Previous Microsoft PMs currently at Google

Better pay for one thing :)

Chatting with my friends at Google (PMs) they like the work quality more but have the same political bs

Starkly different companies. Google is quite bottoms up and data driven - good ideas and projects proven with solid data and user research can gain momentum and become real products. Quality of co-workers is high, you’ll be pushed and will learn a lot in the process. That said, some orgs can have politics - talk to multiple teams and join the product you feel passionate about and the team/manager that seems the most inspiring and committed to their vision. Make the switch, you won’t regret it.

I wouldn’t say that google is politics free. However there is a higher degree of autonomy that comes with it being a more bottoms up and a developer centric org. That also means that as a PM, need to do the initial ramp up of gaining credibility with the eng teams. Google also operates for the large part to build consensus and this does mean that compared to some other orgs, esp Amazon - you spend time influencing horizontally (peers). Again lending to credibility being the currency.

Some ex-MSFT people in there hold bias against MSFT people. You’d have to prepare to possibly have those people in your loops.

I just made that switch a few weeks ago. So far so good, I’m learning a lot. Do your homework on the team and meet with lots of folks. If you get past the HC they want to work with you to land you in the best place. Ramp up for me has been hard, since my team is mostly based in another office, so I’m learning on my own a lot. Still loving the new challenge and growing myself.

OP, @ysvr47, can you please share how many phone interviews, and what was the focus? Any prep tips you can share? Did you get any technical / problem solving questions, for which code or pseudo code was needed as answer? Thank you :)