Mistakes to avoid in product manager interviews

TL;DR

1. The product manager interview should feel like a conversation, not an interrogation.
2. You must understand the intent behind the question before answering.
3. It’s hard to ‘pitch’ yourself to big tech companies during the interview process. Startup interview process might be messier, but you have an opportunity to position your experience as a valuable addition to the team.

Conversation, not an interrogation

1. Great communicators. Successful interviewees provide structure for the discussion and proactively drive the interview. They don’t fall into the trap of thinking that an interview is an examination and their answers are scored as right or wrong. They often ask useful clarifying questions to make sure their answers are on the right track.
2. Thoughtful and explicit about their process. Good interviewees also clearly signal when they are in ‘brainstorming’ mode vs ‘answering’ mode. Jumping in with the first answer that comes to mind is usually not a good idea. You can signal that you’re in ‘brainstorming’ mode with a simple: “before I start answering, I’d like to brainstorm/structure my thinking. I prefer to do it out loud / I prefer to write down a few thoughts”.

Understand the “why” behind the question

1. Understand the intent of questions. I try to make this one easy on candidates and state explicitly what signals I’m looking for. For instance, I might preface my typical product sense question of “tell me about a product you launched that you are proud of” with an explanation of what I want to get out of it: a) an example of a hard and vague problem space, b) solid framing of the hypotheses and the solution space, c) the learning you got out of it. Not everyone is as explicit, so I suggest that you always clarify the intent behind the question with your interviewer. “There are many ways I could answer this question, so could you clarify what signal you’re looking for?” or “I’m excited to dive in, but before I start answering your questions, it would help me to understand what type of interview this is: are you looking for signal on something specific, like product sense, execution, or leadership?”
2. Keep their answers tight. If I ask you to “give me a quick overview of your career journey”, I do mean quick. It’s a warm up question that helps me refresh my memory because I probably looked at dozens of resumes since I read yours. Don’t just regurgitate your whole resume — give me the headline and your current experience and then ask if I’d like to hear about your past experiences as well.

Approach Big Tech vs Startup interviews differently

Big tech

1. Demonstrate fit for the company. The interviewer isn’t assessing you for a specific role or team. At WhatsApp, my job was to assess whether you’d be a good PM at WhatsApp, not a great VOIP or payments-focused PM at WhatsApp. Hence, your past experience doesn’t play as big of a role during the interview (there are exceptions to this for particular spaces like payments, integrity, ML).
2. Know what the interview is assessing. Big tech interview process is structured and each interview in the process focuses on extracting signals on very specific PM competency. Generally, this signal is obtained via hypothetical questions, rather than questions about your past experience. Don’t expect that the interviewer even looked at your resume before talking to you — your experience or past accomplishments likely don’t matter when they are assessing your product sense or execution skills.

Startups

1. Demonstrate fit for the company AND the role. Startups don’t have conveyer-belt pipelines for PM hiring. They often look for a specific skillset relevant to the problem they are trying to solve. Your past experience in the messaging space might not matter to Facebook, but it could matter a lot to a startup building messaging into their app.
2. Embrace a messier interview process. Don’t expect a startup to have a clearly laid out interview process. Unlike Facebook, a startup won’t send you a neatly formatted pdf outlining the expectations for each interview. Clarify proactively, but also use this to your advantage! You can choose how to demonstrate your ability to lead teams to conceive of and build great products efficiently. Put together a keynote, write a memo, or create an awesome Miro board — be creative in how you pitch yourself to the startup.

Disclaimer

Hiring has been a big part of what I do at Noon, WhatsApp, and Zillow over the last 4–5 years. The thoughts above are a synthesis of my observations from hundreds of product manager interviews I conducted. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list — I tried to share what I have not seen online elsewhere.

PS. I’m hiring Senior Product Managers and Senior Data Analysts.