Let me preface this by saying I have been a PM at Microsoft for the past 11 years where I have led massive teams and literally made the company billions of dollars and another 8 years of product experience at various startups before that, including my own which was acquired by Microsoft. About a year ago, I had a record number of recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn and for the first time in a decade, I decided to actually take some interviews as the market was getting red hot. I got rejected after the first or second round everywhere--Snap, Google, Facebook, Stripe, you name it. I know I am a stellar Product Manager and all my performance evals and promotion history at Microsoft solidly back that up. However, the interview feedback I consistently got was that my responses weren’t structured enough or that I had missed covering things in my response that weren’t explicitly asked about. Or worse, I would get useless hypothetical questions like “Come up with the business strategy for an invisibility cloak” which just felt like PMs at Google in their mid-20s were trying to amuse themselves at the expense of my interview experience. This year, I decided to recruit again but instead of winging it, I spent nights and weekends for an entire month prepping. I completed the full Product Alliance course, wrote out 20 different stories I could use for various behavioral questions, did some paid mocks with PMs at the some companies I was targeting, etc. This time around, I got offers from everywhere I interviewed (Facebook, Google, Coinbase, Apple, Rivian and Uber) with the sole exception of Stripe. My realization was nothing had really changed in me as a candidate between the 1 year where I got rejected and then accepted at a lot of the same companies. There is just an artificial barrier we have put up around preparing frameworks, structures and canned stories in order to progress our careers. If you haven’t spent at least 40-50 hours prepping, you realistically won’t get offers at any top companies despite having awesome credentials. What’s worse, is the questions you get asked in PM interviews do extremely little to establish that you’d actually be a good Product Manager. Like estimation questions in particular are largely useless imo; however, unless you have learned the preferred structure for answering estimation questions, you won't get the job offer where you'd actually be working a very specific project that’s already been market sized and is going to ship regardless of your ability to do back of the envelope calculations on the spot. I’m not sure where I am going with this. I just feel like the current FAANG PM interview process just tests if you have studied rather than if you are actually a good PM. I shouldn’t have to take a 30 hour course to pass PM interviews when I have nearly two decades of experience. I think the current state of product management interviews is completely broken and it's gonna lead to the wrong people taking the product reins at a lot of the current top companies if it doesn’t change. Companies are explicitly prioritizing candidate's willingness to cram for interviews over actual product experience, references, etc which I think is a big mistake. YOE: 19 New TC at Facebook: 890K
Dude, thank you. And yes. It’s an exam we need to study for, not an evaluation of any experience.
Yes yes yes 🙌
This post needs 100+ plus likes. I completely agree that the current process for product management interviews is broken. Previous experience is disregarded and you get interviewed by these newbies who have barely 2 years of experience who are trying to see if you can deliver canned framework responses. It tells me nothing on where you can deliver results or you are a good pm.
This isn't just applicable to product. I feel like all of tech is like this lol
I mean it sounds pretty normal to me… just like taking SAT or other standardized tests, your interviewers expect a standardized answer. It sucks but you got no choice
Except that, unlike SATs, PMs deal with gray areas with no one right answer.
I couldn't agree more.
Can you please share your product question structures ? Can really use your experience here
Lol read the room
Someone give this man a medal 🥇🏅
They are expecting a templatized answer. If you understand this and prepare accordingly you crack the interview and get in. This is the case for not just PM but also Data Science interviews, Product DS interviews, Amazon LPs etc. All the interview prep platforms and coaches are making good profits out of this situation. People with families and not getting enough prep time after a full time job are clearly at a disadvantage
Yeah the equity thing here is killing me. If you aren't some 20 something single person with no dependents etc, you're never gonna have the spare time needed to prep. Mind boggling. And not everyone can do all this unpaid work to prep either
What are the templates to use ? Can you share for different types of questions ?
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Ngl, this is pretty spot on of everything wrong with PM interviews