🤓 Five Mistakes You’re Making in PM Recruiting
I’m Sudhanshu Mishra. I graduated from MIT in 2018 with a Bachelor’s in CS and a Master’s in AI. I joined Uber as an Associate Product Manager (APM) in August 2018. In this series, I chronicle my journey in product management (PM). I (1) talk about my experience in Uber’s APM program, (2) detail my transition from Eng to PM, (3) share surprising lessons I learned along the way, and (4) offer tips on how to crack the PM interview.
If you’d like to stay updated on the next stories or have any feedback for me, please let me know here. I’d deeply appreciate it!
This article is part four of four.
It’s late August 2020. If surviving a global pandemic wasn’t hard enough, college seniors must now juggle another life-altering responsibility: recruiting for full-time jobs.
I was a college senior not so long ago. I remember walking into every interview with butterflies in my stomach. The stakes seemed so high and the time remaining so little. Somehow, I weaseled my way through a resume screen, a homework assignment, two phone interviews, and four onsite interviews to land a job at Uber as an APM. I couldn’t have done it, however, without the support of my friends and mentors. This blog is my attempt at paying it forward.
Over two recruiting cycles as an APM, I reviewed hundreds of applications. Time and again, I came across the same set of mistakes, which quite frankly are easily avoidable. In this blog, I distill the top five mistakes you’re (probably) making in your PM recruiting. While my advice draws on my learnings from Uber, it applies broadly to anyone recruiting for PM gigs at Tech companies.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely my personal opinion and are not the views of Uber Inc. or its affiliates.
1. You’re applying without a referral
Each year, Uber’s APM program receives thousands of applications for less than ten spots. A recruiter may only have seconds to review yours. One way of securing the attention your application deserves is by getting a strong referral from an Uber employee, ideally a PM.
Like any other Tech company, Uber rewards its employees for referring high caliber talent. A referral will never get you the job. But it will put you on the company’s radar and boost your chances of getting an interview. I didn’t get an interview for Facebook’s RPM program and I suspect it was because I applied late in the process and didn’t have a referral.
If you don’t already know a PM at Uber who’s willing to vouch for you, I would try cold outreaches. Here’s how to go about it:
- Find a few PMs at Uber on LinkedIn with whom you have something in common.
- InMail them with a catchy message, requesting for a 20-minute informational chat. If you really want to go the extra mile, come bearing gifts. For e.g. you can help improve their product by collecting user insights, writing a product document, or designing a mockup.
- Follow-up once at max, if you don’t hear back within a week
- Prepare interesting questions for your conversation
- Politely request for a referral if the call goes well
A few protips:
- Don’t be overeager. Be respectful of people’s time. Once, an applicant set up coffee chats with every APM at Uber. It obviously wasn’t a good look.
- Get a referral before you drop in your application on the APM website. This way the person referring you is awarded a referral bonus if you land the job :)
I was fortunate that one of my friends and upperclassmen from MIT had just started at Uber as an APM when I was applying. He graciously put in a referral for me.
2. Your resume is too heavy on engineering
I believe the best PMs tend to have been engineers first, but not all engineers become the best PMs. Time and again, I’ve seen APM applicants with resumes that are too heavy on engineering and speak too little to their PM abilities. The applicants meticulously describe the ten libraries they mastered during their FAANG internship but fail to talk about their impact on the user and the business.
As a PM, you’ll be responsible for defining your product’s vision, setting the right metrics, and executing with a cross-functional team. Make sure your resume demonstrates your potential to wear these different hats, be it through prior internships, side projects, or leadership roles.
A clear and well-written resume can go a long way in helping you land an interview. Here are some simple tips:
- Use strong verbs but write in simple and direct language. It can be exhausting to parse through the resume of an applicant who pioneered a novel haptic-based approach to human-computer interaction on a multi-billion dollar platform when in reality, they created a button on an iOS app
- Structure each of your past experiences in no more than three bullets in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, and Result)
- Use a resume template that’s easy to read. You can let me know here if you’d like a copy of my template (screenshot below)
3. You’re explaining how the sausage gets made
If you pass the resume screen, you’ll be invited to the second step of the application process: the homework assignment round. Your task will be to choose one of several problem statements that are top-of-mind for Uber and design a feature to solve it. You’ll have ~2 weeks to submit a slide deck with your recommendation.
A common mistake people make is documenting their brainstorming process. Using a mix of text and photos, they attempt a riveting story about how they locked themselves up in a room, plastered their walls with sticky-notes, and emerged with a eureka moment. Let me save you the trouble — get straight to the point. Your goal should be to create a clear, thoughtful, and professional presentation, as if it were a real company document.
In my view, the homework assignment has five goals:
- to weed out the lazy and uninterested
- to test your product intuition
- to gauge your logic and structured thinking
- to evaluate your written communication
- to assess the basics of your design skills
A good presentation will typically follow the following structure:
- Executive Summary: The key takeaways of your recommendation
- Problem: A clear explanation of what the problem is and a data-backed argument of why it’s worth solving
- Objectives and Key Results: What are the 2–3 metrics that will indicate whether you have successfully solved the problem?
- Potential Solutions: 10+ ideas written in one-liners and prioritized by a clear framework. For e.g., you might prioritize ideas based on technical feasibility, business impact, marketing simplicity, etc.
- Product Deep Dive: Flesh out your most promising idea and include a clean-looking mockup. (This was pretty hard for me because I’m terrible at design. But you can get far with free assets available online)
- Product Roadmap: Prioritize your features across must-have (P0), good-to-have (P1), and nice-to-have (P2).
- Go-to-Market: Describe how you will launch your feature. Will you use in-app comms, push notification, email campaigns, or nothing at all?
- Experiment Plan: How will you test the impact of your feature? Will you use an A/B or switchback experiment?
- Risks: What are your riskiest assumptions? What could go wrong?
Back when I applied, the assignment was in a long-form written format. But I followed the same structure as above. If you’d like a copy of my APM assignment, please let me know here.
4. You think PM books are your best friends
Anyone applying for PM interviews should read two books: Cracking the PM Interview and Decode and Conquer. The former will teach you useful frameworks. The latter will show you examples of best-in-class interview responses. But let’s face it: anyone serious about PM interviews has probably devoured those books anyways. While prep books are a great way to nail the basics, they won’t give you an edge. Your secret weapon is your creativity.
Once upon a time, one of my good friends from MIT was in the final round interview for Google’s APM internship. His interviewer asked him a question related to Google Translate. Through a series of questions, my friend identified the product’s (hypothetical) customers were unhappy not because of the quality of the translations but the artificial-sounding voice through which they were delivered. So, my friend suggested Google Translate should integrate with WaveNet, a state-of-the-art neural network model created by DeepMind that could generate natural-sounding speech. As impressed as the interviewer was with the idea, he was more impressed by the fact that my friend even knew about WaveNet — the paper had only been published the week before. Needless to say, my friend got the offer.
No PM book on the planet could have taught my friend about WaveNet. Moreover, given the expansive universe of Product questions, it would have been quite ludicrous of him to specifically learn about the technology in preparation for his interviews. He knew about it only because he was passionate about AI and read research papers for fun.
The key to standing out in your Product interviews is to generate relevant yet surprising ideas. Like a chef, you want to be able to mix two seemingly unrelated ideas to prepare a dish that’s just right for the occasion. Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can do overnight. You need to put in sustained work over months to actually change how you think.
It’s never too late to get started. Here are a few ways:
- Tech Publications: Read about the latest product innovations in TechCrunch, The Information, Stratechery. For e.g., why is TikTok’s so addictive?
- Side Projects: As Y Combinator champions, write code and talk to users. There’s no better way to sharpen your product instincts than building products for users and getting their feedback. Find a friend and solve a problem you personally face.
- Product Obsession: Randomly pull up apps on your smartphone and look at them through the eyes of a critic. Why are they designed the way they are? What core metrics are they driving? What would you change?
5. You’re coloring within the lines
The best interviews are ones that don’t feel like interviews. They drift into organic conversations and allow you and your interviewer to build on each other’s ideas. This usually happens when the two of you connect at a deeper level, be it personal or intellectual. While you can never force such a connection, I believe you can greatly improve its odds by having a little bit of fun with the conversation.
I did this through my “origin story”. I started each of my PM interviews with a short story that set the stage for why I wanted to become a PM. I spoke about my early fascination with technology while growing up in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. I touched on my gap year after high school, during which I learned how to code and built my first product — a security system for ATMs — using low-cost smartphones. And finally, I described my journey at MIT founding Capiche, an EdTech startup that answered students’ doubts using AI and scaled to 30K users.
At the very least, my intro validated my genuine passion for building products. At times, it went much further and steered the direction of my interviews. During my first round phone screen for Uber, my interviewer, who also happened to be from Bangalore, was intrigued by my ATM project. We spent the entire time jamming on ideas around what I would do differently if I had to rebuild it from scratch. During my onsite design interview, my interviewer, a former EdTech designer, was excited to learn about Capiche. We reviewed my app screen-by-screen and discussed how we could improve its UI and information architecture.
These conversations were a lot more fun and memorable for me compared to my usual interviews, and I imagine the same held true for my interviewers. Moral of the story: Loosen up and have some fun with the process :)
