Failure at PM interviewing
My objective is to seek advice from fellow PM's, to overcome my interviewing failures. I understand that PM interviews are subjective to some extent. I am not confident about my product design and execution skills in a time-bound interview setting. This has led to inconsistent performance with product design and execution, running out of time, and not being able to think about the right metrics/tradeoffs or user needs/solutions. In the case of technical rounds, I am even less confident with the system design and tend to struggle more. I have interviewed with more than 20 companies (on-site) with limited success. The interviewing also impacts my work commitments and leads to a vicious cycle of failure + no learning at work. Seeking help from fellow PMs, to come out of this cycle. Some of the companies that I have failed: Rippling Meta (R1) Wayfair (onsite) Okta (onsite) Microsoft (GPM round after onsite) Amazon (multiple on-sites) Yelp (onsite) HashiCorp (onsite) Salesforce (onsite) Disney (onsite) Shopify (R2) Intuit (onsite) Ramp (HR) Multiple seed and late Startups (at every round from HM, onsite to CEO conversation) YOE: 15+ (10 SWE, 5 in PM, post-MBA from top 20) TC: 180k #productmanagement #pm #failure
Sorry to hear that. Are you able to give PM interviews at your current role? I’ve learned a ton from giving interviews rather than doing them myself.
not an interviewer at my current role, so far. Although i have expressed my desire to be on the panel
I would highly recommend doing mock interviews. Interviewing like anything else is a skill. I tell people 50% of the interview are about the quality of your ideas and the other 50% is the way you communicate them. There are several platforms out there that connect you with others to do mocks, both as the interviewer and the interviewee. One example is Exponent. Hope this helps and know you’re not alone! I’ve seen people with amazing experiences not interview well. Good luck!
I have done mocks but reached a point where my speed is not improving and getting stuck
I found the hardest part was finding the right/best stories to match behavioral questions. The frameworks for the mainstream PM questions were extremely helpful- I used both Exponent and especially liked Diego PM on YouTube, but once you know how to play that game the hard part was speaking from experience. I also found they love dev experience if you have it, and collaboration with engineering.
How many mocks have you done? It’s tough now that the market is saturated with good PMs looking for new roles. Sometimes it’s not the case study content but rather your communication and delivery, or other cues that make you not a great candidate. If you’re running out of time, it maybe tells me you didn’t summarize well and didn’t lay out your thoughts clearly. It’s a part of the job, how to communicate clearly that people understand. Theres a peer community helping each other with with PM prep https://discord.gg/EkpFgHvGS9
spot on. Delivery has been an issue as i am thinking and speaking, resulting in gibberish content.
Happy to get on a call with you to help diagnose what went wrong
Since you're looking for diagnosis and prescription from Blind, my 2 cents - Cent 1 -It's all about confidence...projection Cent 2 -It's all about retrospection and reparation, apart from the initial preparation. I feel you may be failing to look at where you failed and then actually consciously improving those points before going into the next interview