is known for its directness and straightforward approach in interviews. So talking to the point would be helpful.
• Keep your previous work on hand so that you can tackle the subject when it comes up.
• Make a strong case on why you want to work for Zalando and how you can succeed there.
• Make sure you communicate concisely and effectively. Strong communication skills are something your interviewer will explicitly filter for.

Interview Questions

• Tell me about yourself. Tell me what it is about you, that makes this job a good fit for you.
• What do you hope to learn from this job at Zalando?
• Personality fit is important to us at Zalando. How would you describe your personality?
• What was your most recent blunder and how did you overcome it?

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Zalando product manager - round 2.

This round will consist of a telephonic or video call with a hiring manager or a current  Product Manager at Zalando. This interview is similar to the onsite interviews. It might take up to 2 weeks before you’re informed if you progress to the onsite round.. Some points to keep in mind :

• This round will lean more towards behavioral and situational questions.
• The interview will last up to 45 mins.
• Some technical and analytical questions can also be expected.
• Your core PM competencies (product ideation, brainstorming, prioritization, MVP thinking, execution, metrics and iteration skills), as well as your experience in the field.
• Your ability to think objectively and analyze data.
• Your commitment to your work.
• The efficiency with which you come up with solutions.
• In this position, you will have the opportunity to make a real difference in Zalando’s customers' and partners' experiences, as well as participate in the fashion ecosystem, by creating something entirely new that is tangible and meaningful to their customers and partners. Therefore, it is necessary to have a well-rounded viewpoint where you take into account the needs of the entire marketplace.
• There's a good chance the interviewer may question you about some of Zalando's and its competitors' most recent items, and you'll be asked for your thoughts. As a result, doing some analysis and planning a few points in advance even before the interview should give you an edge.
• How can you balance the demand from stakeholders and the development team's speed?
• How do you decide whether or not to follow an enhancement feature that has been suggested?
• How do you deal with tension among team members?
• How do you prioritize the backlog of products?
• At Zalando, we need dependable people on our team. Last year, how many days did you miss work?

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Zalando product manager - round 3.

You will be invited to an on-site interview at the Zalando offices at this stage. A series of interviews with Recruiters, Product Managers, and the Technical Delivery Lead make up this round. This round is important if you're looking to become a product manager in the organization, as you will be put to the test by a variety of senior executives and other professionals. There are a few things to bear in mind:

• The onsite experience consists of about 5 interviews.
• Each round will be about 45-50 mins long.
• You'll be tested on PM fundamentals like product knowledge, analytical skills, and strategy questions, as well as a slew of technical questions.
• Your comprehension of the organization.
• Your track record and levels of success.
• The manner in which you present your ideas.
• Your expertise in your core Product skills, as well as skills such as decision-making, calculation, and interpretation, as well as marketing abilities.
• According to many interviewees, the order of interviews is often not fixed, and can vary depending on who is available in different time slots. There will often be tiny breaks between interviews, so this can be exhausting. Come prepared for a long day!
• Many Zalando PMs who participate in the interview come across as very confident and even arrogant. We suggest that you explain and scope questions as quickly as possible and at the beginning, so that you can concentrate on topics that are relevant to the conversation you're having.
• In addition - our candidates have reported that they were challenged on their assertions, so be ready to defend your viewpoints and any assumptions or hypotheses you might be making during your answers.
• Why do you think this role with Zalando is the perfect fit for you at this point in your career?
• What is our firm's strategy?
• What is the concept of rapid agility?
• What are the company verticals that we work in?
• Write a press release about a unique product you've created.
• What product innovation are you most proud of?
• What would you do if you had to introduce a new product?
• How can you boost the Zalando website's user experience?
• How do you handle change?
• Are you willing to take a position that isn't as high-profile as your current one?
• According to you, what is the difference between product and project management?
• In a week, how many times do you speak with customers to enhance your product? Do you still write down the predicted outcomes ahead of time and then compare them?
• How do you schedule your releases? What type of production do you use?
• How much do you perform consumer research and what kind of research do you conduct?
• Describe a time when you failed. Why do you think it didn't work out? What would you do if you could?
• Could you share a takeaway from your most recent product launch?
• Describe a time when you made a decision based on data.
• What one word would your colleagues use to identify you if I asked them?
• Have you ever been into a disagreement with a teammate? What was the end result?

This is where the hardest part comes to an end. Bear in mind that the interviews are almost like a casual chat, but the interviewers are putting your expertise to the test. As a result, stay alert at all times and keep your responses quick, crisp, and to the point.

Practice with an Zalando PM

The decision and hiring process.

There are four ranges in the scoring system: strong yes, yes, no, and strong no. To pass, you need to have received a “yes” or “strong yes” from a majority of your interviewers. You might still go through with a no, but a strong no would put your application in jeopardy. You will receive an offer letter within a week or two if you are recommended by a majority of the interviewers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a Product Manager do at Zalando?

What qualities does Zalando look for in a Product Manager?

What can I expect in a Zalando Product Manager interview?

Relevant interview guides

Zalando: How to pass the interview

Interviewing tips for software engineers applying to Zalando. Before Amazon , I worked for Zalando for over 2 years. During that time I interviewed countless developers, from junior to tech leads, mostly in the Android space. In this post, I share what I was looking for and how to best prepare for the software engineer interviews.

Zalando is the leader company for online fashion in Europe. In 2017, the company totaled over € 4 billion in revenue and grew more than 20%. They employ an agile and laid back style that focuses on team autonomy, mastery, and purpose. To sustain their rapid growth, they’re hiring plenty of engineers.

I had the pleasure not only to work for the company but also to be on the frontline of interviewers. I did hundreds of phone screens, Skype interviews, onsite interviews and also some manager/tech lead interviews.

I will describe the process how it was when I left the company, which is in May 2017. There might have been changes but I expect the structure to be quite similar.

The interview process

The interview process consists of:

• A call with a recruiter
• A phone screen over Skype with an engineer
• Three Skype or onsite interviews

The recruiter call deals with behavioral questions such as your motivation to join Zalando and what excites you about your job. Also know your resume inside out and be prepared to talk about your past projects.

The second interview is a phone screen with an engineer. This interview is similar to the other onsite interviews but it may kill your application if your performance is not great. The covered topics are technical : coding, algorithms, Java, architecture, design, and some easy questions on standards such as HTTP and REST.

Zalando vs other tech companies

Zalando is growing fast and the change is reflected in its interview process. To sustain the company’s growth, the hiring pipeline was remodeled after the suggestion of a consultant who previously worked for Google. The main ideas are similar to my posts about the Google interview and the Amazon interview , especially the part about algorithms.

The main differences are:

• Zalando focuses more than usual on Java knowledge
• Android specific interviews will have plenty of Android questions
• Algorithms are easier than Google or Amazon
• System design might include API design as well
• There can be knowledge questions about tools, best practices, and technologies.

 Java questions

In order to pass the interview, you must know Java well .

Read Effective Java, 3ed . In particular, focus on the contracts of equals() ,  hashCode() , and compareTo()  (Items 10 and 11). If you read the second edition, read the third edition again : it has additional content from Java 7, 8 and 9, such as best practices for try-with-resources, stream API, and modules.

Another important topic is to know what classical data structures Java provides. Know when to use a  Set  and when to use a  List , the differences between the two, and the big-O notations for their main concrete implementations.

For more specific Java tips, you can read this blog post by Sean Floyd, an ex-colleague of mine.

Android questions

If you want an Android role, you need to know the Android fundamentals . They include:

• Activity, Services, Content Providers and Intent Receivers (in order of importance and detail)
• Fragments and Views
• The lifecycle of all above
• Main libraries and tooling
• How to carry out common operations such as network requests and saving data to flash memory.

The list looks basic and simple but so many people can’t answer basic questions around these topics. Brush up your fundamentals.

The main resource for this is the developer site , containing trainings and the Java docs of the APIs. If you want to go deeper into the system internals I recommend two books:

• Modern Operating Systems, 4th edition , Chapter 10.8: make sure to get the 4th edition as it contains a chapter by Dianne Hackborne, one of the creators of Android. This chapter explains how Android works at the OS level and some of its differences from plain Linux. The information is golden and very hard to find elsewhere.
• Embedded Android: Porting, Extending, and Customizing : this book deals with the internals of the OS and the contained information come from countless hours of tweaking and playing around. Having worked myself at the OS level, I might say that this information is extremely hard to find. Don’t be put off too much by the age of the book: most of the Android internals haven’t changed fundamentally from Android 2.3 (at least at the level of this book).

Algorithms and data structures questions

Algorithmic questions are easier than the big 4. Usually, at least one interview will deal with coding, with an emphasis on algorithms. Other interviews may have easier coding questions on the line of  “reverse a string”. More advanced topics such as graphs and dynamic programming (and more dynamic programming ) are not so common .

For example, I used to ask flood fill , a graph question. The problem was taken directly from Cracking the Code Interview  and can be resolved in few lines of code either by recursion (DFS) or with a queue (BSF). I thought that taking a problem from a standard source would make it easier to answer. I was wrong: only one person in a dozen answered satisfactorily and I had to take the question out.

To prepare I recommend  Tech Interview Pro by ex-Google, ex-Facebook Senior Staff Software Engineer Patrick Shyu (the Tech Lead). Use this links  to get 40% off and support the blog. And for more popular coding interview problems, check out CoderPro . Use this link to get 20% off .

System design questions

System designs questions vary a lot in Zalando. For Android roles they revolve around:

• App architecture design (not distributed systems)
• API design (following REST principles)
• Component/OOP design.

For the first question, have a sound understanding of Clean Architecture  and/or some alternatives. You need to articulate how you would distribute logic through components and how to make them testable.

For the API design, you need a basic understanding of REST and HTTP. It is not expected you know fancy media types or the intricacies of HTTP proxies but you need to know how to structure an API and its data using HTTP and JSON. You should have a look at the Richardson’s maturity model (till level 2) and perhaps have a quick look at his book, RESTful Web Services . (Richardson’s newer book, RESTful Web APIs , deals with REST level 3, i.e. hypermedia controls, which is more advanced and out of scope for the interview)

Component and OOP design questions are less common and I don’t believe they require specific preparation. They may involve the high-level design of a component or the code design of a class. Best practices and well-used design patterns are always welcomed. As an example, when asking flood-fill to more experienced candidates, I would leave the question open and expect them to model the problem themselves.

Tools, best practices, and technologies questions

This is a broad category. As a software engineer, you need to keep up-to-date with the industry best practices, know your tools and be constantly learning. Common questions in this domain involve knowledge of methodologies such as TDD, libraries such as Retrofit and blog resources such as Medium or HackerNews . The key element here is not to know any specific tool (though it helps to have some breadth) but rather to show motivation, commitment and desire to learn more.

What interviewers are looking for

Contrarily to other sources, I still believe that solving the problem with correct code is the best way to ace an interview. Good code goes a long way and makes up for rough starts, lack of knowledge and even suboptimal communication skills.

This varies from interviewer to interviewer. In my mind, I had a bar set by interviewing dozens of candidates. During the interview, I would compare your performance with what I had already seen. Good candidates managed, on average, to solve the problem. Bad candidates didn’t. So this for me was the most important point.

The second most important point was communication skills . Say you come up with a brilliant algorithm but cannot articulate your thoughts. I don’t understand your solution, so how should I score you? Well, I would analyze your code post-interview and see if it works. If you “solved the problem”, you are all good, I would even grant additional points for smartness. But, more likely, you have some bugs in your code. Not understanding your idea, I don’t know if your approach is fundamentally flawed or you just mistyped some indices. So I would consider the code wrong and reject you. On the other hand, if the interview was about system design the situation is even worse: the whole point was to showcase your communication skills and you just bombed it.

Finally, the scoring system had four categories: strong yes, yes, no, strong no . You generally need most yes ‘s to pass. You might still go through with a no , but a strong no would kill your application very quickly. Of course, take this with a grain of salt because it has been about a year since I left Zalando for Amazon .