Product Manager Interview Prep in India
After four years as PM at Freshworks, I was ready for a new challenge. After job hunting and interviewing for around three months, I accepted an offer from Razorpay and moved to Bangalore.
Compared to the last time I interviewed, the quality of the prep material available has improved significantly, so I thought I’d write this post as an update to my PM interview preparation post from 2014.
For an understanding of the various types of interview questions, go through my previous post or look at this excellent (and detailed) post by a Senior Director at Razorpay on how they hire product managers.
Looking for PM jobs
I first started the search by reaching out to my network and letting them know I was looking for roles in Bangalore. Most of my network was in Chennai so this was not very fruitful.
I then updated my job search status on LinkedIn to let recruiters know I was open to a change and subscribed to new job alerts. I also purchased a LinkedIn premium subscription but am not really sure if this was necessary.
One of the problems I encountered was that the level I was looking for had different titles in various companies (Associate Director, Principal PM, Group PM, Senior PM, Senior Manager etc). I used levels.fyi to identify the right position to apply to. The site is primarily targeted at software engineers in the US, but I still found it useful.
Indeed was the best job posting aggregator, although I did use LinkedIn, Instahyre, and Glassdoor as well. I researched companies on Glassdoor and Teamblind to understand more about the culture.
How I prepared
First I made a high level study plan by going through the following guides
- Preparing-for-pm-interviews-how-to-get-there-in-15–20-hours
- 2-week-product-management-interview-prep-plan
- PM-Interview-Prep-Plan-How-I-got-PM-offers-from-Google-Expedia-Microsoft-and-Facebook
Next, I re-read two books that I used the last time around
- Cracking the PM Interview — A classic, worth reading if it’s your first time interviewing, you can skip otherwise.
- Divide and Conquer by Lewis Lin — this one has many questions with detailed sample responses
There were several new resources that I used, these were best ones
- PM interview book by Lewis Lin — I bought this ebook for 40$, it’s an extension to Lewis Lin’s earlier book. It contains a lot of sample interview questions with high quality answers. Highly recommended.
- Mock interview videos by the Exponent — Went through the free material, the video interview format was interesting.
- ProductHired/open-product-management — Great collection of PM interview prep material.
Practising
There are many sites that offer practise questions, the best one by far is www.productmanagementexercises.com, because they also contain good answers. They have a stack overflow model where the best answers get voted up. This site along with the PM interview book by Lewis Lin was highly effective for me.
Some recommend interviewing with second choice companies first to get real world practice, I find practice ethically dubious. Furthermore, there are several places online where you can find an interview buddy and pair up with them to practise for interviews.
I did not use any of these, but others recommend them, may be worth checking out
- https://productmanagerhq.slack.com/ — Slack group, they have a channel where you can find PMs looking to practise.
- https://prodmonk.com/schedule-mock-interview-i/ — Mock interviews conducted by Indian PMs, paid service
- https://stellarpeers.com/
Technical
Some companies include a technical round to ensure that you can work well with engineers and understand technical constraints. I over prepared for this round, it’s sufficient if you understand the technical architecture of the products that you have worked and revise basic concepts.
I found the articles at High Scalability to be really useful.
- highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/ The Netflix article is a must read!
- www.youtube.com/channel/UC-vYrOAmtrx9sBzJAf3x_xw/videos — Success In Tech, meant for developers but I found the system design questions very useful
- medium.com/basecs/tagged/data-structures — Fantastic overview of data structures
Behavioural
Confession, I hate preparing for this round. Some questions feel artificial and I get bored preparing for them. Pretty sure this hurt me in a couple of places where these questions are taken seriously, so it’s wise to prepare.
Another thing that you should do is familiarise yourself with the culture code of the company and prepare stories where you demonstrate aspects of the culture.
Compensation
I used my network and Teamblind to research compensation and ensure that the offers I received were competitive.
This being India, the recruiter has access to information about your payslip which limits the potential upside. You can counter this by have competing offers or be prepared to stay at your current job.
Conclusion
Finding the right PM job is challenging but worth it. I hope you find this guide useful. Happy interviewing!
