Table of Content

1. Introduction

2. Pre-interview Preparation
a. Know Yourself
b. Know Them

3. Skills that matter

a. Decision making
b. Technical acumen
c. Business Leadership
d. Execution
e. Influence w/o authority
f. Communication
g. Design

4. Additional Preparation

5. Conclusion

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Introduction

Product management is one of the most flexible roles in any organization. One that
deals with cross-functional teams and is measured sheerly based on outcomes rather
than efforts.

For companies, it’s difficult to find good Product Managers that actually deliver.
Probably because the role is so diverse and a lot of it is intangible knowledge.
Screening a candidate to measure him across all the verticals that a PM needs to
excel at is a challenging process in itself.

Also, the negative impact of hiring a bad PM is often so damaging that companies
take a hell-bent approach and spend a lot of effort in picking the right person in the
first place.

All of this makes the PM interview quite challenging by design. But for the right
candidate, it is equally exciting given the practicality and problem solving that entails
during the process.

Preparing for an interview becomes a lot easier when you know what you are
supposed to demonstrate during the process. This guide is focussed on offering you
exactly that; a sneak-peek into the other side of the table. It’ll help you prepare for
the core skills that top companies look for while hiring a PM.

There are two parts to the guide:

a. A pre-interview homework to give you an upperhand before the interview
begins.
b. A list of skills a PM is supposed to have and the preparation required to
demonstrate them during the interview.

With the help of this guide, assess yourself and prepare to ace your next PM
interview!

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Pre-interview Preparation

By taking a generic approach for interview preparation, most candidates miss out on
deep diving about the company, its people, and the role being offered. During the
interview, there are several factors at play while evaluating whether you’re fit for the
role. The below preparation will ensure you are in control of all those factors.

Know Yourself
Core motivation
You’ll probably apply to a PM job for all or either of these 3 core reasons:
1. You love the product/company/industry
2. The role offers skills and knowledge you wish to acquire
3. It aligns well with the the impact you want to create through your work

Other factors like salary, designation, co-workers, etc. definitely play their role but
the above mentioned reasons are the most crucial while applying for a PM job (Any
other reason warrants rethinking upon the motive behind your choice).

Figure out your reason, the ‘why’ of your choice. It’ll help you understand whether
the role/company is right for you and what to expect out of it.

Current Skill Set

Another great exercise would be to do a simple analysis of your current skill set as a
Product person. Measure yourself against all the verticals that a PM operates in,
come up with things that you excel at, and find out the potential gaps that exist.
Being aware of your strengths and weaknesses will better equip you to help the
recruiter perceive them clearly.

Not every PM role demands the same chops though, so you need to make the
interviewer understand how your specific skill set and strengths can be essential to
their product.

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Personal Moats
Every successful product has a moat; an attribute that sets it apart and is a key to its
success. It helps to think on a macro level about what your personal moat is.

A personal moat is something that gives you an edge over others; a competitive
advantage. Ideally, it consists of skills that are considered rare in the industry -
something that is hard to do and leverages your unique talent and skill set.
Discovering this moat early on in your career helps you hone it and accelerate your
growth.

In the context of your interview, the personal moat is what will differentiate you in a
pool of candidates who might be equally or in some cases, better skilled.

Know the Company

Get a deep understanding about the company and its core aspects before you go for
the interview. The below pointers are essential:
● Core vision & mission
● Founders
● Culture
● Business model
● Product (UI/UX, user journey, tech stack, scope of improvement, target
audience, etc.)

With this knowledge, you can tie most of your answers/solutions back to the
company’s core vision. This simple hack can give you a massive edge during the
interview.

The interviewers ideally include a senior product person and respective function
heads (engineering & design in most cases). In early-stage startups, the
founders/CEO themselves are interested in reviewing the PM. A quick online search
on the key people can help you prepare better and get an early heads up on the ones
who will interview you. It will also serve the purpose of knowing the people you’ll be
working with when selected.

While preparing, keep the job description as your anchor point, as it has specific
details about the role you’re interviewing for. You’ll most likely be tested for those

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things in particular. Having the right context in mind will play an important role while
you go through the interview process.

Skills that Matter

These are the tenets of a Product Manager’s core functions and most interview
questions/assignments will be designed to test how well you conform to them.

An important thing to keep in mind is that a PM’s role never demands these skills on
a stand-alone basis. Most of them are interconnected and will require you to don
multiple hats simultaneously. But knowing these broad traits will help you
understand what the interviewer is seeking and then allow you to paint a fair picture
of your abilities to match them.

Each skill mentioned below is accompanied with a set of questions the interviewer
will have in mind while interviewing you. You’ll also find the top questions that PMs
get asked during evaluation of these core skills. Most of them are template-based
questions, the specifics will differ for each interview.

Decision Making
Can this person take small and big product decisions with high accuracy? How well
can he prioritize them? How much does he rely on data vs intuition while making
them? Can he think on his feet for quick decisions?

Decision making is probably the most essential task a Product Manager is responsible
for; it affects virtually everything else. Given the importance of this skill, expect it to
be put through a strenuous test during the interview.

Data-driven
Knowledge of analytics plays a huge role in decision making. As a PM, you’ll mostly
rely on data to make all the important decisions related to the product. Without it,
it’ll be difficult to convince cross-functional teams to approve & the engineering
team to build it. Edward Demings, popular engineer and management consultant had
famously said, “In God we trust, everyone else must bring data.”

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Goals and metrics
Every product has got a set of key goals and metrics that show its health and pave its
direction. As a PM, you will be responsible for deciding which ones should be tracked
and eventually improved. Once this is taken care of, what is your plan of action for
improving the north star? How well can you do both of this?

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has an interesting decision-making theory on
how easily a decision can be reversed. This chart demonstrates the type of decisions
and the spectrum in which each decision falls.

This framework will help you solve decision-making problems thrown at you during
the interview by factoring in time vs accuracy (and reversibility). Additionally, you’ll
also get to know the importance of each decision which will be instrumental in
figuring out the required resources and the decision’s priority.

For instance, if you’re asked whether adding an option to buy/sell on Facebook will
be a good idea or not, put your analysis into this framework and gauge its
importance.

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Similarly, a small decision like changing a signup link to a button would reflect like
this.

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The interviewer here is not trying to see if you are right all the time. He wants to
know whether you’re capable of taking high-risk, high-impact decisions that are
often irreversible with exceptional consistency. As Pareto’s principle says, 20% of
decisions drive 80% of the results.

Trade-offs
Decision making often includes situations where you are forced to sacrifice one for
the other. Be prepared to give a valid reason for the compromise if an answer
demands it. It shows the trade-offs you’re willing to make and more importantly, the
reasons behind making them. You’ll be judged based on how well you can make
complex trade-offs in a structured manner.

Your decision making ability also relies on several other factors that’ll be gauged
during the interview. The below sections talk of the same.

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Top questions asked to evaluate Decision Making:
1. What key metrics will you measure while deciding whether to change a social
media app’s home feed?
2. If you had to allow users to edit their tweets, what are the key things you will
factor in while making the decision? What are the feature’s pros & cons?
3. What KPIs would you track to determine the success of X? (X being any
popular product/service or a feature)
4. Will you build a product feature if your intuition is with it but the data strongly
disagrees?
5. What experiments will you run to improve the form filling experience on a
landing page?
6. Business head ‘A’ asks for a particular feature, Business head ‘B’ asks for
another feature. Both don’t complement each other, how will you decide
what to build?
7. Are there any decision making frameworks you follow?

Technical Acumen
Can he speak to developers in their language and understand their challenges? Will
he be able to understand the technical implications of the decisions he makes? Can he
relay information between technical and non-technical colleagues seamlessly? Does
he understand the limitations and possibilities of the underlying technology?

Being able to work with developers is an important PM attribute. But as polarizing as

it might sound, technical acumen is an optional requirement in many cases.

However, if you’re interviewing for a product that is completely driven by a web/app

presence, expect this to be a mandatory demand. In fact, companies like Google
insist on hiring PMs with a technical background, often a CS degree. Others make it a
point that all product folks at least have a basic understanding of how things work in
the back-end.

Technical know-how is also a brilliant asset to have while communicating with

developers and designers both, which we’ll cover in depth in a later section.

If you don’t have a technical background, learning up on basic yet important

technology concepts might go a long way.

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Get a good grasp of:
1. APIs
2. System-level architectures
3. Tech stacks
4. Common software development processes
5. Web languages

These might not be enough but will ensure that your lack of technical skills won’t be
a hindrance in getting the job. You’ll easily find online resources on each of these
topics if you wish to learn from scratch.

If the role specifically demands a strong technical background, prepare yourselves to

delve into high-level algorithms, complex SQL queries, and code-level concepts to
showcase your skills during the interview.

But don’t expect brain teasers in this round, instead, it will largely revolve around
broad technical ideas. As a PM, you’ll never have to actually code so the syntax and
nitty-gritties of the job won’t matter in the tech assignment/questions. They merely
want to test two things: how well-versed you are with the technology upon which
the product is built and whether you are equipped to take tech decisions with ease.

Top questions asked to evaluate Technical Acumen:

1. Why do you want to move into product management from engineering? (For
developers turning into PM)
2. Does it make sense to build a PWA for our website? (Can be asked for any
technological development and whether it’s useful for a product)
3. How do you resolve a server bottleneck? (Can be asked relating to DNS issues,
SSL issues, time-outs, etc.)
4. Write an SQL query that returns the total number of users who’ve added a
payment method? (can be an SQL query for anything)
5. What steps will you take to increase a site’s speed performance?
6. What technical skills are you particularly good at?

(Note: The level of technical questions will vastly differ depending on the role and its
requirement of technical knowledge)

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Business Leadership
Can he identify business opportunities and translate them into the product? Does he
understand the business implications of product decisions? Does he have a good
grasp of the industry and the business model of the company?

Every decision that you would take as a PM would impact the business in some way.
Or to say it differently, how would you take decisions that positively impact the
business? It requires a strong business acumen to drive such decisions.

You must have seen this popular venn diagram that depicts the position of a PM. It
lies in the confluence of UX, tech, and business.

A PM can be great at everything but if he lacks a smart business sense, the end goals
of the product will never be met and that would discard other achievements.

Your understanding of the below topics might be put to test to gauge your business
leadership abilities:
1. Deep understanding of business models
2. Key metrics that drive revenues
3. Competitors and their strategic positioning
4. Basic product economics
5. Product life cycle (business-end)

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Industry knowledge
Another important factor is the industry expertise you possess. Every industry has its
own dynamics and getting a hold of it can equip one to take vital product decisions.
Alternatively, it helps in deeply understanding the core customer needs in that
specific industry. Demonstrating a good grasp over the industry in which the business
operates in is an impressive asset to have for a PM.

Product vision
Your product vision gets shaped to a large extent by having business leadership skills.
Vision specific questions are quite common in PM interviews. To answer them with
conviction, you need to have a good sense of the overall business and the direction it
is heading towards.

Finance
If you know how to read financial statements as well, that’s a big advantage to have.
Every company would prefer a PM who understands basic finances than someone
who has no clue about balance sheets. Being business-savvy offers a massive edge
when it comes to building products.

It is often quoted that a PM is the CEO of the product and that is accurate to a large
extent. The interviewer, while judging your business acumen, will strongly have to
believe that the candidate can take complete charge of the product, even from the
business side, just like the CEO.

Top questions asked to evaluate Business Leadership skills:

1. Would you launch iMessage for Android as a paid app? (Such questions
evaluate decisions that have huge business impact. In this case, Apple’s
ecosystem is one of its biggest asset, will you trade it with a small stream of
revenue?)
2. What factors will you consider if Facebook wants to venture into the online
dating business?
3. How will you decide what kind of shows to produce if you’re Netflix?
4. What new businesses will you venture into if you had to increase ARPU for
Uber?
5. Will you reduce the subscription price of a service to capture more users in an
emerging market? Why or why not?
6. Do you have an understanding of financial statements?

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Execution
Can he understand the problem and break it down for execution? Does he possess the
ability to work at a micro level by having an eye on the macro goals? Can he drive the
team to achieve the set goals under the desired timelines?

PMs are expected to make their hands dirty more often than not. Although
strategizing, analysing, and communicating problems are essential, it all boils down
to execution at the end. If you can’t ship the end product, the initial effort doesn’t
matter. Having said that, the interviewer won’t judge your ability to do things by
yourself but how well can you get things done from others.

Candidates are mostly screened for the ability to:

1. Draft accurate and detailed user stories
2. Create rough wireframes for feature requirements
3. Write specific product requirement documents

Getting better at each of them will not only help you crack the interview but make
you a better PM as well.

Problem solving
The ability to solve problems that seem ambiguous is one of the most challenging
tasks a PM has. There might be several problem-solving or estimation related
questions to measure this skillset.

In most cases, the interviewer is highly interested in your problem-solving approach;

more than the actual solution itself. The best way to tackle this is to have solid
frameworks to solve user-centric problems. Below is a proven approach by McKinsey
which you can use for most problem-solving questions that come your way during
the interview.

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A great PM absorbs ambiguity and delivers clarity. Learn to do this by clearly
identifying problems, knowing their root cause, breaking them down into smaller
steps, and eventually solving them piece by piece.

Top questions asked to evaluate ability to Execute:

1. How will you decide delivery timelines when there are dependencies on
multiple teams?
2. How will you get different teams to commit to a set schedule?
3. What will be your first few steps in case of an unexpected technical
roadblock?
4. How will you arrange a sprint to develop the search functionality into a
product?
5. How many private vehicles are there in Mumbai? (Assumption-based question,
to evaluate your process of estimating)
6. What project management framework do you use to get things done? (Agile,
Scrum, Waterfall, etc.)
7. What part of product management do you dislike the most?

Influence without Authority

Can he convince all stakeholders for buy-ins required at different stages of product
development? Can he get things done by influencing people from other teams? Can
he form healthy partnerships with the relevant people?

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PMs are leaders in their own rights but they have authority over no one. This is an
important caveat as you can’t initiate direct orders. But to have influence without
authority is a skill that is often a game changer.

To test this skill, the interviewer will try to understand how you have done things in
the past. Or they will throw up imaginary conflicts that challenge your ability to lead
cross-functional teams without being their direct authority.

Without having a strong influence among the people you deal with will hamper your
ability to get things done. Some easy methods through which you can gain influence
include:
1. Demonstrate a rich subject-level expertise
2. Share information that you know with others
3. Form healthy partnerships with key people
4. Be integrous in your approach

This is not a short term strategy but something that grows over time. The interviewer
will be happy to hear this out when seeking answers to judge your influencing skills.

Another great approach to demonstrate this ability will be to recount past

experiences where you’ve persuaded people to do things when they had very little to
gain.

Top questions asked to evaluate Influencing skills:

1. How do you convince an engineer to build a particular feature when he has a
different opinion? (This question can have multiple permutations, where you
are asked to convince a particular team for any particular feature)
2. How will you resolve a conflict when a designer strongly disagrees with the
engineer on something?
3. How will you seek buy-in from the marketing or sales team for building
something that might impact their work in a big way?
4. Tell me a time when you disagreed with a designer/engineer and how did you
proceed further to get the job done?
5. What course of action will you follow when someone from another team
completely disobeys your demands?

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Communication
Can he clearly communicate complex topics in a simple manner to everyone involved?
Can he manage and resolve conflicts through effective communication? Can he speak
to all stakeholders in their work language?

A product manager works as a central point for everyone in the organization. Clear
communication is one of those skills which makes a PM’s life a lot easier. If you have
exceptional writing skills, there is nothing better than that.

A lot of your communication will involve persuading others and this will be put to
test in the interview. Persuasion works best when your claims or proposals are
backed with adequate data and you paint a vivid picture of the final outcome.
Demonstrating this ability with finesse will prove to be a huge win as a lot relies on it.

PMs are advocates for end users, and the only way a user’s voice would make it into
the final product is via effective communication from the PM’s end. This applies to all
verticals, whether it is drafting PRDs, convincing teams for a feature buy-in, or simply
crafting interesting hypotheses.

Ask vs Tell
As a PM, there are several instances where you’ll have to ask for something and
instances where you’ll have to explicitly raise a command for it. Knowing the
difference between when to use either of these is the key.

Instagram’s Product Director, Ameet Ranadive, has come up with a thinking

framework that solves this dilemma.

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Source

During the interview, there might be several questions targeted at how you
communicate problem statements and executory details. Using this framework will
help you come up with the appropriate solution and, moreover, you can go ahead
and explain the reason behind your approach.

The way you communicate your thoughts throughout the interview will also support
your case in proving your communication skills.

Top questions asked to evaluate Communication skills:

1. How will you explain a relevant tech-related topic to a designer? (It can be
anything from a design’s impact on pagespeed to designing for different user
states among others)
2. How will you convey your POV to build something when you have zero or very
less data to back your claim?
3. Describe Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn in 1 sentence?
4. I am an engineer who disagrees with your assumption about a feature we’re
building, convince me to buy your version of the story?
5. Write a brief PRD to build a comments module into the site.

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Design (UI/UX, Product Sense)
Does he have a good design sense? Can he drive designers to deliver stellar UI/UX
without compromising on anything else? Does he understand user behavior and
psychology to craft delightful product experiences?

Design is often mistaken as only the look and feel of the product but it goes much
deeper. Every step at which the user interacts with your product is a design decision.
Although having an eye for good design cannot be compromised with, the ability to
design products that enrich user experience is what most interviewers seek for in a
PM.

A lot of first time PMs the come from technical backgrounds might not be inclined
towards design, but we can’t negate its importance in shaping a good product.

Product design is largely related to the approach one takes while solving critical user
problems. The interviewer will likely test your design thinking abilities rather than
your sense of aesthetics.

A good way to prepare for crafting delightful product experiences is to know the
basic laws of UX. This site offers interesting visual representations to understand and
internalize these laws. During design assignments, demonstrate the use of these laws
and explicitly showcase it.

A PM is also responsible for sharing all product design requirements with the
designers so being well-equipped with design principles and terminologies will help
you communicate your ideas with clarity.

To get better at it, try your hands on wireframing tools like Balsamiq, Invision, Figma,
etc. to come up with quick wireframes for a design requirement. Moreover, actual
pen and paper never goes out of fashion and being able to roughly sketch an
interface can be a good advantage.

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Top questions asked to evaluate sense of Design:
1. What is the most well-designed consumer product you know? What makes it
so good?
2. How will you redesign a door to improve its user experience? (Question might
be for any everyday use non-tech object)
3. Can you draw out a wireframe to redesign LinkedIn’s profile page?
4. Given you can choose only one, will you opt for a better UI or UX? (Asked to
evaluate your ability of making difficult design trade-offs. In this case,
choosing UX is always the right choice)
5. How do you determine if a design is good?
6. Are you proficient in using wireframing tools?

Additional Preparation

Questions you can ask the interviewer/s:

Apart from the basic follow up and clarification questions, there are several other
questions that you can pro-actively ask your interviewers. Below are some
interesting examples:
1. What is the product vision?
2. How does the product team work with the top management?
3. How does the product team work with other key departments? (process, key
people, hierarchy, etc.)
4. What product responsibilities will I be expected to undertake?
5. Is this a marketing/sales/product led organization?
6. How is the current product roadmap panned out? (unless you are the 1st PM
they’re hiring)
7. What are the biggest product challenges being faced currently?
8. How has the product transformed in the last few years?
9. Can you help me understand the product development process being
followed?
10. What are the biggest achievements of the product team so far?

These are product-centric questions that will give you more clarity and a deeper
understanding about the role as well as the company. Feel free to ask questions
about the organizational structure, company vision, culture among other important
things during the interview.

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Demonstrate experience without formal PM experience
Build side projects: There is nothing more self explanatory than a product you have
built on your own. Since those are mini products that you have managed from end-
to-end, it gives the interviewer a fair space to judge your executionary skills.

Write Blogs: Writing thought pieces on topics that relate to product can be a great
way to showcase your original thought processes. Plus, like mentioned earlier, the
ability to produce good content can be a huge boost to your application.

Failures
Your past failures might be a great way to showcase how you have learned from
them. If you have worked in a product capacity before, you must have seen many
hypotheses and features fail. What is your response when things go wrong? How do
you diagnose the root issue without being distracted by vanity metrics?

Interviewers often ask about past failures and experiences. These questions are not
designed to see if you’re infallible. Rather, they are looking for someone who has
failed, has accepted it, and has learned the right lessons from it. Being able to
analyse why something failed is a valuable asset to every company.

Domain expertise
A question that frequently gets asked to first time Product managers is, ‘Describe a
day in a Product Manager’s role?’. This is possibly asked to gauge your current
understanding of the role and any preconceived notions you might bring along from
your past job experiences.

Todd Jackson, former Director of Product Management at Twitter, once carried out a
survey of his employees to understand if they are aware of what their cross-
functional peers do. While most could easily lay out roles of developers, designers,
and marketers, very few had a clue about what PMs did. Alternatively, all PMs knew
exactly what everyone else did.

It might help to brush up on your knowledge on the role of a PM and his day-to-day
activities, especially if you are venturing into it for the first time.

Knowledge
If you’re looking to get better at Product while preparing for the interview, the below
resources will be helpful.

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Read up interesting blogs like Stratetchery, First Round, Signal vs. Noise, Blackbox of
PM, and Intercom that churn out exceptional product analysis. They will give you a
peek into some of the best products out there and help you form original insights.

If you’re looking for something long form and more impactful, below are some good
books to start with:
1. Hooked by Nir Eyal
2. The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
3. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
4. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
5. Influence by Robert Cialdini
6. Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Check out this site to practice questions that were actually asked in PM interviews
for Apple, Google, and Facebook among others.

Conclusion

Apart from landing your dream job, an interview and its preparation process is a
great practice to assess yourself. It helps you think out loud and brings clarity to your
thoughts. More importantly, the questions and analysis you go through helps in
understanding the things that actually matter for a PM’s job.

The fact that the PM interview is challenging cannot be contested. But with adequate
preparation, you will be well equipped to not only crack the interview but leave a
lasting impression on your interviewers.

Often, candidates that lack a formal PM experience fear it to be a deal breaker. But
in most cases, this is not how the interviewers think. If you’ve got the skills it takes to
be a stellar PM, companies will be more than happy to take the plunge and trust you
with their product. Ken Norton, former group PM at Google and an investor in
startups like Uber, Nest & Slack, puts it perfectly, “I’ll take a wickedly smart,
inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and years of experience any day.”

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