Interview Guide

Help us get the right products to market, faster. 

We value a collaborative approach in our interviews. We encourage you to ask clarifying questions right from the start to ensure that you thoroughly understand the problem or questions presented.

Our focus is on depth rather than breadth. We're more interested in hearing detailed accounts of specific challenges you've faced and the precise actions you took to address them. It's important to provide insight into your individual contributions rather than a broad overview of team or company achievements. This helps us to better understand your personal impact and the outcomes of your efforts, rather than just the inputs.

We aim to create an environment where all candidates feel supported and prepared for success. If you have any questions or need further clarification about the interview process, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

Screening 

Intro call with    Hiring Manager            (45 min)

This interview is an opportunity to discuss how your career goals and experiences align with the role and the team's needs. The hiring manager will explore your past achievements, understand your career aspirations, and assess how well you fit with the company culture and values.

Onsite

UI Development    (60 min)

This segment focuses on your technical expertise in UI development, particularly using React and TypeScript. You'll be tasked with practical coding challenges that mimic real-world scenarios, assessing your ability to create efficient, user-friendly interfaces.

Technical        Problem-Solving          (60 min)

Here, you'll face problems involving data structures and algorithms to evaluate your technical proficiency and problem-solving skills. This interview tests your ability to think logically and efficiently under pressure, tackling algorithmic challenges that reflect the types of problems you might encounter in the role.

System Design        (90 min)

This interview assesses your skills in designing scalable, maintainable software systems. You'll be presented with a complex system design problem and asked to articulate your approach, considering factors like scalability, reliability, and maintainability. It's an opportunity to demonstrate strategic thinking and depth of knowledge in software architecture.

Career Review        (60 min)

This conversation delves into your professional journey, focusing on your key accomplishments, challenges faced, and how you've collaborated in past roles. The discussion aims to understand your growth trajectory, your approach to overcoming obstacles, and how you've contributed to team success in your previous positions.

We look forward to getting to know you better through this process and are excited about the potential of working together!

Intro call with Hiring Manager

The hiring manager screening interview is a crucial step for both you and us to assess if this opportunity is the right fit. This session is designed to delve into the details of the role, understand our company culture, and explore your values and work style.

What to Expect:

  • Insights into the Role and Company: 
    You'll receive information about our company's mission, team dynamics, and business opportunities. We'll discuss the culture, benefits, and potential for growth within the company.
  • Discussion on Fit and Values:
    The interview aims to gauge how well your professional values and work approach align with our company's culture. We'll explore your past experiences, key achievements, and what drives your career decisions.
  • Addressing Your Queries:
    This is your opportunity to ask questions and clarify any aspects of the role, team, or company that are important to you.

Preparation Tips:

  • Reflect on Your Career: 
    Prepare to talk about your professional journey, focusing on significant achievements and your future career aspirations.
  • Assess Your Values:
    Think about what you value in your work and life, and how this matches with our company's culture.
  • Formulate Key Questions:
    Consider what information you need to help decide if this role and our organization are the right match for you.

This interview is an opportunity for a meaningful conversation, aimed at understanding each other's perspectives. It's a chance for us to see if there's a shared vision and mutual fit. We look forward to getting to know you and helping you understand what it's like to be part of our team.

UI Development

In this interview, you will engage in a pair programming session focused on React and TypeScript. We will assess your technical skills and your ability to solve coding tasks. You can use either CoderPad or a GitHub repository template, which allows you to work in your preferred IDE.

Agenda:

  • Intros (5 min)
  • Pair programming (50 min)
  • Q+A (5 min)

Pair Programming:

  • You'll work on a series of tasks related to day-to-day operations at Productboard, including API usage, styling, and utilizing our design system. 
  • The session is hard-timeboxed to 50 minutes. Focus on demonstrating your React and TypeScript skills, error handling, and test design.

Preparation Tips:

  • Clarification and Understanding:
    Start by fully understanding the task. Don't hesitate to ask any clarifying questions. 
  • Systematic Approach:
    Outline your approach before starting to code. Consider the efficiency and quality of your solution.
  • Effective Communication:
    Articulate your decision-making process clearly. We value candidates who can explain the reasoning behind their choices.
  • Coding Practices:
    Prioritize writing clean, maintainable code. While not required, consider writing tests to demonstrate your attention to detail.
  • Handling Edge Cases:
    Be prepared to adapt your solution to different scenarios and think about potential edge cases.

Note: We appreciate the advancements in AI, but for this interview, please refrain from using tools like ChatGPT, Github Copilot, or similar. This ensures a fair and consistent evaluation of your skills.

Technical Problem-Solving

In this interview, you'll participate in a coding session aimed at assessing your coding skills and technical proficiency. We will be using Coderpad as our primary coding platform. If you prefer another tool, please let the recruiting coordinator know in advance.

Agenda:

  • Intros (5 min) 
  • Coding session (50 min)
  • Q+A (5 min)

What to Expect:

You’ll be presented with two coding challenges. Each challenge is designed to be completed within approximately 25 minutes. These problems will primarily focus on algorithms and data structures and will give us an insight into your problem-solving skills and coding ability.

Preparation Tips:

  • Clarification and Understanding: 
    Make sure you understand the problem before beginning. Asking clarifying questions is encouraged.  
  • Systematic Approach: 
    Explain your approach and thought process before diving into coding. This helps us understand how you tackle problems.
  • Communication:
    Keep the interviewer informed about what you're doing and why, especially if you encounter any challenges.
  • Code Quality:
    Focus on writing clean, maintainable code. Consider error handling and edge cases in your solution.
  • Efficiency:
    Prioritize the most critical parts of the algorithm. Efficiency in coding and problem-solving is key.

Note: We appreciate the advancements in AI, but for this interview, please refrain from using tools like ChatGPT, Github Copilot, or similar. This ensures a fair and consistent evaluation of your skills.

System Design

In this interview, you will be presented with a software design problem that you will solve collaboratively using Excalidraw or any document editor you're comfortable with. This problem will be open-ended and will require you to design a solution that addresses core requirements and includes considerations for follow-up scenarios.

Agenda:

  • Intros (5 min)
  • Problem solving (70 min)
  • Q+A (10-15 min)

Preparation Tips:

  • Clarification and Understanding:
    Start by fully understanding the problem. We value candidates who ask clarifying questions and consider the broader implications of their design choices.  
  • Systematic Approach:
    Discuss your approach in a structured manner before diving into design details. For higher IC levels, think strategically, considering not only the current requirements but also future scalability and organizational impact.
  • Communication:
    Clearly articulate your thought process and reasoning. If you encounter challenges, discuss them openly. We are interested in how you engage with problems and incorporate feedback.
  • Design Considerations:
    Focus on creating a scalable, maintainable, and efficient design. Consider various aspects such as data models, system resilience, and potential bottlenecks.
  • Edge Cases and Follow-ups:
    Be prepared to adapt your solution to cover edge cases and to address follow-up scenarios effectively.

Note: While we appreciate the role of AI in problem-solving, we ask you to refrain from using AI tools like ChatGPT, Github Copilot, or similar during the interview. This ensures fairness and enables us to accurately assess your individual problem-solving skills.

Career Review

In this interview, you'll have a conversational discussion focusing on your career history, key accomplishments, and how you've approached challenges and collaboration in your past roles. We'll explore your experiences in driving impactful results, working within teams, exhibiting a growth mindset, and understanding customer needs.

Agenda:

  • Intros (5 min)
  • Career Walkthrough and Discussion (45 min)
  • Q+A (5-10 min)

Preparation Tips:

  • Reflection and Preparation:
    Review key moments in your career, focusing on both successes and learning experiences.  
  • Communication: Be clear and concise in your descriptions. We're interested in understanding your role and impact in various scenarios.
  • Teamwork and Collaboration:
    Share examples of how you've collaborated with different roles and contributed to team success.
  • Problem-Solving:
    Discuss how you've approached complex challenges and what you've learned from these experiences.
  • Customer Orientation:
    Reflect on how your work has aligned with customer needs and contributed to overall business goals.

Note: This interview is an opportunity for mutual exploration. It’s a chance for us to understand your career journey and for you to assess how well your aspirations align with our organization.

About Productboard

Our story

Productboard was founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan and Daniel Hejl with a simple mission: to help companies make products that matter. In the years since, we’ve grown from a handful of people to hundreds, backed by some of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Today, Productboard is recognized as one of the hottest tech startups, appearing on the Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list and being named the most valuable startup in the Czech Republic by Forbes Magazine.

Product Vision

Productboard seeks to be the system of record for every digital product, providing software that is purpose-built for the product management lifecycle. Product Management is the single driver of growth and innovation in many companies, yet PMs have gone too long being forced to use tools built for other departments and other workflows. We believe Productboard can enable companies to unlock product-led growth with customers and their needs at the center and ultimately build better products faster.

Market Opportunity

We are targeting a massive and growing market of digital product makers. As software continues to eat the world, the number of digital product makers and the importance of product decisions keeps growing exponentially.

Productboard's paid users are not just Product Managers, but also Designers, Researchers, Engineers, Product Marketers, executive stakeholders, and even members of customer-facing functions like Sales, and Customers Success.

Amongst Productboard's customers are digital native companies like Zendesk, Slack, and Autodesk, as well as companies undergoing a digital transformation like Disney, Quicken Loans, Cartier, McLaren, and Swarovski.

More than just software

We are building a software platform, but we are also pioneering a whole new category of Product Management systems. Just like Siebel and later Salesforce, created and dominated Customer Relationship Management, Hubspot and Marketo pioneered Marketing Automation, and Gainsight created a new Customer Success category, we have the unique opportunity to create and dominate a new category for Product Management Systems.

Product Features

  • Build Roadmaps
    • Connect your backlog with always up-to-date and easy-to-share roadmaps
  • Prioritize Features
    • Know what to build next based on user insights and company priorities
  • Centralize Feedback
    • Capture and collect all your customer feedback in one place
  • Validate Ideas
    • Share plans, validate ideas, and celebrate launches with a public Portal
  • Integrations
    • Enable efficient workflows with best-in-class integrations and APIs

Watch our Productboard pitch in front of 40k attendees of the Web Summit:

Executive team

Hubert Palan, CEO / President

Hubert is the founder and CEO of Productboard. Driven by a passion for building truly excellent products, he started the company back in 2015 when he saw a hole in the market for a dedicated product management platform. Prior to Productboard, Hubert was VP of Product Management at GoodData. Passionate about sharing his knowledge and experience, Hubert mentors and advises startups and judges teams at entrepreneurship competitions. He frequently speaks at his two alma maters – the University of California, Berkeley, where he got his MBA and certificate in Entrepreneurship, and the Czech Technical University, where he received an MSc. in Computer Science. In a past life, Hubert worked in management consulting. Fun fact: he once trained 20 national park managers in Vietnam on ecotourism marketing. Originally from the Czech Republic, Hubert now lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife, Jenna, and their two young sons, Hubert V and Nicholas.

Loïc Houssier, SVP of Engineering & CISO

Based out of San Francisco, but is originally from France. He is coming most recently from Firstbase, another Kleiner Perkins company, where he’s been a customer and a big fan of Productboard!

Before Firstbase, he spent six years at Docusign where he’s seen a massive scale and complexity both from engineering and organizational perspective. He is incredibly passionate about our mission and understands the massive opportunity we have ahead of us in building a scalable, extensible product management platform.

Loïc lives in San Francisco with his wife and three kids. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, gardening, traveling and hiking!

Cris Domingo, Interim Head of People

Cris is experienced world-class leader. She brought experience from previous roles at Sumo Logic, Platfora, Monster Inc. and Yoh, A Day & Zimmermann Company.

Sebastien Giroux, CFO

Sebastien Giroux is a seasoned finance executive with experience in a wide range of environments, including start-ups and Fortune 500s, M&A integrations, IPOs, and turnarounds. He has experience in building financial foundations, teams, and processes for high-growth companies in the technology industry. He has a proven record of creating and executing a strategic vision that unifies Finance efforts with GTM, Operations, Product, and other areas to drive business success. Giroux was most recently Chief Financial Officer at Collibra and previously held strategic financial management positions at Atlassian, RingCentral, and IBM.

Jeff StClair, President 

Jeff joined Productboard in September of 2023 as President of our entire GTM function. He is an exceptionally positive and high-stamina professional who brings incredible energy to our team. He is a seasoned Revenue-focused executive who previously oversaw Marketing, Sales, and CS execution at Automox. He also led and experienced exceptional enterprise scale at Palo Alto Networks, a large public cyber-security company now valued at $75B. Jeff lives in the Bay Area with his wife and three sons.

James Lee, VP of Finance & Operations

James joined Productboard as VP of Finance and Operations in March 2020. He is responsible for the company’s financial and internal operations functions, including accounting, strategic finance, and business analytics. Prior to joining Productboard, James held senior leadership positions at Wonderschool and GitHub, where he built and scaled finance and business operations functions from the ground up, while also helping out with fundraising and M&A efforts. Previously, James was an investor at Accel-KKR and an investment banker at JP Morgan. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, James has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years. He is a loyal fan of Philz Coffee, the Golden State Warriors, and his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, where he got a B.S. in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research.

Backed by top VC firms

In February 2022, we closed our $125M Series-D round, backed by VC giants like Dragoneer Investment Group, Tiger Global Management, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Investors & Board Directors, and observers:

Strategic Angel Investors:

Our customers

6000+ customers love Productboard. Read their success stories here:

Our differentiation

We have a point of view on Product Management and we are highly differentiated on several dimensions:

  • Customer-centric product management - Unlike the old-school feature-focused approach to product management (e.g. Aha) we lead with the modern, customer-centric approach to product management that is far superior because it puts the customers and their pain points at the center and significantly increases the chances of building the right product.
  • Comprehensive and modular Product Management System - Unlike some of the utilities that focus just on a small part of the product management process (Roadmapping utility like ProductPlan, Roadmunk, or research repository like Dovetail, EnjoyHQ), we deliver a comprehensive and modular system for Product Management that supports the whole product management workflow.
  • Purpose-built Product Management Platform - Unlike the engineering task management tools, generic project management tools, or generic no-code software (JIRA, asana, airtable, etc), we focus specifically on the needs of modern digital product managers.
  • Open platform - Unlike traditional closed applications, we are architecting Productboard as an open platform with APIs that make it easy to integrate PB into existing workflows, integrate with existing systems, get data in and out, and that allows IT and developers programmatically extend and control Productboard's functionality.
  • A standardized approach to Product Management - Unlike anyone else, we pioneer a standardized approach to Product Management based on a collection of best practices adopted by the industry's best product organizations - the Product Excellence Framework.
  • Delightful user experience - We understand that the only sustainable long-term differentiator and a competitive moat is user experience (and delight specifically) and we invest heavily to deliver a product that is superior in the execution of both functionality and usability. Our product satisfies the needs of product managers with superior functionality and with unprecedented delight.
  • Collaboration across the whole company - We understand that Product Management is a team sport and a highly collaborative endeavor across the entire company. We are building a system not just for the core product team, but for anyone who is interested in the Product's progress or who wants to contribute market insights.
  • Brand and community - We are not building just a software product, we are building a community of exceptional product makers. We are inspired by the legendary products out there and the relentless product teams behind them. We stand for excellence in the craft of Product Management. We aspire to inspire, guide, and delight all product makers out there, to do the best work of their lives.

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