Crushing the MBA PM Interview

If you are reading this, you are either thinking or already in the MBA Product Management recruitment process. If you are just exploring this career or you have that PM interview invite, this guide is meant to give you some context and relevant advice on how to reach the end goal.

Having been through this process and barely coming out on the other end unscathed, I thought I should write down what worked for me and point everyone to the direction of the resources that actually work — or how to make them work for you.

Good luck!

Understanding Product Management

If you are pivoting or an undergrad, it is essential to understand what a PM truly does. This can be done by talking to people who have done PM before, reading books or taking a course. If you are someone who already has PM experience, feel free to skip this section.

Some books I would recommend

1. Cracking the PM Career — A comprehensive primer for anyone who wants to understand what being a PM entails or wants to level up their skills as someone who is new to PM
2. Swipe to Unlock — Lots of case studies around how to think about certain technological decisions
3. Inspired — The philosophy of product management and what the ideal version of PM should look like

Other Resources

1. The Art of Product Management with Sachin Rekhi (ENG’05 W’05)
2. What Does a Product Manager Do All Day? | Day in the Life of a PM
3. What I *actually* do as a Product Manager (in 2023)

Preparing for the Interview

Company Research

Extremely important. Do a deep dive on the company you are interviewing for.

1. Watch their most recent conference or CEO keynotes
2. Read their product blogs
3. Read their 10-K, Annual Reports
4. Know their mission and vision
5. Play around with their products and know their entire product suite
6. Do an industry, landscape and competitor analysis
7. Speak to people who work there (this will be helpful later)

This will not only help you learn and pick up bits you can sprinkle in your interview to show your research but may also help you understand whether this is the company you even want to work for.

Behavioral Interviews

STAR framework. After trying everything else, I kept coming back to this. It works.

Interviewers even expect and suggest it. Amazon is purely behavioral — even for PM.

So make sure you lock these down. This is the easy part. These are your own stories. Practice storytelling. Make your stories engaging and provocative. Be proud of your achievements. Use ‘I’ more than ‘We’.

Make sure you practice well, ensure each answer is within to 2–3 minutes and leave enough room for follow ups.

Using the STAR method for your next behavioral interview (worksheet included)

Product Casing

Now let’s come to the fun part. Product Casing.

To be honest, even though I have had PM experience, it’s not the same as being a good PM interviewee. I had to start from scratch.

Here are the resources I used and their purpose.

Decode and Conquer — Lewis Lin

Everyone and their respected mothers will recommend this book to you and so will I. Fun Fact, Lewis is actually a Kellogg MMM alum!

But will this book single handedly make you great at interviews? No. However it will start you off!

Use this book to get a ground-level understanding of the types of questions asked, and the frameworks used. But remember as you start memorizing CIRCLES, everyone else is doing that too. That’s why it’s very important to take CIRCLES, but build on it. Remove/merge the parts that you think are necessary. Add something that you think is missing. And cook your own framework.

I’ll put mine in a later section.

Exponent

Check if your school has a membership. If not, buy it. It’s worth the investment, even if it makes you more committed. Split it with your friends if that makes it easier.

Read up on their frameworks too, and start merging it with CIRCLES. Then watch the videos. The videos are really really valuable. Understand how actual PMs solve these questions without sticking to a certain format.

Interview prep for product, engineering, data science, and more — Exponent

Supplements

1. The Product Manager Interview by Lewis Lin: Treat this like a workbook. It has hundreds of case questions. Use it to sharpen your skill.
2. Swipe to Unlock: Read it to improve your technical knowledge and understand why certain product decisions are made the way they do

Mock Interview Practice

If I have to attribute my success to one thing, it will be mock interviews. It is the easiest way to get over the fear and start creating mental models and developing the confidence in solving these interviews. During my interview season I was doing at least 2 mock interviews a day.

Find people who can mock you through these sources

1. Your school seniors — bonus if they interned in the same company
2. Alumni/network of people who work in the same company
3. Exponent’s mock interview platform

And once you have exhausted those sources, there is the best source for finding unlimited mock interviews — Lewis Lin’s Slack Community. This has hundreds of strangers who you can practice with, without the fear of judgement if you mess up. And it also requires you to mock them back, and that is also a great way to find best and worst practices. It’s very well structured and easy to set up. Line them up and practice away!

My Interview Philosophy and Frameworks

Think about this, for a company that is interviewing hundreds of candidates on a daily basis, how would you be able to stand out? I think in the end it boils down to whether you are genuinely a passionate technologist or not. Are you able to provide meaningful analysis and bring in a centered approach to your thinking? Are you confident in your suggestions, but also open to feedback. Will you add value to their team and product?

That is what they are looking for.

Here are some extra tips and thoughts for the different product case questions that helped guide my thinking

A. Favorite Product Question

1. Think — what attributes make a product amazing for you or for the world?
2. Build a list of 3–5 digital products that you love, and find similarities between them and why you like them — this is your favorite product framework
3. For me, some of the attributes are — solves a key user problem, is well designed, better than its competitors, company’s mission is aligned with product (that means it will stay relevant in the future)
4. Build a list of products you like and dislike for any situation

• Apps: Notion, YouTube, Instagram
• Hardware: Kindle, Apple Airpods Pro, Amazon Alexa
• Some non-digital products: Guitar, Air Fryer, Vinyl Player
• Something that you like from the company you are interviewing for
• Badly designed products: Paywall news, Airport baggage collection, Government websites

B. Product Design

My theory — it’s impossible to come up with an amazing answer to the product design question before you start answering it. It can go so many ways, and the interviewer may want to steer you into a specific direction that may derail your thought process.

The goal should be to build a framework that helps you unlock the answer one step at a time.

Let’s take an example of a question asked at Google recently. (Sourced from Exponent)

I am going to solve this as I write this, so it may not be polished, but I hope it helps to help bring the framework to life.

Here is how I would go about it, I don’t have a fancy acronym for it, but maybe that’s a good thing! Seems more natural

Context, Goals → Purpose, Problems → Users, Needs, Prioritize → Solutions, Prioritize → Metrics, Prioritize → Summarize

1. Context, Goals

Always start by asking questions, and the most important should be Why?

Why does Google want to build a birthday app? This may be something they might ask you to decide too.

You must also ask in terms of metrics, what metric is Google hoping to achieve by building this

• Revenue
• User acquisition
• User retention
• Market share
• Customer satisfaction
• Conversion rate

This question will set up your entire thesis and will be your number one prioritization tool. For the purpose of this question, let our goal be revenue. Google wants to earn money through this.

Then see if there are constraints — any certain geographies, or OS that you need to build this on? How much time or resources do you have?

If I was to think about this, my immediate thought would be, this could be a great integration within their Calendar app.

2. Purpose, Problems

Here you should know two things

1. A basic list of the fundamental needs of a human being — they boil down to things like, community, wellness, convenience, utility, efficiency, security, education etc.
2. What is the company’s mission and vision, and how can you link it to the current space

Now this is where you can differentiate yourselves from the rest. Spend some time thinking about

• Why are birthdays important? What human needs do they solve, and why should we work in this space?
• Why is it important for Google to be in this space? And is Google well positioned to do something about it?
• Who else is in this space and how are they succeeding / failing

My analysis would be — birthdays are important and a great way to celebrate someone and their community. It’s the one day everyone gathers together to celebrate a person’s existence. It’s very special. Happens only once a year. Even your ex will text you on your birthday, that’s how powerful it is.

Birthdays are also a great event where money is spent more liberally → On gifts, on events, and f&b etc.

Google wants to organize the world’s information, and most people probably use Google, YouTube to find gifts, locations to host, trips to plan, or services to leverage. Additionally most people may also put the birthdays onto their calendar to remember. Google probably has all this information already because you gave it to them when you created an account. Additionally, let’s not forget that Google’s top business is ads. It is very well placed to enter this industry and solve a need.

3. Users, Needs, Prioritize

Spend some time brainstorming users for this. Remember the rule of 3. Things sound better in groups of three. Additionally make sure you talk about what their pain points and needs might be.

You can go two ways about it, either divide based on demographic, or based on behavior.

For example

Demographic

• Gen Z — Love finding unique ways to celebrate birthdays + Share events on social media
• Millennials — Really busy, and can’t remember their friend’s and family’s birthdays, don’t have time to think about gifts
• Elderly — May not remember birthdays easily, want to be part of celebrations in the families

Behavior

• Executive Assistants — Need to remember important dates for their boss and accordingly act accordingly. May want to automate some of those processes or find unique gifts for them.
• Small Business Owners — Need to remember birthdays of their customers
• Students/Working Professionals — Busy, but need to maintain relationships

Now prioritize. And how do you prioritize?

Remember the goal. Revenue.

Which segment here would be willing to pay for this?

I would pick Executive Assistants. They have a need for this kind of service and usually have a budget for special occasions.

4. Solutions, Prioritize

Come up with a basic feature set for this app

• Should be able to store and sync birthdays with your google calendar and send reminders
• Should store some context and relationship of the birthday person
• Should be able to To pre-draft birthday emails/texts from the user

And now come up with three out-of-the-box ideas!

Think of categories of solutions. Automation, Personalization, Gamification, Gen AI, Loyalty, Social, Notifications, VR, AR → Most of your solutions can come from these categories.

For that extra spice, read up on some moonshot technologies. And come up with one moonshot idea.

1. Helps you organize unique parties based on the profile and context of the birthday person and connects you to trusted vendors in your area
2. Serve unique and in-context ads or affiliated gifts for the birthday person — Google Ads
3. Create have a library of digital birthday cards / videos to send to the birthday person — use Google Photos to pull up images

But your true creativity will shine if you think of the 10-star experience. Watch this video to understand what I’m talking about

Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb) talking about a 10-star experience

Here is my crazy idea — What if we created personalized birthday wishes using deep fakes. The likeness and voice of the wisher. Think this is creepy? Well it’s already happening. It might be useful for a CEO to send wishes to each of their employees or customers.

Now the interviewer may ask you to prioritize, which feature should we build and why? Simple, think of the goal. Which one will give us revenue? I think realistically ads and gifts. It’s an easy lift for Google, they already have the system in place. And this way we can keep this app free for users.

Note: If our goal was different, a different solution could be chosen. That’s why the goal makes it so easy to keep going. It easily helps you choose the next path.

5. Metrics, Prioritize

Come up with three metrics to track your solution. For Metrics, I like the AARM framework. You could pick one metric from each. You should also suggest an A/B test and check the comparison of metrics with the control group.

Acquisition — # of app/plugin downloads

Activation — Ads CTR

Retention — MAU

Monetization — Ad Revenue

You could also be creative and do something like Monthly Ads CTR, or Number of successful birthday wishes.

In the end the north star should be meaningful. If you had to prioritize, I would create something like Revenue/Birthday. Each birthday represents an opportunity to buy a gift. And this metric captures that.

6. Finally, Summarize!

Your entire solution is elegantly laid out, just repeat it and open it up for discussion.

Note: Make sure to check in with your interviewer after every segment to see if you both are on the same page. Sometimes they may decide your next path for you, or have you choose with justification. Either way, you are ready for whatever comes your way.

Do this process a few times, be comfortable with thinking out loud and you should be able to really do well here. And if you do well here, you are a sure shot for the role.

C. Root Cause Analysis

Along with your analysis, you need to be systematic about this one, here is the framework.

Start internal or external or mix it up. Ask questions and try to explain why you are asking for this piece of data.

Internal

• Is the data accurate? Is our instrumentation correct?
• Are we running any relevant experiments
• Which product? Which platform?
• Are there any bugs or outages?
• Are there other features with similar issues?
• Which part of the flow?
• Are there any new features we released recently?
• Steady or sudden
• Any promotions we are running?
• What is the timeframe?
• Specific types of users?
• Funnel analysis

External

• Which regions?
• Competitors?
• Industry
• Regulation
• Economy
• Changing user habits
• Seasonality — Same thing happen last year?

And now you are ready to go ahead and crush those interviews!

A Note on Maintaining Sanity

I wanted to add this section, because this is a tough and draining process. We tend to attach our self esteem to the results of these interviews. My advice here would be to make sure you keep yourself in good spirits and have faith in yourself. Make sure you are taking care of yourself and spending quality time with those that make you happy.

If things don’t work out, there will be more opportunities, and they will happen when it’s time.

Keep in mind that for every interview I got, I was rejected by 5 companies. And that’s just how it goes. You could be extremely talented, and still face rejections. In most cases, it’s a fit issue, not a skill issue.

Remember,

♻️ Rejection is redirection.

Keep working hard and maximize the opportunities in your control, and let what is yours come to you!

Tanmay Goel is an MBA + MS (MMM) student at Kellogg, with a CS undergrad and 4 years experience as a Product Manager at Rakuten (an Amazon equivalent in Japan). He interviewed with BigTech companies (TikTok, Adobe, Amazon, Intuit and Google) for their PM roles and received offers from Adobe, Intuit and Google. He spent his 24' Summer at Google (specifically YouTube Music) as an MBA PM intern in New York.

You can find Tanmay at tanmaygoel3@gmail.com, LinkedIn, his website and his newsletter Business & Pleasure.