Tell me about a time you decided between customer-centric and business-centric goals.

In this question, the interviewer is interested in knowing about your decision-making skills, particularly in situations where you have to balance between considering the needs of the customer and business requirements. Essentially, they’re looking to see how well you balance between short-term profits and long-term relationships, as well as how you prioritize among competing interests.

To successfully answer this question, start by sharing the context of the situation. Then, explain the choices that were available and why you were torn between considering the immediate needs of the business and the long-term interests of the customer. Finally, discuss what decision you made, the rationale behind it, how you implemented it, and the end result.

Remember to highlight any lessons learnt and how that has shaped your decision-making in similar situations moving forward.

In my previous role as a product manager at XYZ Software, we had a significant release coming up. However, we also knew from our customer feedback that there were several bugs in the existing software that were causing problems for our current users.

Our business goals were pushing us to focus on the new release, as it would bring substantial immediate revenue and help make the quarter. However, we also knew that not fixing the existing bugs could cost us long-term customers and affect our reputation.

After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to advocate for the customers, I spoke with our development team to find out how we could integrate bug fixing into our workflow without stalling new development. We strategized to fix the most critical bugs while delaying the release schedule by a few weeks.

The decision was initially met with resistance, but turned out to be the right call. We saw a significant increase in customer satisfaction and customer retention rates increased by 15% the subsequent quarter. This experience taught me that customer satisfaction comes with tremendous business value, and sometimes, it's worth it to momentarily put aside pressing business goals for the sake of the customer.

During my time as a team lead at ABC Mobile, we received a feature request from one of our biggest clients. The feature was complex and implementing it would require resources that we had allocated to a major platform upgrade that was essential for gaining new customers.

I communicated this dilemma to the client, explaining that while we wanted to prioritize their request, doing so would mean pushing back on a critical business objective. However, to demonstrate our commitment to them, I also suggested a workaround using existing features in the meantime and promised to add their request in our future development pipeline.

The client appreciated our transparency, agreed to the workaround, and we were able to keep our focus on the platform upgrade. Not only were we able to sign up new customers as a result of the upgrade, but we also strengthened our relationship with the existing client. This taught me the importance of open communication and managing expectations when confronted with competing customer-centric and business-centric goals.