8 PRINCIPLES TO LAND YOUR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT OFFER: ACING THE INTERVIEWS
Before reading this article, be sure to check out the first 3 principles around getting interviews!
HOW TO GET THE OFFER
PRINCIPLE #4: Be tech fluent and speak the lingo
Once you get that first interview invite, start researching that company. During that interview, you want to be able to talk the talk to show that you can walk the walk. The easiest way to do this is to read their annual presentation (in slides if you can find it, otherwise the 10k can suffice). The annual presentation in a visual format will be a lot easier to understand in a short period of time over reading a denser 10k. If the company is not public, try to watch some YouTube videos or recent news.
We talked about in our last post about the importance of networking in getting referred. If you get an interview at a company that you have not talked to someone from your network about, try to! The easiest way to learn about said company is to hear it, unfiltered, from someone you know. Ask them about the culture and its strategy. Who are the key competitors? What are the major challenges they are facing? And most important, what are internal lingo, words and phrases that only employees use? Additionally, have them point you in the right direction for extra resources about the company.
Lastly, try to understand the trends at a macro level. Depending on industry, the buzzwords of cloud, big data, AI, 5G, blockchain, IoT & edge, automation, AR/VR will be opportunities or even realities that a lot of these tech companies are facing. It’ll be good to know where the space is going and the company’s strategic position within it. Know some key competitors and what they are trying to do.
With all this information, make sure you make it known during your interview that you have this depth and breadth of knowledge, and try to term drop as much as possible (the Why XYZ company? question is usually a good opportunity for this).
PRINCIPLE #5: Stand out by being persistent & different
Think about this situation. You left a high paying job to owe up to 200k in loans not to mention the opportunity cost of not working. You have 7–8 months to find a job. Majority of your time is taken up by classes, social events and other activities. And your fellow friends interviewing for consulting and banking have earlier and more structured processes. Welcome to the typical life of a prospective MBA PM.
My advice, be hungry. Find a way to stand out from the hordes of applicants that apply to renowned XYZ company. We talked about getting a referral, but here are some other ways that I’ve tried to varying degrees of success:
- In the case that you are provided the interviewer’s name beforehand, look up their LinkedIn. Try to bond between shared interests and ask targeted questions at the end of the interview to their background and experiences.
- Use your energy, enthusiasm and honesty to win them over. It’s OK to admit that you are not an expert in the differences between low, mid and high band 5G. But tell them that you are a quick learner and back it up with your knowledge of the telecom space and their usage of the different bands.
- You see how a lot of tech companies have optional cover letter slots? But don’t add to the reading load of those poor recruiters that have to read through hundreds of resumes already each day. In the off chance that they open that PDF file called “Cover Slide”, visually display your accomplishments.
- I did this for an Alphabet company that I was really interested in. After a mediocre first round interview where I fumbled a couple product questions, I asked the hiring manager for a follow-up case I can put a couple slides together for. While it took a significant amount of time to do (~10 hours), he really liked the fact that I took initiative and followed up with me personally after when I did not land the position.
PRINCIPLE #6: Understand your story and fine-tune it to each company
I cannot stress this enough. In the past, you wrote an essay about your own story to land your spot in your MBA program. Throw that out the window. Now write a new story for Google. For Amazon. And fine-tune it to that company and to why product management. And then practice that story over and over again in front of your friends and your school’s career management professionals so that it is intuitive and easy to deliver in 1–2 minutes.
Moreover, in most interviews, you will be asked the question “Why XYZ company?”. Most candidates use a three-reason answer that include words such as culture, competitive positioning, place for growth, etc. Sure, it’s fine to be generic — but find ways to sprinkle in your own personality and reasons into it. And this goes back to principle #4’s internal lingo, but discover what makes that company’s culture different? Is it an open floor plan, even for managers? Is it a manager-doer mentality?
PRINCIPLE #7: Start case prepping early
There is a myth at MBA programs that tech recruiting happens later. It’s true that many job postings open up later in the year, way past your consulting or banking classmates. But FAANG, and specifically product management is seemingly trending to posting earlier, specifically for internships. Moreover, because of the complexities in the cases and types of questions you can get (strategy, product design, metrics, estimations, etc.), it doesn’t hurt to start early.
There’s a lot of resources and medium articles on how to prep for PM cases. I won’t go too much into detail here, but I’ll just note what I found to be most helpful:
- Read the two PM holy books: Cracking the PM Interview and Decode and Conquer
- Watch how PMs case from the YouTube channel Exponent
- Read Stellar Peer’s Medium articles
- Use productmanagementexercises.com to find case questions with generally good crowd-sourced answers, good for casing with others as well as self-casing
- For the technicals, especially Google 2nd rounds, read up on this system design primer
PRINCIPLE #8: Plan and be ready to play the long game
At the end of it, while I called this a “formula”, sometimes the formula may give you the wrong number and you don’t end up with the internship that you wanted. It’s OK. Be ready to play the long game and treat it as a two-year approach.
Especially if you didn’t have much product related experience prior to MBA, try getting it over the summer at a tech company. Find a gig as a business analyst, project manager, program manager, marketing intern, product marketer… the list goes on and on. The title doesn’t really matter as the lines are blurred on what PMs do and don’t do at different companies — you really are looking for the experiences that you can talk to. And if you still haven’t started your MBA, think about a pre-MBA or in-semester internship that helps fill out the PM gaps on your resume.
Whew, it’s a lot, but don’t be daunted! You worked really hard to get to this point at your MBA program and technology companies are trending towards hiring more business minded PMs. None of these principles we talked about are new and most are intuitive and transferable to recruiting in other functions and industries. But I do believe that with the right mindset, nothing can stop you from landing your PM offer. Best of luck with the job search process!
Cheers,
Tony
#CBSDigitalLiteracy
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
This article is written by Tony Hung, a current student at Columbia Business School in the class of 2021. He will be interning at a top technology company over the summer. The views are his alone and not representative of any company or educational institution.
