Demystifying the PM Interview

Landing an interview for any job that you want feels awesome. In your case, if you’re reading this, maybe that job is for the role of Product Manager.

So what can you expect from the interview ahead of you?

To start, recognize that you won’t be able to anticipate every single question. That’s okay. Blindly cramming hundreds of Quora responses or stacks of product management books right before your interview isn’t really an effective strategy, and the sooner you accept this, the better off you’ll be.

Instead, you should focus on just the concepts and questions that you are most likely to encounter. You also need to understand, at a high level, the motivations of those who will be interviewing you; why might they need a Product Manager to come and fill this role in the first place? What are they looking for?

Having interviewed at a variety of places now from smaller startups to bigger tech companies, I’d like to share two resources that I wish I’d focused on during my interview prep process:

1. Ken Norton’s essay, How to Hire a Product Manager
2. Madhu Punjabi’s blog post, The Product Management Interview

That’s it. Given limited time and capacity, these are the only two resources you need familiarize yourself with in order to understand what will generally be expected of you from the PM interview.

Let’s review why.

You need to know what they’re looking for

At a high level, what is the role of a Product Manager? What kind of people make good Product Managers? What, therefore, might an interviewer be looking for? You need to figure this out before you head into that interview, and there’s no resource that answers these questions as succinctly or straightforwardly as Ken Norton’s classic essay, How to Hire a Product Manager.

Drawing from the points in Ken’s essay that overlap with what I’ve personally experienced, here are the qualities and skills that interviewers generally seem to care about:

• Your overall intelligence and creativity. Are you well-spoken? If I ask how you would improve X feature with very little time to think about it, how thoughtful and creative will your response be? Can you think on the fly? (cue market sizing exercises…)
• How technical you are, to a reasonable extent. Are you technical, or technical enough to work with engineers and gain their respect? Even if you didn’t write any of the code for it, can you explain how X API works? Can you articulate the business considerations that influenced the way Y feature was built?
• How you handle process. Are you good with process-y things like prioritizing features or making sure the right meetings happen amongst the right people? Have you done lean/agile/scrum with a team before, or implemented some successful version of those processes from the ground up for your team? Are you rigid about doing things a certain way, or can you adapt to what your engineering team and stakeholders need and keep it all from turning into a shit show? Which goes hand in hand with…
• How you handle people. Can you inspire and convince people to do things, even when it seems like they don’t really want to at first? Are you an effective communicator? Someone on your team is stirring the pot and spreading negativity; what do you do? Some particularly disgruntled users are very publicly leaving negative reviews and blowing up the support ticket queue; what is your instinctual response? How do you deal with this?
• Your ability to take things from nothingness to somethingness. This one is probably the most straightforward: are you capable of shipping and/or have you shipped things before?

You need to know what they might ask

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the nuances and requirements of the role (intelligence, creativity, technical fluency, knack for process, people skills, ability to ship things), you need to prepare for some of the questions that you might actually get asked.

The best resource for common PM interview questions — in my humble opinion — is Madhu Punjabi’s blog post, aptly titled The Product Management Interview. These questions “tie it all together”, testing your propensity to be an effective Product Manager for a specific company. This means you have to do your homework not only on what the role of a Product Manager is, as we went over earlier, but also on the specific company you’ll be interviewing with.

Madhu is, by the way, a kickass Product Manager at Pinterest.

These are the 8 questions she recommends preparing for. I can vouch and say that I’ve been asked every single one over the course of my interviewing experience:

1. Why do you want to work at this company?
2. How would you improve the product?
3. What is your favorite feature or product and why?
4. What are the 3 metrics that our company cares about?
5. You have to choose between feature X and feature Y, how do you decide?
6. How would you test a feature?
7. Tell me about a time where you had to convince someone who didn’t report to you to work on something?
8. Do you have any questions for me?

I highly recommend visiting her post directly for even more advice and insight into what interviewers are looking for, specifically, with each question.

Recap

The PM interview doesn’t have to feel like a scary black box. Though the role tends to call for a wide range of qualities and skills, most companies are looking for the same general things in a PM candidate: intelligence, creativity, technical fluency, knack for process, people skills, and the ability to ship things.

Additionally, most companies will ask some version of the 8 questions covered in Madhu’s blog.

Focus on preparing for those 8 questions. Read Ken’s essay. Be able to articulate your own experiences — especially those that are applicable to the role.

Then take a deep breath.

Don’t sweat the rest.