**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:02)
Welcome to a very special episode of the podcast. Ever since I started this podcast, one of people's favorite segments continues to be the lighting round, and in particular, a question I ask guests around their favorite interview question that they like to ask candidates, and what they look for in a good answer. What we've done is we've picked my favorite interview questions that guests have shared. Out of over a hundred guests on the podcast, we've got 17 of my favorite interview questions, all combined in this one episode. You can use this episode anytime you are preparing to interview candidates, if you want to improve your existing interview questions, or if you're about to get interviewed and you want to prepare for the kinds of questions that you might get in the interview process.
Before we dive in, let me tell you about our product called Sendbird, the all-in-one communications API platform designed for both web and mobile apps. In a world saturated with multi-channel communication, product teams are discovering the effectiveness of in-app communication. With Sendbird, businesses can elevate their in-app experience with decluttered and branded communication featuring AI-powered chatbots, one-way messages, chat, video calls, and live stream capabilities all tailored for commerce, marketing, and top-tier support. Forward-thinking companies such as Hinge, Patreon, Yahoo, Accolade, and more use Sendbird to build in-app communication experiences that drive engagement, conversion, and retention. In-app communication has the highest conversion, highest engagement, and highest satisfaction of any communication channel. And when it comes to investing in this channel, trust Sendbird to take your in-app communication experience to the next level. Start today with Sendbird's free plan, and as a listener of Lenny's podcast, you'll get an additional two months of unlimited usage and access to all premium features, including creating your very own generative AI chatbot. Visit sendbird.com/lenny to begin your free journey. That's sendbird.com/lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments.
Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out epo at getepo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity.
That's getepo.com/lenny.
First up, we've got Eeke De Miliano. Eeke was head of product at Retool. She was also a PM at Stripe. Currently, she's actually starting her own company. And so here's Eeke sharing her favorite interview question.
**Eeke De Miliano** (3:36)
To what do you attribute your success and you can't say luck? Because I think humble people will always say luck in some way.
And I always kind of wanted to know, did you, like, how self-aware are you basically? And I think, and how curious are you? And I think people have really sort of gone back and reflected on why are they where they are today? Really, really says a lot about how they think about the world.
**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:58)
Next up, we've got Geoff Charles, head of product at Ramp and also just happens to be one of the most popular episodes of the podcast.
**Geoff Charles** (4:05)
Yeah, I asked, what's the hardest thing you've ever done?
And I asked that because working at Ramp is hard. I want to understand what hard means for them. I want to understand why it was hard. I want to understand how they overcame that difficulty, how they worked with other people to overcome that difficulty and how much agency they had in overcoming that. So it's a really good sign around what is difficulty to them and how much work they put into overcoming that.
**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:31)
Next up, we've got Shishir Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of Koda.
Funny enough, we posted this exact clip to TikTok and Instagram Reels and it blew up. It's one of the most popular clips we've ever put on our channels. By the way, did you know I have a TikTok and an Instagram channel? Just look up Lenny's podcast on TikTok or Instagram. Anyway, with that, here's Shishir Mehrotra sharing his favorite interview question.
16 more minutes of transcript below
Try it now — copy, paste, done:
curl -H "x-api-key: pt_demo" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000651996090
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and any agent that makes HTTP calls.
From $0.10 per transcript. No subscription. Credits never expire.
Using your own key:
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000636911336