I’m getting ready for product manager interviews at the senior level and need help showing strategic thinking when I talk about past decisions.
I have this story about removing an old product feature. The data showed barely anyone used it, and the few customers who did weren’t really getting value from it. When I talked to users, they said they only checked it to stay updated but never made important decisions with it. Plus the maintenance costs were way higher than any benefits.
But I’m wondering how to tell this story in a way that shows I think strategically, not just tactically. Should I focus on how cutting this feature let us work on better things? Or talk about avoiding wasted investment in outdated areas? Maybe connect it to our bigger product roadmap?
What do hiring managers actually want to hear when they’re looking for strategic product sense in these situations?
Don’t frame it as just cutting features - talk about opportunity cost and resource optimization instead. Start with context: what was your company focused on growing back then? Then explain how you moved engineering resources to higher-impact work that actually supported those goals. Use numbers whenever you can: “Killing this feature freed up 15% of our dev capacity, which we put toward core workflows that boosted engagement 40%.” The strategic part is showing you understood the competitive landscape and made smart trade-offs. Senior PMs need to think beyond individual features - they care about portfolio-level decisions. Connect your choice to real business results and explain how it supported your long-term product vision, not just fixed a maintenance headache.
Focus on customer obsession! Show how you put user needs first, even when it wasn’t convenient internally. Talk about how you dug into research to find what customers actually wanted, then had the guts to shift resources toward features that solved real problems. That’s the kind of thinking executives love to see.
Most answers here are way overthinking this. Hiring managers are sick of hearing “strategic pivot” - they’ve heard it a thousand times. Just be honest: you killed a feature because it wasn’t working and you’re not afraid to make hard decisions. That’s what senior PMs get paid for.
Skip the fancy frameworks and “customer obsession” buzzwords. Tell them you spotted a sunk cost fallacy, cut your losses, and moved on. The strategic part isn’t some grand vision speech - it’s having the guts to kill features when the data shows they’re failing.
Start with the why behind the why. Skip the feature details - jump straight into the strategic challenge your company faced. Breaking into a new market? Fixing retention? Beating competitors? Frame your decision as solving that bigger problem. I got burned in my last interview talking about similar stuff but staying too narrow. Show them you weren’t just reacting to bad metrics - you were proactively creating space for what mattered to your strategy. Wrap up with how this framework helped you tackle other tough decisions down the road.
Don’t just call it feature removal - frame it as a strategic pivot. You need to show how you connected data analysis to bigger market positioning decisions. Start with the hypothesis you were testing. Maybe you questioned whether this feature actually fit your target customers or helped differentiate your product. Then explain how you validated this: usage data, customer feedback, competitive research. Here’s the key insight - low engagement usually means the feature doesn’t align with your core value, not that it was built poorly. Focus on how this decision reflected your strategic principles about product focus and market positioning. Senior-level thinking means recognizing that every feature is a statement about who you serve and how you compete. Wrap up by explaining how this shaped your feature prioritization going forward. Show that you extracted lessons that influenced future strategic decisions.
show them you think like a CEO, not just a feature manager. frame it as brand positioning - what impression do you want customers to have? messy, low-engagement features hurt how people see your brand. i’d emphasize that you protected the user experience by choosing quality over quantity. hiring managers want to see you get it - every feature either strengthens or weakens your market position.