Just want to give back to the community as this board has helped me through my very long interviewing experience. YOE: 9Total/7PM How did you get interview? Recruiter reached out to me How long did the process take? 4.5 months from initial recruiter email to getting the offer Was there a technical round? Yes. As far as I am concerned, it was probably the easiest interview for me personally, although I do tend to be on the more technical side of the PM spectrum. I prepared using resources provided in the interview guide as well as by watching a bunch of videos from Gaurav Sen and Tech Dummies Narendra L What else did you use to prepare? Mostly free information available on the internet. I did pay for Exponent but only watched about half of their videos. I didn't find much value add over what they have out for free to be perfectly honest What questions did they ask? My interviews were 3 months ago, so I no longer remember, sorry Did you do any mock interviews? No, although I interviewed twice for Facebook, so I had some experience with the format How long did it take to find a team? I spoke to 4 teams before finally matching with mine. It took about 1.5 months to actually get a team match. When was HC? After the team match. What is your offer? $290K Total first year compensation (Europe) Current, compensation $100K (Europe) What is the level? L5 What advice do you have? Honestly, if you are a solid PM already, which I think I am, it's a bit of a coin flip. I interviewed for FB in 2019 and made it to the onsite with only a few hours of preparation. Got rejected after the onsite. My next attempt was in 2021, again at FB, and I didn't even make it to the onsite. Did I become a less capable PM somehow? I sure did not. In fact, I've stepped up my PM game pretty significantly between the two interviews due to landing a better job. I also spent significantly more time preparing the second time around. Once you master the basics of product sense and execution interviews, I think it ultimately comes down to a bit of luck. Some product sense questions are just much easier to answer than the others. Some interviewers are more/less demanding than the others. Some days you are more/less sharp than the others. This being said, practice definitely help. I certainly felt more confident and relaxed the third time around. Fun fact I nearly pulled out from the interview process the day of my phone screen. I remembered how painful FB interviews were and didn't want to put myself through it thinking that my chances of actually landing the job were 0. I was about to write email to my recruiter but changed my mind thinking I'll just do it to be done with it and that I don't give a shit about the outcome as I was fairly happy with my job at the time. Hope this helps #product #productmanager #pm #interview
Can you shed more light on how you negotiated with Google for the L5 position? I am interviewing for L5 and I hear Google lowballs hard unless you have a counter offer.
I didn't negotiate. This is what they offered and it seemed very much in line and even a bit higher than whatever data was available to me for Switzerland. I also didn't have any leverage, coming form a shit startup with 100k salary and no other offers on the table. I actually expected that the offer will be low 200k, so they surprised me.
Thank you and glad it worked out for you! I'm currently at a very small company and current don't have other interviews in the pipeline. Hopefully Google won't lowball me too hard
Congrats - I read through comments that this is a Switzerland role - I’m guessing Zurich? Is 290k really a lot at that YOE for Zurich then? I read 1 YOE APMs get 170K(1 data point on levels pre covid).
I honestly have not idea if this is a lot in Google standards in Zurich or not. I know that it's 5 times an average Swiss salary. Assuming that the average raise is about 7% a year, that's in line with that APM salary you're seeing. From the data it looks like that people who've spent all 7 years of their PM experience at google make more than someone who's just coming in.
What companies were you at before?
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Ah Gaurav Sen help here too. Nice. Guy is good.