General Tips for PM Interviews

I often find myself repeating the same tips during PM practice interviews, so I wanted to share the most common ones in a blog post here.

Disclaimer: This post is based on my experience as a PM interviewer at Google (I’ve recently joined Shopify, but I haven’t been trained for interviews yet). I know my perspective was shared by many other PM interviewers at Google, but it’s worth noting that companies and individuals have many different interviewing styles.

The interviewer wants you to succeed. Help them help you!

It’s common for product interview questions to cover a lot of topics in just 45 minutes. The goal of this is not to trip you up, but to give you as many possible chances to shine, and you and the interviewer both want to make the best use of the time.

If you are ever unsure about how much time you should spend on one sub-answer, don’t hesitate to check in!

Interviewer: what are three things you don’t like about product A, and which one would you choose to improve?

You: It doesn’t work well for X, because of the homepage navigation. I would like to get notifications about Y, and I wish they had better calendar integration so I could see Z without having to click through the app.

At this point, if you aren’t sure if you should talk about each of these in more depth, a check in might look like:

You: “I’m happy to pick one of these now based on my initial thoughts, or if we have time I can talk more about the pros and cons of tackling each of these issues before deciding.”

Be prepared to proceed either way! But this way you don’t risk spending too much time on a part of the question that doesn’t actually matter for what the interviewer is evaluating.

Don’t freak out if the interviewer:

Cuts you off

• Often this means the interviewer can see you understand the topic and wants to move on to something else.
• Sometimes you might be going more in-depth than is necessary, and the interviewer wants to help you make better use of the remaining time. Let them help you!

Says “have you considered”, or “what if we did this”

• Receiving a few prompts is common, even for stellar candidates.
• Interviewers also might be assessing how you respond to guidance or feedback. Having the right amount of commitment to your own ideas in an interview is a delicate balance.
• Never be afraid to second-guess, double check, or go back on something you said. This is especially true if the interviewer is pushing back on your answer. Regardless, you should make sure you think critically and explain your reasoning.
• The opposite is true too though: just because the interviewer pushes back, doesn’t mean you should abandon your idea. As long as you give sufficient explanation, it’s okay to keep going with your idea.
• However, if you say “no” to all ten of their suggestions this will probably raise concerns about your ability to take direction and feedback.

You can try asking for relevant information, within reason

Even if you are working in a theoretical scenario where everything is made up, the interviewer might still be happy to make up some theoretical data or research that you can use in your answer.

For an analytical question about Netflix, you might ask

• What is the average monthly watch time?
• Do we know the leading causes of churn?
• How many users watch content in spurts (ex: watch 15 minutes of a show, then return and watch the rest), vs start to finish in one session?

Note that not all interviewers will give you answers, so be prepared to proceed with or without this information. In some cases, the interviewer may ask you to estimate what you think this is, especially if you are doing a Fermi estimation.

Also try to limit yourself to no more than two or three data requests. If the interviewer declines to provide numbers for your first request, try not to make any other requests. It’s usually a sign that this is not the type of interview question where you will be given data to work with.

[Carefully] take inspiration from your own experiences

Many candidates are afraid to share their own thoughts in case they seem like they can’t think about other users. However, in my opinion, it can be done responsibly. Just be sure to:

• Call out your biases and any specifics of your circumstances you think don’t apply to other users.
• Share a quick summary of a more typical use case.

Good examples of this

What would you improve about WhatsApp?

• When I use WhatsApp with my friends we often end up planning our next get together, but it’s always such a pain. Better support from the app through things like easy poll creation in threads would make this a lot easier. I would want to look at the data of all users before deciding to prioritize this as the PM, but I could believe this happens to other users as well.

How could Amazon decrease online returns?

• I don’t know why everyone returns products, but I am very sensitive to certain fabrics, and not all online stores list materials. Sometimes I’ll assume a product is made of cotton because of the name of the product, or in some cases the name of the store, but I’ll find out after the product is delivered it’s made of something else. I don’t know how many other users have issues with products not being cotton specifically, but I could believe not having enough detail in product listings generally, not just for clothing, leads to unnecessary returns. This could be dimensions for furniture, number of items in packaged food, etc. I might look at the “return reason” data to see how often a return could have been prevented with better listing information.

Bad examples of this — uncommon pain points

How would you improve [a physical product you use often — in this case headphones]?

• One pair of over the ear headphones hurt my ears (because I have a very unusual ear shape). I would like to redesign the headphones to fit ears like mine.

How would you improve Google Keep?

• It’s not great for planning vacations with my parents, the notes are too short and it could show better previews of the hotels in the links.

To conclude- if you can easily guess that less than 0.1% of users share your frustration, you probably want to find another way to improve the product.

Conclusion

Wherever you are in your Product Management journey, I hope this post was helpful. Stay tuned for my next post on the most common mistakes I see in PM analytical interviews.

If you are looking for other ways to prepare for PM interviews, I recommend Googling “Product Manager interview questions [COMPANY]” (for whatever company you are interested in) and writing up detailed responses to each one before looking at the answers.

Also be sure to check out my post on The Most Common Mistakes in the Google PM Analytical Interview.

Feel free to message me on LinkedIn if there are any other questions about PM interviews or PM life generally you’d like to see answered in a future post!