The product manager interview playbook — Part I

What you need to land that sweet PM role.

You’ve started applying for those interesting product roles at your favorite firms, and have a bunch of interviews lined up. Great.

I was in a similar spot a couple of months ago, and needed a way to prepare well for the challenge that lay ahead.

And here, friends, is my synthesis of those learnings. (I landed a pretty great PM role, and had a great set of interview experiences along the way, so I hope this synthesis helps you in your journey as well).

With that context, let’s dive right in.

A few caveats:

• I will be tailoring the content below to folks with some prior product management experience; those who want to make that fresh transition to product management may need a slightly tweaked version of the guide below, but I hope it still helps!
• The PM interview process varies greatly depending on the firm you interview with; however, the broad phases below are likely to form a significant part of the interview process, based on my personal experience.

I will be breaking up this into a few parts, with the following structure:

Part I: Telling your story, and showing off your PM chops!

Part II: Breaking down the PM interview; the types of questions you would need to prepare for

Part III: General tips on approaching questions, handling curveballs and holding your ground during the interview

In this article, I will expand on Part I.

Part I: Telling your story, and showing off your PM chops!

How do you answer the ‘Tell me about yourself/what you’ve done in your career question’? (specifically, in the context of a PM interview)

Start with a bird’s eye view of your journey (should be crisp and to a minute)

• As an example: Over my 8 years in the workforce, I have worked across startup, mid-size and large scale firms, and have shipped products in the B2B enterprise market, focusing on use cases ranging from data management & cleansing, financial planning and forecasting, internal audit management etc.
• Talk then, in reverse chronological order, about each key role you have played in your career — keep this brief, and talk about key highlights, business impact and your learnings. Do not deep dive into the product itself too much at this stage.
• Once you are done with this introduction, take a pause and ask the interviewer if there is any specific area they would like to know more about.

If you are asked to deep dive into a particular product/PM role, be sure to highlight the following — here is where you get into the details.

• What was the product/what did it do/who were its customers/what was the core pain point it was solving?
• Why was this product needed? What were the uber goals/vision that led to the product being conceptualized, built and shipped?
• What was your role and how did you fit into the product/larger business goals?
• How did you get into problem discovery, and lay out the roadmap for your MVP and beyond? What were the challenges and learnings along the way?
• How did you measure success? What did you change/alter after examining how the product was adopted?

A few key points to note -

• Through your answer, make sure you pay attention to the interviewer’s expressions and body language — it is key to stop, take a pause and make sure that they are following you and are engaged with your answer.
• After your answer, make sure to take a pause and let the interviewer absorb what you have said — please note, the above answers should not take more than 5–10 minutes — you would want to entice the interviewer to ask you more probing questions, rather than going off on a monologue.

Most introductory conversations in the PM interview process would start off in this fashion, so it is key you have the above points well prepared, so that it can be communicated effectively.

Another key part of the PM interview is exploring how much the company/role you are exploring fits you and your goals as well. This evaluation (done by you), is just as important as the evaluation that the interviewer is doing to determine fit.

Here are a few questions I always make sure to ask during the initial conversation:

• How is the product team in your company currently organized? How do they fit into and server the larger business?
• What are the strategic goals for the business? How does the product team play a role in achieving this?
• What are the key challenges you are looking to solve by bringing me in as a product manager?
• How are other verticals in the company organized? Can you help me understand more about the culture?
• What are the next steps in the interview process?

These should be the bare minimum, but feel free to replace/modify questions as you see fit; however, keep in mind the time constraints and prioritize your questions accordingly.

One last but important point — make sure you do your research on the company, leadership, its business model, current product offerings, important news/updates that have happened recently well before the interview — your questions to the interviewer should NOT be things that can be easily read, researched and inferred through your own analysis.

In the next article, I will showcase a quick mind map of the analysis I am talking about, and we will also dive into breaking down the PM interview process further :)