Cracking the PM interview with Gayle McDowell
Know what the interviewers actually want to know about you
The book “Cracking the PM interview” has been popular among those who have been thinking of transitioning to product management. Many of us prepare for the transition by taking more courses, building new skills or meeting new people in the field, interviewing is the last “battle” before you can claim your victory that is your dream job. Many interview-related questions such as what are the expectations for product managers and what do interviewers really want to know were covered by author Gayle Laakmann McDowell on March 13th at the event hosted by Women in Product and Paypal.
The first step Gayle advised that we should take before applying to any jobs, is to figure out what the role really entails. The definition of PM varies from company to company. Sometimes Product jobs have different titles such as Product Manager, Associate Product Manager, Project Manager, and Program Manager. In fact, Product Managers at Microsoft are actually called Program Managers. I think this step is critical to get you persuade the interviewer you are good fit. Imagine you step into a PM interview trying to impress the interviewer with your product building skills only to find that what they are looking for is narrowed down to program management capabilities only, all your efforts will go to waste.
Gayle pointed out some of the common mistakes people make when anwwering PM interview questions and how we can give better structured responses for behavioral questions, product design questions, estimations questions and case questions. It seems like we can always find a way to move our answers from “good enough ” to “great”.
For example, for behavioral questions, a “good enough pitch” would be a strategy of trying to tie your experience, skills and even hobbies to the skills and achievements in your answers. However, it could be a “great pitch” if the you can tell an engaging story through your experience, sending a message of your passion and addressing your “stereotypes” (for example, demonstrate that you are aware about what assumptions people make about your background and how you differ from other candidates who have the same experience). In any cases, it is important to keep these three things in mind when answering questions:
- Know who you are
- Focus on the user
- Structure your response
For product design questions, well, there were a lot of great things that Gayle covered in her talk that I would suggest you read her book to get them all. However, once again, it is critical to understand distinctly what the interviewers really look for through those product questions they ask. According to Gayle, interviewers ask product questions to know more about candidates in terms of:
- Communication
- User empathy
- Creativity
- Judgement
- Product insight
I was also inspired by the fact that there is no perfect PM and there are always ways to overcome the “stereotype” of you and your background. In fact, the perfect PM is a myth. It is nearly impossible to excel at user analysis and idea pitching while also having deep technical chops or vice versa. On the other hand, we also need to remove the assumptions about our stereotypes: technical people cannot communicate, marketing people may not be able to understand technical problems, etc. One way to change that stereotype is to acknowledge it, take time to improve your skills (taking technical courses for example), and prove that with the interviewers.
Last but not least, if you are looking for more resources other than the book, simply send an email to Gayle through gayle@gayle.com with subject “PMprep” and you will receive an auto-reply of some notes and slides from her.
You can get a copy of Gayle’s book here.
Good luck!
