How to get a product management job? What do product managers look for when they hire PMs?
First of all, this medium blog is actually the notes that I took from Uber Product Manager Randy Edgar’s Product School Talk. I really believe that Product School Talk is one of the best talks about what it takes to be a product manager. As a person who takes and gives interviews, as someone on both sides, I think this article will be useful and you will enjoy reading it.
First Tip:
Never miss any interview opportunities, you don’t know what is under the hood.
You can find the titles here;
- Goals and Metrics
- Data-Driven Decisioning
- Innovation
- Technical Acumen
- Overall Knowledge of Relevant Market
- Leadership & Vision
- Execution (Get Shit Done)
- Communication — MOST IMPORTANT :)
Let’s Start.
Goals and Metrics
The most important thing is why you are building it, and why you are doing it. It’s for your consumers -of course- of the product. But what are the goals and metrics you are going after? What's the goal of the company that you're tying your products back to?
If you are talking about the product, you’ll get this question a lot:
❓ What would you build if you are a part of this company?
🗣️ The company's goals and missions are x, y, and z. So I would want to build a product to tight back to the company's goal or mission. For example, Facebook → “to keep the world more connected”.
Whatever it is you are talking about needs to tight back to the mission of the company otherwise, it’s a red flag without even starting.
🗣️ The other one is the metrics side. If you say I wanna build “XYZ”, the reason is it tights back to one of the goals in the company. and how I measure that is “blah blah”. Or the key metric that I'm going after is usage, adoption, trip, or whatever it is.
—
Data-Driven Decisioning
So what's gonna happen is after you mention that I wanna build “XYZ”. You need to explain how did you decide to do that “XYZ”. You don’t want to say, “because it’s really cool”. You want to say “it is really cool, because, data supports my argument”.
There are banners around Facebook saying:
“Data wins arguments”
It’s an awesome phrase for PMs.
❓How would you prioritize X over Y? Why would you do that?
The answer is always because data tells me that.
🗣️ It is not necessarily SQL data or Google Analytics data, but also qualitative data that is coming from your users — some sort of data that supports your arguments-.
—
Innovation
The question about what would you like to build… The reason why they are asked is not just for the goals and metrics, but also for the innovation.
How are you gonna raise the bar of the company?
How I define that when I do these interviews, I just want one good idea, just one. The way we do that usually is;
❓“Take out your phone. Pick any app you use and tell me if you are a pm of that app, what would you build?”
The wrong answer is as you know, “I know, I have that cool new idea” ❌
🗣️ I know the goal of the company is “XYZ” and I assume one of your metrics is “ABC”, so if my assumption is correct increasing “ABC” will affect the “XYZ” positively. I will focus on increasing “ABC” by doing “this” new idea.
Sometimes that idea doesn’t come right away. Feel free to note down, sometimes you will be brainstorming with the PM in the room. Keep thinking and keep iterating. Jam with the manager.
—
Technical Acumen
For those people, who are not technical, what you wanna do is ask the recruiter, how technical it is gonna be. They are some companies, that don’t care at all about being technical, but sometimes it requires.
The way Facebook did it,
1- They first ask you a very technical question, if you did not get it, it is ok.
2- Then they ask you another SQL-based question and if you don’t know, it is also ok. They just try to understand where your level is.
3- To understand how you think, they ask you to build a “movie web page— chat app — x” data model:
❓
Give me a data model of “X”? For example, you are building a product online book store? Tell me what the data model looks like.,
🗣️ The best answer is “What do you wanna know?”.
The idea is to answer a question with a question to understand exactly what they are looking for as an answer.
The bottom line of this is to ask follow-up questions to clarify the problem. You might not know the technical side that much, but your way of thinking is going to solve the problem.
—
Overall Knowledge of Relevant Market
Do I need to know about this market/business? This is a great question for the recruiter. Some companies really want you to know their business and their business model. Some companies like Facebook for example don’t care at all. Doing research and figuring out at least from the recruiter the company cares about the market, you better do your research.
—
Leadership / Vision
A good PM spends 80 percent of the time building the product. The other 20 percent of the time is working with designers to make sure that you have a vision for your product.
2 years from now, what is our product look like?
What is that north star?
Where are we bringing the entire team so that we know when we build the roadmap, this is our angle.
This is incredibly important to be a good PM. Without that, if you don’t have a way to articulate that through mocks — through designs you really have a hard problem trying to sell what it is that you are looking to do.
Because as a PM a lot of times you are in sales. You are selling your own product to upper management. Because you want resources to be able to build what you wanna build. Going back to the beginning;
🗣️ Here is what I want to do,
here are the metrics that I’m trying to drive,
here it tights back to the goal of the company,
but this is where are we trying to go,
and here is why?
—
Execution
One of the parts of the pie is
❓“Can this person get shit done? Can she/he execute?”
You have to sell yourself, but you should come prepared with a story, for how you get shit done?
🗣️ ” I was up against this, I was up against this and this is I did it done, this is how I did the roadmap?”
—
Communication
Be succinct.
In an interview be succinct. Never talk for more than 2–3 minutes and do not ask unnecessary questions. Because what you are doing is you are talking to them. They wanna communicate, they want to have a conversation with you. To question of an interviewer don’t talk too fast.
How does every job interview start?
❓Tell me about yourself?
Why do they ask that?
They want to test your communication skills. If you answer that question for 15 mins, think about the people listening to you for 15 minutes. Usually, It is over in 5 mins. By over I mean, the interview is over.
Most people really looking for your communication skills. How succinctly can you go through your background?
🗣️ Talk about the highlights in max 3 minutes. And then say “hey would you like to hear more about ‘XYZ’?”
Because what happens is when you sell your elevator pitch to the upper management, how much time you will have there?
If you get in a situation of “Tell me about yourself?” Just practice it. Make sure that you are skipping over the parts that are not that relevant.
Tips: SMILE — One of the best tips here is to be personal, be friendly, and smile. Because people wanna hire people they like.
Book Suggestion: Malcolm Gladwell — Blink
It is important to connect with the interviewer on some level such as common points.
—
Usually, product managers do interviews also with designers. Obviously, any good product manager focuses on user experience. If you get a question about:
❓Tell me about a time you worked with design really well?
or
❓Tell me about a product that you think has a really good user experience? Or Tell me about a product that has a horrible user experience?
Don’t forget to prepare for it. The most important thing is to be collaborative on this. Because what designers looking for is to work with a product manager who listens to them.
—
Additional Q&A
❓ How do you measure the success of the newsfeed?
🗣️ Depends on the goal. You need to understand what “success” mean, by asking the right questions.
—
❓ You are the PM of Facebook Live. The amount of time people spend on Facebook live going up. But the problem is people's views of Facebook stories are getting lesser. What do you do? What you are doing is good but you are making someone else’s product.
🗣️ What are we optimizing for?
— We are optimizing for the next three months “time on Facebook live”.
What we can do?
— We can monetize Facebook live. — We can collaborate with the other product manager and etc.
—
❓ Tell me a feature that we should build?
🗣️ What they looking for is “why” — “why, we are building it.” — “what metrics you are going to check”
—
❓ The number of weekly users we get or engagement of the users do we have? How many or how often?
🗣️ It depends, on the goal. 😀
—
Sometimes they ask you 3–4 hours to solve a case. In this case, what you should do is you need to understand the company goal and you need to make some assumptions. You should note each assumption. Because you know the company goal but you don’t know the product goal.
—
❓ What would be your process for prioritizing the features?
🗣️ Take everything that is on my roadmap and build all the business value for each of these features and I would rank them like this way. Then I need to go to the engineers to understand the challenge of it. Which makes us together doing trade-offs. etc etc.
—
I hope you liked it. In Modanisa we try to hire people who follow these rules. You can follow
https://medium.com/modanisa-engineering
for more.
—
This article was written together with menguhan bulut.
Go Follow his Medium channel.
