I’m interviewing at Google for an L7 PM role. I’m 15+ years into my career in software but I never had a CS major or a programming background. Have done fine as a founder and startup VP product as well as large company PM.
BUT I’m a bit apprehensive about Google’s “CS required” mentality for PMs. And cognizant that PMs are expected to be more technical than most companies. Curious:
— If you’re a senior level PM, what technical skills did you actually use on the job?
— for a non CS major what subjects do you recommend they brush up on for actual job performance ?
— What skills / domains are worth learning from scratch?
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Had never taken a CS class but had some experience doing basic scripting and stuff as well as data science stuff. I spent a month or so studying the basics of algorithms, data structures, and system design. I thought the tech interview was easier than PM ones.
Senior PMs L6 and above are in meetings all day, they need to be able to understand technical trade-offs and and consume complex analysis, but definitely not coding anything.
Did two rounds of phone screen in 2010 - was typical pm product / feature design business case questions.
In 2016 one phone call, first question itself took the whole call -.it was technical design algo question, I didn't anticipate and wasnt prepared for that type.
Since then, I have been believing that LeetCode is needed.
My anticipated call is for Cloud PM ( my pm since 2010 has been cloud related).
In my current role:
- I did prototyping in Python for Machine Learning for an AI/ML project before it turned into a project. So my code has a lot of “brute force” and need to be optimized but it proves that a concept is doable.
- System design is mostly around Hadoop HDFS, Hive, Pig, Impala,Kafka etc. I have yet to write any MapReduce job as I don’t have to in the past. I plan to practice a bit on it. Also do some back on the envelope calculation on distributed systems. I my current role, the architect did all these but I guess Google expect the TPgM to know the trade offs and challenge certain assumptions. It seems to make sense.
- skills and domain: I am sticking to Python at the moment. Domain is in distributed systems and machine learning.
It’s hard to stay technical as TPgM. 50-70% of my time spent on meetings, documentation, chasing loose ends; barely have any time to sit down, code, and improve ourselves.