Step 2: Provide the structure for the answer. Interviewers of all types love asking about past mistakes, as it’s a way to test how well you learn from blunders. Not only will understanding the company’s structure and key stakeholders help you if you do end up with the company—it may also give you the upper hand for questions related to interacting with various stakeholders and your understanding of their priorities. And you’ll get much more out of it if you frame it as a sort of game: a conversation and process of mutual discovery. It was not easy coming from a totally different culture but I learned a lot in a very short space of time. In addition to helping you understand the types of backgrounds the company looks for, understanding the different types of people and roles can give you a better sense of company culture before experiencing it firsthand. That is, Partner A (interviewer) gives a case to Partner B (interviewee). Others seem to have been bad apples, and later Glassdoor reviews confirmed as much. Read more about general Product Manager interview tips. BUT before you spend the money…check out the free stuff: Finally, read what PMs have to say about how they interview and what they look for in places like First Round Review and Medium. How I Prepared for a Product Manager Interview. My first month has been great, and I’ve received a ton of support from peers and managers alike. Each company is structured slightly differently, and this is particularly pertinent for product managers, who often interface with every business unit. If it excites you, then your background, and thus words on your resume, should position you as the best possible candidate to solve that problem. There are a few interview bibles out there that everyone recommends, and you’d do well to read: My advice would be: read them after you have a good sense of your local job market, know that they are biased towards US/Silicon Valley product manager jobs, and some are a few years old by now. Some of the good stuff was hidden away in articles you wouldn’t expect. Y es, it’s a lot of work to prepare for these interviews. “To get the best result in your salary negotiation, focus on one thing at a time and make that thing the one which is most valuable to you. “First, the candidate should be able to speak clearly about their product management experience,” suggested Alex Willen, former product manager at TalkDesk and author of the book “The Product Management Interview: How to Find the Right Job as a Product Manager and Crush the PM Interview Process.” How to Answer Program Manager Interview Questions. I did this early on when I had no idea what I was doing, and from a couple of dozen resumes and letters sent, I had a 10% response rate. I doubt that is you and it’s certainly not me. I’d work to prioritize the area I most need improvement on. Technical skills aside, if the team likes you, they’ll be that much more likely to extend an offer. You should be! Well-meaning people gave me advice, often contradictory, and shadowed by their own experiences long time ago. You want to find out if you want to work for the company, and they figure out if they want to hire you. A lot of people I met at events and talks around town ask me how I prepared for it, so I thought I’d do a post — but wanted to wait for all signals from my manager to turn green before I published it. What was it like working for your manager? If you’ve recently landed a product manager interview, congrats! 45-minute phone interview with a Product Manager. Thanks for reading. You’ll know more about what to ask if you do the preparation mentioned at #7 but there a couple more things to mention: Ah, the offer — the moment when everyone starts talking about your “leverage” more than at any other point. Overly formal is an impression too. The Product Management Hiring Panel at Google is evaluating your creativity, and they place a big emphasis on big ideas (aka "moonshots"). This is the hardest part of the whole interview, and the hardest to write about since there are so many variables. “Dress for the job you want” is silly and vague. Hopefully the responses above will help you prepare for your next product manager interview. Others wanted to hear you rattle off frameworks. It’s virtually impossible to prepare an answer for every interview question, so the next best strategy is to prepare case studies of work you’ve done in the past which can be applied as answers to a variety of “tell me about a time when you…” questions. Before the interview, see if you can speak directly with someone who has actually worked as a product manager at the company you are interviewing, or at the very least a PM in any company. Sign up for the product management interview practice group on Slack: bit.ly/PMInterviewGroup Post a request for a partner or partners in the #req-practice-ptr channel. Not all companies are courteous when it comes to time at the end for the candidate to ask questions. You start out terrible at it but the more you practice, the better you become. SEE ALSO: How to Ace the Facebook Product Manager Interview (Second Edition) What to Expect The Facebook PM interview has standardized across three components: Product SenseGood Facebook PMs innovate beautiful products that solve big, messy user problems. 4. Creating a study plan with these areas defined is a good way to prepare for the product management interview. This blog series is for product managers who are in the recruiting and hiring cycle, working with recruitment agencies, working with product management recruiters and anyone looking to hone the interview skills needed for product management.. How do I prep for a second round interview for a Product Manager position?. His newsletters are informative but you can read his book too. I am postponing my interview. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Guide to Prepare for a Product Manager Interview Published on November 10, 2019 November 10, 2019 • 139 Likes • 21 Comments Best interview preparation books. Wear something nicer: pants, a shirt and a sweater. As you will know, the PM role covers a broad set of skills, and different people may have different takes on it. Just look at how people around dress in the city, and go “+1" as in dress one “level” smarter than they are. The rest never ever got back to me (85%) or got back to me within 24 hours to say no (5%). Creating a study plan to prepare for the Product Managment Interview. That’s it! Some background, I have software engineering background and moved to product management. Let’s say that the interview question is something vague like “improve a pen “. 3 min read. You'll also want to download … It goes both ways – check out this list of 20 key interview questions you should ask. Give the cross-functional nature of product manager roles, you’ll be working with many more people than who actually interview you—and it’s worth getting an idea of who they are before going in. It wasn’t always possible (search on LinkedIn for ‘recruiter’ title at a bigger company and get dozens of people) but it’s advisable. Decode and Conquer was published in 2013, Cracking the PM interview updated in 2015, and only Lewis C. Lin’s last book with 164 Q&As was published in 2017. Impress and inspire them with unique, compelling ideas. At the end of our interview, we chat about some fun product questions! Step one: Set a business objective First, we should confirm our understanding of the question and define a business objective. It depends on your background. No matter how large or small the product, its success hinges on how well a product manager does their job. This question can be a tripping point if you’re not well-prepared, and candidates often end up digging themselves into holes trying to come up with a good answer, so think through some mistakes, how you handled them, and what you learned. It won’t be how you’ll always dress in case you get the job but interviews are still about first impressions. You don't want to end your Product Manager interview with Google this way. So you’d have to cast your net really wide for this one to work, which isn’t feasible or desirable after a while. Wear yours tucked in with a jacket, and so on. This almost goes without saying, but don’t forget to gain a good understanding of the company’s products—and particularly the product(s) you might be working on. Interviewers will probe for the following areas: Negotiation & ability to influence others.Amazon PMs can take a position, convince others, and drive team action. Have multiple versions of the answer ready to deploy depending on your read of how long you should talk for. Product Design (aka Product Sense) Questions Step 1: Ask clarification questions. Pick one category.. You have to be prepared to do well in all of the above categories in order to excel … As you answer, try to align your … Prioritization is a key skill anyways, so might as well get as much practice as we can. Step 3. — Benjamin Franklin. You’ve been selected to lead a team and you’re excited about the opportunity ahead. 2. Based on the suggestions, some research, and a mock interview, I feel I will need to prepare little more seriously than I thought. There are lots of posts about “how to get your first job as a product manager” and I certainly read my fair share in preparation. While the job titles look ridiculously similar, and the roles do have quite a bit in common, they aren’t actually the same. Best advice on how to write your resume. Drawing wireframes on a whiteboard will help illustrate your ideas. There are only so many opportunities to prepare for product strategy interview questions! But…, Telecommuting and distributed offices have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly with the rise of digital productivity tools…, The nature of a mentorship is a pretty simple one: someone with more experience helps someone with less experience…. In addition to getting you in the product mood, using your favorite products before an interview can help you think more specifically about what makes products great—or not so great. We appear to be 5% into 2018 and it’s been a great year so far. But before it, I went through a 3-month job hunt after we moved to SF. Every PM role is different, so is every company, and so is the particular moment in time when you apply. Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter or in the comments. But some do, and some CEOs take time to read them, usually to see motivation and clarity in written communication. The more you know about the market and company and have confidence in your self worth, the better the negotiation will go. Thank you everyone for all the positive feedback, comments, and suggestions on this article since I published it back in September 2013. Find resources about the company you are interviewing for on Google News, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and other news outlets. Here, the interviewers are typically probing on two specific leadership principles: Earn Trust. I haven’t signed up to the course as it was overkill for what I needed at the time. Once you maximize base salary, then move on to something like paid vacation or whatever is the next-most-valuable thing on your list.”. Technically, they all oversee projects, but the niches can vary. Do you see people mostly in shirts (albeit unbuttoned)? 3. Since there’s a lot to this, I wrote a more in-depth article on how to prepare: Google PM Interview – how to prepare. Here’s a checklist of ten things to help you prep for your interview. I just completed my first month as a product manager at Rainforest QA — we built an on-demand QA platform that uses a combination of crowd testing and machine learning to help companies around the world deliver bug-free software, and we’re based in SF with a ton of remote people. You are super excited, but your mind is going at million places about what you need to do to prepare/study for the interview. Remember to think like a product manager when you are going through these sources. It'll prescribe a step-by-step prep plan, including specific exercises and recommendations. All of them promoted “internal candidates” (or so they claim). Product manager interview questions are often intense, and with good reason: It’s an absolutely vital role within companies, and hiring managers want to thoroughly evaluate a candidate’s suitability. Woohoo, you finally got the call, the interviewer would like to interview you for the product manager role. Disagree and Commit. How to Avoid Micromanaging and Become a Great Coach Instead, How to Work Remotely and Keep Your Sanity, How to Mentor Yourself Out of a Job (So You Can Get a Better One). These views can be applied to a number of questions, whether your interviewer asks for more general product thoughts or you’re sharing your opinion on what the company already does from a product perspective. In general, have a few of these examples related to product instincts, leadership and teamwork, and stakeholder collaboration. What They Want to Know: This question isn’t a query for … Books are great, but nothing beats getting informationfrom the horse’s mouth. Cover letters are controversial. Preparation for the Product Manager phone interview. 1. Clean up any portfolios or mockups you plan to bring with you. I’m not inside the mind of a recruiter or hiring manager, and don’t want to speak for them, but hope this will be useful in the job hunt. But you’re not over the finish line just yet, as you’ll need to impress your interviewers more than the next (and preceding) candidates in order to land the job. Napala is a consultant to early-stage technology companies. If this article by an ex-Google recruiter is anything to go by, you’ll just end up in a huge pile with other randoms. When compiling your personal case studies, be sure to think about examples that demonstrate your technical, in … The internet! Focus on technical skills. To prepare for this first round product management call, you need to do basic research about the company. The next step is a 45-minute phone interview with a current PM. Only very special, highly elite people can walk into a PM interview totally cold and actually nail it. They probably won’t let too much slip about the actual interview questions, but they can provide real world context to the PM role that you won’t get from a book. In addition, conduct some searches for recent company news—from new funding to PR scandals, being able to speak to recent developments shows you’re interested in that specific company, not just in getting a job offer.