2. Great product managers score off the charts in listening, learning, leading, analyzing, anticipating and re-imagining. gives readers 167 practice questions to improve product management (PM) skills and master the interview. It was also starting to lose regular customers and revenue.”. What’s the relationship currently like between Product and UX, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, etc? Get it wrong and your new hire might be shifting your business into neutral. Because product management teams include members from different backgrounds such as engineering, design, and data design, product managers must have strong communication skills and excel in cross … Practice technical program manager and program manager interviews 1-on-1 with ex-FAANG interviewers. In addition to practicing by yourself, and with peers, it can be a huge advantage to do mock interviews with experienced PM interviewers. If you are on a Starbucks Manager Interview then dress formally. The key is to answer the question without seeing other people’s answers. Speaking of Google, I'm honored to share a brand new Google PM interview cheat sheet with all of you. Here's how to ace your interview and make a great impression as you prepare to answer some of the most common manager interview questions. But when you do so, make sure you follow the tips and avoid the mistakes we have listed below. We’ve created a coaching service where you can practice 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers from Google, Amazon, and other leading tech companies. Product Management Ace the product management take-home assignment. Let me know how it goes and if these tips were useful to you and how I can improve them. Don’t just monologue and hold forth for half an hour; if you find you’ve been talking with little to no response from your interviewer, pause to do a time check and ensure that you’re spending your time answering what they’re looking for or if they can guide you to spend more time digging in on things they’re interested in. These questions aren't particularly hard compared to some of the others you’ll face during the interview and are sometimes overlooked by candidates. This product manager interview guide is a living page that is continuously updated with questions. This is why it pays to be bold. HOW TO ACE THE INTERVIEW Lewis Lin Seattle, WA lewis@impactinterview.com Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you know a Product Manager who can help you, that's fantastic! In general, a customer will maintain a relationship with a single account manager throughout their association with the company. Use a whiteboard, your hands, whatever and walk me through what the user sees, what they need to do in detail. Why was it significant? Here's the announcement about a special offer - learn more here, Behavioral questions are common in interviews at tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Infer as much as possible to reduce user load. Hello, and welcome to this blog on Retail Interview Questions and Answers. My hope with this article is to give prospective candidates their best shot at showing off their thinking and creativity during a PM interview. This will help you to understand the structure of a good answer. With my passion being the work that I do, I am always giving my full potential to all my tasks. I asked customers about their preferences, conducted some basic competitive analysis, helped to establish low-risk innovations by brainstorming solutions with the owner, and trained staff on the changes. Visualize. I’ve had candidates hold forth on me without pause and it can be awkward for both parties if the interviewer needs to jump in and interrupt you to get you to move on. Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews Technical Program Management 101 by yours truly – This is an introduction to the TPM role it is included in the Ace … Most great PMs are made, not born, so the good news is that you can develop many key PM skills if you’re coming up short in an area. It shows your creativity, as you found low-cost and innovative ways to solve the problem despite the limited resources of the company. Had a phone screen with the recruiter, followed by a phone interview with the Validation Manager, and lastly a Zoom interview with several managers. PMs do not have to be gurus with visual design, but they do need a sense of UX and information theory. Three Facebook leaders discuss adjusting to life during the pandemic during a virtual Women Create panel It includes a detailed overview of what Facebook is looking for along with real interview questions and answers from Facebook PM interviews. Three Facebook leaders discuss adjusting to life during the pandemic during a virtual Women Create panel In this guide we will be teaching you all about how to ACE any retail interview. Finer details like applying an appropriate discount rate to reflect the time value of money can be worked out by your fine peers in Accounting. Product manager Interview Questions Often considered the "CEO" of their product area, product managers oversee the strategy, production, and implementation of a particular product. Reason from first principles. Explain the last time you figured out what your customers really wanted, t: How do you interview for that? Leave a comment at the bottom of the blog post with your answer. Application. Then, as bad as it sounds, I convinced QA to cut a week off the testing schedule. If someone asks you to design a television for the elderly, don’t say, “well, I’d need to go and spend time with the elderly to begin to know how to answer that.” You can call out that this kind of surface area contact in product development is ideal — even necessary — but it’s obviously something we can’t incorporate into the interview itself. I interviewed at Facebook (New York, NY). After your onsite interviews, the interviewer feedback is collected and sent to a hiring committee (not including anyone you’ve met in the process to date) and a hire/no-hire decision is made. Start by outlining the situation. See Also: 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions – Affiliate Now you will have to do well at the management interview so that you can land the job. The third interview is when the candidate is invited onsite to partake in a series of interviews. Tell me about your most significant accomplishment. Don’t just answer with process. The overall process is usually a recruiter phone screen followed by a PM phone screen, followed by an onsite panel of 3–5 back-to-back 45 minute interviews, where each interviewer may have a different “hat” on to assess one aspect or another of PM excellence. I just focus to the job done. Acing a behavioral question is much harder than it looks. Interview. I’ve mentored a number of folks who have then successfully transitioned into the PM role. While this isn't exactly a question, answering this the wrong way … Check in. A technical interview is your chance to show you have the skills to match. When talking about failure, don’t try to hide your mistakes or frame a weakness as a strength. Expose your thinking. ), Practicing for a PM interview can be a lot of fun and will help develop skills you’ll actually need to use regularly on the job. In this Top 30 Project Manager Interview Questions article, I will help you in gearing up for your interview and ace it. This is a good first step, BUT just knowing the method is not enough, you also need to be able to apply the steps in interview conditions. If you … Consider flipping things around and yourself interviewing someone you know is a great PM to observe how they answer questions. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with PM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process. We've already made the connections for you. If it’s a mobile app, sketch out the main screens and what someone will see. Clamming up is refusing to discuss things you don’t know with certainty. If there are post-it notes, feel free to use them. More importantly, it covers all the different question types you'd encounter at the interview including product design, technical, analytical, and strategy. We don't have a product manager here on the CC team—so we reached out to an expert to give her sage advice on how you can stand out in your next product management interview. This is a great opportunity to gain some practice for your PM interviews. If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's a great option too. This article is part of a multipart series of my experiences interviewing at Google, Facebook, Airbnb and Walmart Labs. Facebook Lite serves over 200 million people every month. The best thing to do is to do a little research prior to the interview. In this article, I’ll discuss the overall strategy on how to tackle the PM interview take-home assignment so that you can progress further in your PM interviews and improve your chances of landing your next product management … Ah, this is right up my alley. We’d encourage you to first memorize the basic steps, and then try solving a couple of the sample questions on paper. How do you motivate yourself? In the next section, we’ll step through two techniques you can use to answer behavioral interview questions. Finally, a lot of the process really is the luck of the draw. You will find our proposed answer to the question below. If you are on a Barista Interview then dress business casually or better. Once you know your niche, Fang recommends that you back up your candidacy with relevant experience and can identify the driving principles of … If you’re excited about the possibility of landing a technical job at Microsoft, chances are you have a passion for coding, solving problems and the incredible things technology can do for people around the world. Don’t beat yourself up if things don’t work out; I failed my first several Google interviews decades ago! Don’t rathole on fine details; instead, quickly get to a provisional approximately correct answer and then iterate to refine as needed or if in working it out it becomes clear you need to abandon and restart, do that. - Abhijit Jere, Software Development Manager, Facebook. While you should clearly articulate where your firm knowledge ends and your wild speculation begins, you should also feel comfortable in speculative territory, calling out your assumptions, however feeble they may be. Don’t spend all your time describing a process to get to an answer — describe an actual answer. From the creator of the CIRCLES, AARM & ESTEEM Methods , The Product Manager Interview, 4th Ed. 1.2 What happens behind the scenes Your recruiter is leading the process and taking you from one stage to the next. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Amazon Product Manager Interview: A Step by Step Approach to Ace the Product Manager Interview at Amazon. I’ve hired 10+ Managers this year at Facebook alone. While it is true that “No business plan survives first contact with a customer”, you need to know whether your idea could possibly be economically sound. I interviewed for Facebook’s RPM (Rotational Product Manager… During the technical part of the interview in particular, it is always even more impressive to me if someone is unfamiliar with a specific piece of technology but can use their general technical knowledge to correctly infer how it might work. Interview. This may sound strange, but it’s an excellent way to improve the way you communicate your answers during an interview. Visit Exponent's PM Interview Course for more great product management interview prep. Use a timer while you practice to ensure you provide only necessary information. Here’s an overview of what we will cover: Employers such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google use behavioral interviews to assess job candidates based on their past behavior. We’ve gathered product manager interview questions from companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, and we’ve also gathered product manager interviews from small startups. It’s a way for a potential employer to get to know you and what you’d be You have spent very few words between describing the situation and problem, but your answer so far has given the interviewer a clear sense of the setting and challenge you faced. Focus on the user. This is a self-guided, 30-day, step-by-step interview prep guide for Google product management (PM) interviews. Answering too high can cost you the job. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. The process took 3+ months. From the creator of the CIRCLES Method , The Product Manager Interview is a resource you don’t want to miss. W, e’ve created a coaching service where you can practice 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers. You could say, “This all happened before my professional career really started, but it taught me that the most innovative solutions are not always radical or expensive. Dress however you feel most comfortable. If you're applying for Facebook's entry-level Rotational Product Manager program, the interview process is similar, and you can learn more about it in this guide. If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's a great option too. After an three prior phone interviews at Facebook that happened through employee referrals, I was pleasantly surprised to embark on one of the most pleasant interview experiences of my career. Application. Be pragmatic. You’ll definitely stand out if you put in the required work. If you have any questions about behavioral interviews, do not hesitate to ask them below and we will be more than happy to answer them. There are many ways to do this, but an incredibly helpful exercise can be to start by understanding how Facebook thinks of itself as a … The Facebook RPM interview tests you on several dimensions: * Product Sense * Vision * Logic (hypotheticals) * Cultural fit * Initiative I had two phone interviews, one on site interview, and one phone chat with Sam (Maybe I’ll save a description of these archetypes for a later post.). This gave me insight into what other shops were popular and what people liked about them. Describe a project that you wish you had done better and how you would do it differently today. It was risky, but it was so important to hit the holidays. We want to see your crazy side. But a lot of the candidates we work with find this framework easier to use as there’s no overlap between any of the steps in your story. I highly recommend the course even if you may not be interviewing in the near future, but want to make yourself a better TPM in your current or future role." Hear from parents in our Tel Aviv office on how they find support and community at the Facebook company. You won’t get dinged. Giving a number that is too low can make you seem less qualified for the management position. Whether you are preparing to interview a candidate or applying for a job, review our list of top Product Manager interview questions and answers. Play both the role of the interviewer and candidate. Practice TPM and PM interviews 1-on-1 with ex-FAANG interviewers. Product management tips from leaders at the Facebook company. Definition: what’s a behavioral interview? First, buying a few cartons of soy and almond milk allowed us to test if this made a difference to Sunny’s customers without requiring a big investment. Let’s use an example from working at a coffee shop. I’ve excerpted that Google PM study guide here. If you're applying for Facebook's entry-level Rotational Product Manager program, the interview process is similar, and you can learn more about it in this guide. You can learn more about their thoughts on how to land and excel in a Product or Program Manager job and interview through their new book “Cracking the Or worse yet, reverse. The best way to practice for a PM interview is to have a friend (ideally who is themselves a PM) ask you questions of a rough form “How would you design an X [kind of product] for Y [demographic of user]?” Being able to quickly articulate who you’re building it for, why they will care, what the product does functionally and visually, and how you’ll bring it to market. Each company you meet with will be unique, so plan on allocating prep time for every interview … Now that you have a list of sample questions to work with, it’s important to consider how you will practice with these questions. Give a specific example where you drove adoption for your vision. Your interviewer may be trying to get to 3–5 completely different questions in a 45 minute slot that generally includes a 5 minute warmup at the beginning and a 5 minute “turnaround time” at the end. I stay calm under pressure and handle it well. My first step was to informally survey customers about their coffee habits as they paid for their order. ;) If your interviewer hands you new data mid-question that may challenge your assumptions, nimbly incorporate and revise as needed — or, as appropriate, put those data in context and charge ahead! For example, instead of asking hypothetical questions like, “How would you lead your team if we hire you?” they would ask situational questions such as, “Tell me about a time you lead a team through a difficult situation?”. It’s better to talk aloud through your thinking and backtrack, even calling out your idea of a minute ago as dumb, than to wait until you’ve got the perfect thing to say. Hopefully, you can utilize some of these tips the next time you’re in the job hunt yourself! You can't know exactly what's coming your way but preparing for these ten questions will help you put your best foot forward during your interview. Note that this question isn’t necessarily about a past product manager role and allows you to describe a variety of situations. The world's expert in product management interviews, Lewis C. Lin, gives readers 164 practice questions to gain product management (PM) proficiency to master the interview. The area I most often get asked to help product managers on is preparing them for their upcoming product management interviews. Here are a few tips and some common mistakes to keep in mind when answering behavioral questions in interviews. Make sure that the most important information is most clearly displayed to a user; hide complexity. To have the role work, you probably need someone who is a good mix of friendly, curious, opinionated, engaged, humble, and excited. Give a crude answer quickly. If you go into unnecessary details you are likely to lose their attention. I’m a Senior Product Manager at Google and was also a PM at Facebook. Application I applied through a recruiter. It was a small business with less than ten employees, resistant to change, and located in a neighborhood with new shops and restaurants opening at a rapid pace. (Other Googlers will likely disagree with all of the points in here. I am very self-motivated. We've already made the connections for you. An easy way to achieve this is to use a step-by-step method to tell your stories. You could say something like, “So what I did wasn’t all that complex. Once you have an idea for the user story, help me see what you’ve built in your mind. What will it cost you to support your user? Problem is, there are no standard best practices Hear from parents in our Tel Aviv office on how they find support and community at the Facebook company. You should use and practice whatever method you’re most comfortable with. So in short, if you have a really out-there concept, don’t bite your tongue and stick to the tried and true! It’s best to take a systematic approach to make the most of your practice time, and we recommend the following three steps: In this article, we’ve outlined a step-by-step method you can use to answer behavioral questions. A great product answer is something that could potentially be tested in a week. You have applied for management position at a successful company and have been called back for a job interview. Brand New Google Product Manager Interview Cheat Sheet. They give reasonable answers to questions but lack depth or novel insight. There’s no shortage of possible questions to ask a product management candidate. And as mentioned in the tips section, it’s especially important to focus on YOUR contribution. Nevertheless, experience alone won’t win you this job contract . Try answering the question below following your preferred method. Acing Your Product Manager Interview Originally published by David E. Weekly on December 4th 2016 14,129 reads @dweeklyDavid E. Weekly I’m a Senior Product Manager at Google and was also a PM at Facebook. Product Manager Interview Questions; 7 Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers . Fancy technology should take a backseat to pragmatism — be willing to propose solutions that start off “hand cranked” and then build technology to support them later. SEE ALSO: Google PM interview prep, Amazon PM interview prep This course helps the student get ready for the Facebook Product Manager (PM) interview. Don’t do that either. Product sense is Facebook’s term for a candidate's product design abilities. Bullshitting is confidently saying something you’re not sure if is true. Pick one of the methods above and prepare a story for each of the questions we have listed at the bottom of this article. help in beefing up your resume and are preferred by employers globally. Don’t be alarmed if your interviewer asks follow up questions; this is perfectly normal. But for most of us, it's tough to find the right connections to make this happen. Product Manager Interview Tips In this article, I’ll give you tips for every stage of the Product Management job hunt process, from sourcing opportunities to the final interview. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with PM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process. For instance, your interviewer might ask, "When was the last time you overcame a really difficult challenge?". After these changes, sales returned to normal within a couple months. A simple “LTV > CAC + S” (lifetime value is greater than customer acquisition costs plus support) is a good way to begin the discussion. The product manager agreed on a couple. To do so, scroll down directly to the bottom and leave your answer before reading other candidates’ proposals. All these are great and necessary, but we rarely find any material on how to prepare for a product manager interview, which I feel is equally important. Authored by the At the end of the interview, if you feel like you had a fun and engaging brainstorm with the interviewer and are full of energy to go build something, it probably went well. When answering the question in your interview, answer with a range. This is a great opportunity to gain some practice for your PM interviews. Hone the Right Skills. When interviewing for a product manager role, you can expect behavioral questions to also touch on core PM skills like strategy, prioritization, marketing, analysis, etc. Practicing by yourself or with peers will help you memorize your answers and be confident on the day you interview. What not a lot of people realize is that it’s actually much better for your odds if you have two fantastic interviews and one that was only so-so instead of having three good-but-not-amazing interviews. Please note that all of the below are my personal opinion and in no way shape or form should be considered official Google guidance. So, at this stage of a Product Management interview, you will be interviewed by a Product Manager. Create your free account to unlock your custom reading experience. Much of it will come down to the people selected to interview you and the personal chemistry you happen to strike with them. If you brought a notebook, feel free to organize your thoughts there. That said, don’t just repeat back the question to buy yourself time—while clarifications are fine, stalling is annoying. Asking some of these product manager interview questions will demonstrate your product knowledge, determine if this role is a good fit and, if it is, help This is not the time to be shy about your accomplishments. Spending too much time on the Situation step is one of the most common mistakes candidates make. How did you know it had been adopted by others? How do you get people to agree with your point of view? Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. You can also find peers to practice with on, Here's the good news. 30-day step-by-step guide to ace the google product manager interview. Next, I stopped by some of the other shops on my way to work, looking for what they might be doing differently. We’ve developed the IGotAnOffer method to correct some of the pitfalls we’ve observed when using the STAR method. If you want to land a great sales job, you’ll have to learn how to ace the sales interview.Sure, interview performance is critical in landing most jobs. Practice product manager interviews with other FAANG candidates for free. Also feel free to write-out your answers in the comments below. Tell me about your most successful project, Tell me about a product you lead from idea to launch, Tell me about a time you applied judgment to a decision when data was not available, Describe the last time you had to make a challenging decision when prioritizing, Tell me about a time you broke a complex problem into simple sub-parts, Describe a project you’re proud of and explain your process for ensuring high standards were met in delivery, Tell me about your greatest achievement as a product manager, Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information, Describe a time you proposed a radical solution to a problem and how you identified that it required a different way of thinking. Now that you know some approaches for answering behavioral questions, let's look at a full example. For the actual interview itself, here are my recommendations: Get comfy. What is your likely lifetime customer value? As a PM, your primary job is to identify a potential user in a clear demographic, empathize with the problem they have today, visualize an improvement to their condition, and spell out the solution in sufficient technical detail to be realizable. Third, we realized that printing the password on receipts was too cumbersome of a change, so instead I trained all baristas to ask customers if they wanted the WiFi password after they paid for their order.”. Here are some To become a product manager, it’s key to supplement that understanding of technology with rich communication skills, an eye for good design, and a perspective on product strategy / industry trends. Product marketing interview questions tend to be the same for most companies. Naturally, a dramatic proposition needs to be coupled with rationale that can be talked through, but this is one of the biggest areas where I see highly polished and experienced professionals bomb a PM interview. It's therefore worth spending time to prepare answers for them and to build an edge against other applicants. Second, all of the coffee that Sunny’s sold was already fair trade, but this wasn’t advertised; so I helped make a few signs to explain and placed them around the store. All questions are good questions, so go ahead! A place like Google gets far more excellent applicants than there are available roles to fill, which means that the process knowingly discards a lot of really fantastic folks. More: 10 Interview Skills That Will Help You Get Hired The Best Ways to Get the Hiring Manager … The Facebook PM interview has standardized across three components: Product Sense Good Facebook PMs innovate beautiful products that solve big, messy user problems. Practice product manager interviews 1-on-1 with ex-FAANG interviewers. I applied through a recruiter. Don’t do that. Not talking about YOU enough is another common mistake we see with a lot of candidates. Post a Job. What to Expect There are five components to the Google product manager (PM) interview: Product design. Let’s take a step back and look at all of the different behavioral and product skills you’ve highlighted with this answer. Behavioral interview questions often start, “Tell me about a time you…” and they tend to focus on soft skills such as: leadership, communication, teamwork, problem solving, etc. If you need to pee, ask to go to the bathroom.