How I Got the Microsoft PM Offer in 2020

2020 was a difficult year for most. This year was a turning point in my life when I started my master's at Carnegie Mellon University. With grit and effort, I received the Program Manager offer from Microsoft. I’d like to write this article to share how I got here and hope this can help people who are going through the same journey.

Before I dive into how I got the offer, I’d like to share some of my backgrounds.

Back in 2012, I completed electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Soon after, I started my career as a Project Manager at a telecom company and spent five years there. Then coincidentally I became a Product Manager for three years at two separate startup companies. I’ll write a post later on how I made the switch.

In 2020, I decided to further my education in product management and started the Master of Science in Product Management (MSPM) at Carnegie Mellon University. This was when I applied to the program manager position at Microsoft.

Do I need a referral to apply to Microsoft?

The short answer is No for the graduate program manager position.

For every University, Microsoft has a dedicated recruiter managing the applicants. If you know people inside Microsoft and they are able to find out who that recruiter is for your university, then it might be helpful to reach out to them directly and express your interest. Otherwise, you may apply to the graduate program management position with or without a referral. For myself, I applied without a referral and still received an interview.

Tip: make sure to apply as early as possible. I applied in mid-August for next-year Jan hire. People who applied later received interviews but spots were filled.

What is the interview structure?

I had two rounds consisting of five interviews in total.

The first round was a screening interview done by either a junior PM or an HR. The duration is usually 30 minutes.

It is very crucial to prepare well for this first round because (rumor has it that) Microsoft rejects the majority of candidates in this round, and those who made it to the second round have a high chance of getting an offer.

Internally, once Microsoft believes you passed the first round, you’ll need to be selected by one or more teams to be interviewed further. Once you are selected by at least one team, you will proceed to the second round.

My second round consisted of four interviews back-to-back. Each interview was 45 minutes in length with a 15 minutes break. Usually, all the interviewers will be from the same team and this indicates which team you will be joining. The HR did not tell me which team I will be interviewing with, so I found out during the interview. The interviewers ranged from senior PMs to principal PMs. Questions may cover all six aspects of a PM interview including behavioral, product design, strategy (rare), estimation, metrics, and system design.

Tip: Try your best to get the team name or interviewer names from HR even when HR says none of the questions will be team specific, because it is simply not true. Many of my questions were team specific.

How to prepare for the first round

Put more emphasis on behavioral and simple tech questions, know your resume well

For the first round, it is important to prepare answers for the following questions:

• Why Microsoft?
• Why PM?
• What is your favorite product?
• What is a successful product you developed?
• Stories about team conflicts
• Failure stories

When interviewed by a junior PM, it is likely that you will get asked a lot of behavioral questions going off your resume. When interviewed by HR, in addition to behavioral questions, they tend to add more simple technical questions such as:

• Can you explain recursive programming to your grandma?
• What is your favorite programming language and why?

For behavioral questions, follow the STAR method and use Amazon’s behavioral question bank as a guide.

For technical questions, this website explains key computer science terms in layman’s terms.

How to prepare for the second round

Prepare for behavioral questions, product design, metrics, and system design questions.

For each interview in the second round, I was asked around 20 minutes of behavioral and then 15 minutes of product questions and 10 minutes of questioning. Personally, I got lucky in that I wasn’t asked a full-on design question or a system design question. Most of the questions revolved around the team I was interviewing for. In addition, the team wanted a more conversational interview, hence I did not get a chance to share my screen.

Gathered from others who also interviewed with Microsoft, the questions vary greatly across teams within Microsoft. People have been asked about product design, system design, and product metric questions. I have not heard about strategy questions.

To prepare for product questions, below are some of the resources I found helpful:

• Read Decode and Conquer by Lewis Lin 2x to learn the frameworks. After the first time through, practice 10 mock interviews with peers, then go back to the book and read it again, then do mocks again.
• Use the questions in The Product Manager Interview by Lewis Lin to help with self-practice and peer mocks.
• https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/ is a good website to find PM questions and answers for many companies.
• To find mock interview partners, you can sign up for Lewis Lin’s slack channel and Facebook product management groups. If you are Chinese, you can also look for Wechat groups such as 躬行学堂 or 小戴面试群. For myself, I practiced with classmates, people from Lewis Lin’s slack group, and people from the Wechat groups.
• Watch all of the Exponent’s mock interviews on Youtube.
• Watch Tech Dummies’s youtube channel to prep for system design questions.

What tips can you give?

• Find strong PMs to practice mock interviews with, their feedback is invaluable.
• Initially, it is important to mindfully practice the frameworks so that you can memorize the steps. As you do more mocks, try to internalize those frameworks and make modifications to them so they become yours.
• Do retrospect after every mock interview and incorporate the feedback into your next one.
• 3-person mock interviews can be more effective than 1-on-1 mocks.
• Product School has many product-related videos on its LinkedIn page where you can learn more about the industry.

Lastly, follow PM Hub or me to read more articles on my frameworks to product questions.

About the Author

Oliver Xu is currently an MS of Product Management student at Carnegie Mellon University. He was a product manager with domain knowledge in Ad Tech, IoT, and Telecommunications. He has worked at both startups and established corporates with seven years of experience leading software teams building enterprise solutions.