Interviewing for PM with non-traditional background? A few things I’ve learned so far
Breaking into product management with a degree other than Engineering or CS can be tough. If you’re a non-traditional hire, you can absolutely be a rockstar PM — don’t be put off by intimidating job requirements! That said, as I’ve watched others go through this journey (and gone through it myself), I’ve taken note of a few things you might want to consider as you work your way into a PM role.
Use coffee meetings with current PMs to immerse yourself in PM thought processes. There’s excellent advice on how to ask for a coffee meting elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it here (try this LinkedIn template). But now that you’ve got the meeting, what do you talk about? Since you’re new to PM, or maybe even to tech in general, it’s important to understand how PMs think and make decisions. You can read about frameworks in a book all day, but I’ve found it’s much easier to listen how a real PM thinks about their own product in order to understand the kind of thinking you’ll need to demonstrate in an interview. Here’s a few questions that can help get you started:
1. What product/feature are you currently working on? Why did you prioritize building this product/feature over others?
2. What factors do you consider every time you decide to work on a new product or feature? What weight do you place on each factor and why?
3. Do you have any recent presentations we could walk through together? What results were you trying to drive with this release? Did you achieve them? If not, what stood in your way?
Make sure your interviewers understand your passion for technology. As Product Management becomes a more popular career, recruiters and hiring managers can have a hard time telling who’s there because they truly love building products that matter vs. those who think PM might be “cool”. If you’ve already worked in tech, this is generally less of an issue. But if you’re coming from another field, think deeply about your product “spark”. Did you have to work with some SaaS product everyday in your current role that didn’t fit your needs and constantly emailed customer service with feature requests? Did you use a consumer product that changed your life? Work this technology and product-related “spark” into your 2–3 minute narrative, and you’ll show your interviewers that you’re in for the product long haul.
Be prepared to have your relationships with engineers questioned. If you aren’t an engineer or haven’t had a history of engaging with engineers, you can be sure that interviewers will ask about your working relationships with them. I haven’t been through one interview without being asked, “Tell me about a time you had to influence engineering to build something they were skeptical about” or “Given your background, how did you learn to communicate effectively with engineering?”. Engineering managers want to know that you understand and can effectively manage development work, which is different than other kinds of work because: 1) it can’t be sped up without making big sacrifices, 2) things can’t be changed on a dime, and 3) attention to detail is a must, not a nice-to-have. In order to answer these questions well, think of times when you shielded engineers from a workflow interruption, removed/mitigated a roadblock, or did anything that made their jobs easier. Where possible, provide details such as the technical depth of your conversations with engineering (i.e. “I knew the feature request would be taxing to our current infrastructure”) as well as the strength of your relationships with the team (i.e. “I brought this issue to the engineering manager, whose trust I’d gained”). If you give your interviewer every reason to think engineers would enjoy working with you, you’ll be that much closer to a PM role.
If you can soak up knowledge from current PMs by asking the right questions, develop a narrative about your passion for technology, and demonstrate an understanding of engineers and development work, you’re well on your way to being a killer PM. Keep going!
Like this article? Want to hear more about the process of breaking into PM or interviewing? I’d love to hear from you — please leave a comment below!
