The Product Management Job Search
I applied to 71 different companies in my most recent active job search.
I was leaving a two-year stint at Yahoo as an associate product manager, and yearned for an environment where I could have more impact on the organization as a whole. Comfort is dangerous, and I dreaded to be anywhere near it.
I applied through every sort of venue: cold applications, LinkedIn, referrals, VCs — and there were even several second-degree referrals to other companies when the fit wasn’t right. All of them were centered in New York. Unlike previous job searches, I was optimizing for geography.
Of course, as with any data-loving individual, I made sure the entire process was tracked. I’ll share some of my findings, and as an added bonus, I’ll even go over some of my more opinionated and qualitative findings (the best kind), as well as describe where I’ve landed.
The Numbers
First, to geek out on the numbers. My sample size is underwhelming to be sure, but probably nudges the upper bound of self-inflicted torture that any sane person would willingly endure. 31 of these 71 companies never got back to me (technically, a few got back to me after 2+ months, but I won’t count those), 8 extended offers, and the rest fell off somewhere during this process (by my choice or by theirs). The funnel looked something like this:
Applications: 71
(No-Responses: 31)
(Rejections at Review: 16)
Initial Phone Screens: 24
Follow-up Rounds: 17
On-sites / Final Rounds: 9
Offers: 8
Accepted: 1
Time to First Interview
The stats are more interesting than the funnel. On average, it took 7 days to hear back for a first interview. As expected, while several startups had their recruiting on point and responded within a day or two, others took more than two weeks. The largest companies, on the upper tail, took a lethargic 27 days. There was no noticeable difference in response time between acceptances and rejections.
Before I go any further, I should caution once again, that my sample size is small.
Time to Completion
The data around finishing the interview process looks very different from the data reflecting the beginning stages; time taken to complete any interview process did not seem to vary with company size, the source of my application (cold, referral, etc), or even number of people I had to interview with.
The sole determinant of how quickly my candidacy progressed was how fast it had to progress. That is, companies reliably moved as a function of competing offers on the table — the more competing offers, the faster the interview process was. I am not sure if this was because of FOMO, whether other offers validated my competency, or because companies can also be irrational actors.
Validating Base-Level Competency
Since the beginning of forever, the industry has undergone tremendous grief in validating base-level competency in their candidates. Nothing is worse than hiring someone who interviewed well, only to learn that they’ve entirely misrepresented.
Enter technical interviews. Engineers use fizz-buzz tests and a multitude of other methods in order to establish simple proficiency, and in the same vein, it seems like a trend to give prospective product hires varying types of homework. For the 9 on-site interviews I took, I finished 6 assignments.
While some companies gave me reasonable expectations for assignments, explicating a 2–3 hour limit, others left it open ended. These assignments ranged from asking me to spec out a feature to delineating a digital growth strategy.
Unfortunately, none of the companies asked me to look at data, which I found disappointing. Data analysis is a critical skill (and dataphilia may be a critical personality trait!) for product managers, so I expected a large portion of my assessments to involve analysis.
The stereotypical PM skill, writing, at least, was always tested for.
I enforced a hard-stop of 3 hours on each assignment (other than the full-day), which I was firm with. This is, of course, in direct opposition to one friend who spent over 20 hours on a single assignment, going so far as to gather crude market data by camping the streets with a clipboard. We had different approaches to job searching :)
Visuals excluded, I wrote approximately 7,000 words for all my homework combined.
The Interviews
As aforementioned, 31 companies never got back to me; this didn’t surprise me. What surprised me is the indifference in response rate measured against application source… That is, there was no significant difference in non-responses for cold applications or referrals. Except LinkedIn. To date (5 months now?) I have received zero responses for which I used LinkedIn to apply.
For better or for worse, I purposefully approached my first round interviews with very little research. This wasn’t about a lack of respect, laziness, or even a lack of time. No — it was about the goal: I wasn’t trying to score a job — I was trying to find a phenomenal fit. As much as I would sell myself to the company, I wanted the company to sell itself to me.
For the most part, companies were open to this. When asked what I knew about the company, I would always reply that I had a general idea of what they did, but that for me, it’s the product challenges and the people that make the job. Those were my drivers.
Interviews, Round 1
First-round interviews were generally dreary and boring; I found it incredibly difficult to screw up a first-round interview. Out of 24, 22 companies asked me to do a second round, with the majority of them telling me so on the call, when I asked about next steps.
The questions at this stage were generally the same. I was asked about my history, my education, and most of all, my experience. I fielded all sorts of questions about my last three major projects, which were Yahoo Weather, a content marketplace, and a MMORPG.
My applicant-advice for this stage? Channel your inner Homer and work on your storytelling. Tell concise, intentional, and powerful stories about your past. Paint their world with not just your accomplishments, but your wit.
My recruiter-advice? Rather than going broad, go deep. Guide the candidate towards what you want to hear, and ask about the quirks that wring out original thinking. Your candidate should never be able to blindly monologue in anticipation of your questions.
A few things advised me to disqualify companies at this stage, with obvious rigidity, high pm:engineer ratio, and general sketchiness being my top three concerns. To all applicants: if you feel even the least bit sketched out, run.
Interview, Round 2
I use “round 2” loosely. In reality, I will talk about every round between the first round and the last round, since a few companies had 5 or 6 “rounds”.
These rounds were much more interesting, and it gave me a chance to really look at the companies in depth. Many of the questions I was asked really ended up turning into discussions, and I fully enjoyed a large portion of my round 2s. Many of these ran overtime with us just chatting.
The best interviewers, once again, went deep, and challenged the decisions I had made in the past, even if they would have agreed with me. The best ones stayed away from purposeless open-ended questions like “how else could you have approached that?” and asked more targeted questions like “if that metric you spoke of hadn’t spiked, would you still have made the same decision?”
I ended up receiving more final round requests than I took, but I think that was their mistake. The fit wasn’t right for some, but I think the difficulty in recruiting sometimes pushes companies to grant greater leniency for false positives at the later stages. I’d encourage candidates to stop interviewing when the fit doesn’t feel right. You don’t want to work somewhere you hate just to have a job.
The best interviews left me excited, and the worst ones had me feeling like I just finished an exam.
My applicant tip? Do your research at this stage. You want to be able to ask the hard questions and unveil the issues that you either can or cannot live with. My recruiter tip? Be super honest with all the bad stuff about the company. Candidates appreciate transparency, and no one will believe everything is flowers and sunshine (maybe unless it’s a flower store set outside in California~)
Interviews, Final Round
I took all my final rounds quite seriously, since for me, the people I work with was probably the most important factor in my decision. Some companies flew me up to New York, while others opted to save some money and conduct virtual interviews. Some interviews lasted three hours, and others lasted an entire day.
By far, I learned the most from the ones that I had a chance to visit in person. It gave me an opportunity to observe the office dynamics, actually get a measure of their talent in person, and figure out the logistics of going to and from work every day. More, it let me measure the tension and atmosphere.
Questions here ran the gamut. There were repeats of product questions asked in round 2, and there were more focused questions about how I worked with engineers, designers, and sales. Mostly, though, I was interviewing at startups, and I had a feeling that most people were just trying to get a read for my culture fit. No one wants to hire someone who’ll destroy everyone else’s productivity. In other words, they wanted to know: “is Shenglong an asshole?”
On-sites were tough and generally left me drained. Speaking for hours on end with person after person is exhausting, especially when you end up repeating the same things. If anything, I guess the on-sites gave my interviewers a glimpse of how I behave when not entirely brimming with energy.
My applicant tips? Observe everything. Listen to how loud the office is. Is most of the chatter friendly or work-related? Are people unafraid to raise their voices in civil debate? That will tell you how comfortable everyone is with each other.
Where is the office located? How nice is it? This will give you a sense of how much budget you’re likely to have. How is the office designed? Drill down into your interviewer’s personal habits, so you can paint a clear picture of what you might be getting into.
My interviewer tips? Don’t hold back. Yes, you’re trying to impress your candidate, but a good candidate will be more impressed with your crass honesty than your manners. All the companies I seriously considered demonstrated close to zero sketchiness.
The Decision
The decision process wasn’t easy, but I ended up taking the offer from Everwise — a completely new model for talent development in the modern workforce. While historically, most companies have rely on formal, classroom style training, Everwise leverages technology to provide a personalized learning experience through a combination of doing and social.
We run a fantastic (ridiculously high NPS) cross-company mentorship program, and an unbeatable diversity program for women.
It ticked all my boxes:
- Competent & transparent leadership
- Smart & stupidly high-energy people
- Early stage, maybe first official product hire
- Validated product-market fit with lots of product work to do
- Extremely difficult problems that’ll keep me up at night
- Solving a real fundamental need (for Everwise, it’s developing people)
- A super cute cuddly omg-so-fluffy woof-woof-arfff-awoooo office dog
Final Words
My search reflected the state of the technology industry in New York, but every search for every person will yield different results. Rather than perform any hard comparisons, I would urge readers to take my experiences anecdotally.
Much like in finding a partner in life, you want the company you work for to put in as much as you put in. You want them to want you as much as you want them. You can never be sure, but when it feels right, you be sure to take that thousand-mile leap of faith, and be damn sure to you give it everything you have.
Follow me on Twitter; I’ll migrate my domain over when I have some time.
