Essential product skills: interviewing for PM roles

What you should take away: Prepare the right examples about your experience, structure your answers in a clear manner, and you will be sure to impress in product interviews.

The median tenure for Product Management roles in the US is only 1-2 years, and I suspect it’s not any different in Europe. This means you will be interviewing for new roles very regularly - you’ll likely have hundreds of interviews over your career.?

Recently I conducted dozens of interviews to hire out my team at Blinkist / Go1. Although I’m not an expert, conducting these interviews definitely taught me a lot about what makes a strong candidate. Here are the three most common mistakes that I saw from applicants:

1. Long winded answers. Interviews are short, so you have to make the most of the time you have. If you go into a ten minute answer, you show that you can’t be efficient and succinct in your communication. It also means the interviewer can’t steer you in the right direction - maybe your answer isn’t what they were looking for, but they can’t interrupt you without being rude.
2. No clear impact. The number one thing I look for is a candidate who can demonstrate they can drive business impact and user value. The amount of interviews in which this is not articulated clearly, or missed entirely, is staggering.
3. Solution vs PM mode. I love to ask candidates how they would solve a specific problem we currently face at our company. A lot of PMs will jump straight into solution mode - brainstorming ways to solve the problem. But great PMs will first think about the user, the company, and the problem they’re solving. Only then do they consider solutions.?

So how do you avoid these mistakes? My own experience of applying for roles in the last few years has taught me that interviewing is a skill you can develop. With the right preparation, your chances of success can increase dramatically. I've used the method in this article to land offers from Blinkist, Google, and Spotify. Some of my learnings may be specific to product managers, but I believe most of it is universal.

And it all comes down to two things: preparation and communication. Here’s how you can nail PM interviews.

Four types of questions

Product interview questions typically come in four forms.?

Personal elevator pitch?

The first question of any interview will be: introduce yourself. What makes a great introduction? I like to see it as a one-minute elevator pitch: who are you, what gives you credibility, what makes you tick, and why are you interested in this company. Instead of selling your product, you are selling yourself.?

Early in your career (< 5 years experience, < 3 companies) I believe a chronological story is fine: what and where did you study, why did you transition into product, where did you work so far, and what would you like to learn at the new company.

As you have more experience, you can’t tell it all without a very long answer. I would then give a higher-level summary: what kinds of products have you worked on, what drives you, and why do you think you’ll be a good fit for this company’s challenges. Make the most of your first impression by highlighting the most relevant parts of your experience.

Situational questions

The second type is the situational question. For example, “Imagine you’re a PM at Blinkist working on user retention. We want to develop new gamification features. How would you approach this?”.

By far the most common mistake I see is people jumping straight to solutions. They will start listing their favourite gamification ideas, many of which are great. But they are missing the point of this question. They are in solution mode, not product manager mode.?

In my opinion, one of the biggest values a PM can bring is thinking about the customer's problems, which problems are worth solving (that also drive the right business outcomes) - and only then coming up with specific solutions. That’s the mindset I look for.?

So before you jump into solutions, first zoom out. Here’s the way I think about answering this kind of question: User > Goal > Problem > Idea > Implement > Measure.

1. User: formulate who you think the user is, and what motivates them. Explicitly share your assumptions to demonstrate your thinking - it’s okay to be wrong, you’re not working at this company yet! But be explicit about what assumptions you’re making.?
2. Goal: next, brainstorm about what goals the user might have, and also what goals your company has. Where could they align? Demonstrate that you have a user-centric but also business-focused mindset.
3. Problem: using the user and goal, come up with 2-3 specific problems they may be facing that are currently unsolved by the company’s or competitor products. Pick one that you think has the most potential impact and business value - this allows you to demonstrate your prioritisation skills.
4. Idea: then brainstorm ways to solve that problem.?
5. Implement: if possible give some high level thoughts on how this could be implemented, technically and/or design wise, but you don’t need to go too deep here.
6. Measure: finally, tie it all together by thinking about how you will know that the problem you’re solving is actually being solved. What metrics or other indicators would you see being driven? When will you know you’re not on the right track?

Oftentimes when I start answering a question like this, I do not yet have any ideas for the problems or solutions yet. But as I start talking through these six steps, those ideas come naturally out of my assumptions. I explicitly structure my response to follow these steps, starting with:?

Before I jump into any solutions, let’s zoom out and think about the user and our company’s goals. We’ll think a bit about the user, their goals, and what problems they may currently face. Then we can think about possible solutions, and how we can implement and measure them. Does that sound good? Great, let’s start with the user.

I guarantee that this kind of structure will show to your interviewer that you are a great communicator, and that you have the right PM mindset. (As a bonus, it also gives them the option to interrupt you in case they are looking for a different kind of answer.)

“Tell me about a time…” questions

The third question format often starts with the sentence “Tell me about a time…”. The interviewer wants to see if you have faced a challenge similar to what they typically see in their company, and how you reacted. Some examples are:

• “Tell me about a time you had a big impact”
• “Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a colleague”
• “Tell me about a time you made a big mistake and had to fix it”
• “Tell me about a time you faced a big obstacle and had to change your approach”

There are many variations of these questions, but there’s a few common patterns - so you can prepare stories from your work experience beforehand. During the interview, you pattern match your stories to give a relevant and strong answer to any question they ask.?

Before your interview, look at the job description, and make sure you have a story that addresses each bullet point - e.g. if it mentions working closely with engineering, you will likely be asked how you work together and resolve conflicts.

At the very least, I would recommend preparing these five stories: 2 x success, conflict, mistake, pivot. Success is so important you should have at least two of them.

How should you structure your answers? Similar to the situational questions, there’s a nice format you can use, which will make it easy to demonstrate your communication skills: the STAR framework. Let’s say we need to answer the question “Tell me about a time you had a big impact”.

Situation: start by giving the necessary context related to the company and your role.

Let me tell you about a time I had a big impact, which was the product improvement that led to the largest revenue increase for my product area at Yelp. I was the PM for the Yelp Store Visits product. We worked on an analytics product that helped large advertisers measure the effectiveness of their ad spend. For context, we assessed how reliable the reporting was before releasing it, because we knew from our analysis that only when it was reliable, did it lead to increases in ad spend. Otherwise it led to a lack of trust and therefore churn.

Task: next, dive into the challenge or task that you were tackling.

Our goal was then to increase the reliability of the reporting, measured by how much the metric fluctuated month over month. Doing so would allow us to release reporting to more accounts, and we knew that accounts adopting reporting tended to increase their ad spend by 50%, so this would directly lead to more happy advertisers and revenue.

Action: outline the things you did to solve the task.

By defining and setting this clear goal, I was able to focus the team on this problem space, resulting in a number of strong ideas that we could test. Within a quarter, we identified a way to make the reporting more reliable by taking into account historical data and using that to 'smooth' out the numbers.

Result: finally, close with the impact that you had. Make sure it’s understandable, quantifiable, and impressive.

This new methodology led to a massive 80% increase in reporting available to advertisers. We estimated that the business impact of this launch was over $X million in extra revenue. This estimate came from taking the previous reporting adoption rate, and the average ad spend increase. It was by far the biggest impact we had with a single launch. Please let me know if you’d like me to elaborate on any aspects of this initiative.

There’s a few things to highlight here about the example. Firstly, the answer is relatively short - it’s 1-2 minutes max. A very common mistake is to give a long-winded answer of multiple minutes. Nothing is as awkward for an interviewer as having someone go on a long tangent - especially if it’s not answering the right question. By keeping your answer short, you show that you can be a succinct communicator, and you give the interviewer the option to ask for more details if they want it.?

In the case that you need a longer answer to explain enough about the product, you can either explicitly say that (“I’d love to tell you about a time I did X. First, let me give a bit of context”). Or you can simply find a different story - if it takes five minutes just to explain your product, it might not be the right one to highlight.?

Secondly, it very explicitly states (and quantifies) the impact that you had. I start every interview with the question “What’s the biggest impact you’ve had” - and I would estimate about 50% of answers don’t include any specific impact! They either missed it entirely, or gave something vague that had nothing to do with driving a business outcome or solving a user problem. Now, sometimes it’s hard to give a quantifiable impact, and that’s okay - you can then explain why it was hard to quantify it, and how you still knew it was very impactful. But you have to address it.

Using this framework, you can write down your STAR answers in a document before the interviews, and they will be clear in your mind.

Do you have any questions?

The final question that every interview should end with is: “Do you have any questions about the role / company?”. Interviews should be a two-way street - you should have the space and time to learn more about the role, and make sure it’s also a good fit for you. Plus, it can demonstrate to the interviewer that you are really interested in the role.

Here’s some questions that I think are particularly insightful to ask the hiring manager:

• What’s the biggest challenge the company is facing right now? How does this role fit in?
• What kind of person would be successful in this role? What kind of person would not?
• If I joined in this role, and six months later we review my performance - what would I have done or achieved to make you say I did a great job?

This will teach you a lot about the role and company, and also show your potential future manager that you are proactively thinking about their needs and expectations.

Coda

Interviewing is a skill that you can develop.?

The key to improving is to prepare the right examples about your experience (using the STAR framework), and to communicate clearly (using your 1-minute introduction, and using the “User > Goal > Problem > Idea > Implement > Measure” framework).

With that preparation ready, you will be way more likely to come out of the interview having given a clear articulation of what you can do, and demonstrate your communication skills.

Best of luck with your next job search!