How to nail the PM phone screen

As we continue growing fast at Tatari, I have been getting a lot chances to meet and interview people across many different roles in product and engineering. One of the key steps in any interview process is the initial phone screen, and I've gotten a chance to refine some tips on crushing that initial phone screen for Product Managers (of software products).

Note that I am not a trained product manager! But I have "worn the PM hat" in a number of roles in my career, and I've hired, worked with, and collaborated with many great PMs over time.

Tell me a story

At the kickoff, help me understand why we are here having this conversation. Explain the broad arc of your career that has led up to you seeking this role. Why are you seeking this role now, and why does your background make you a good fit? Remember, this should be broad strokes. Don't spend 5 minutes on each job you've ever had. What are the key positions you held in the past that give you experience in the domain, or developed your skills as a PM, or demonstrated your ambition and your increasing scope and impact.

Tell me what you shipped

Now that we've covered the basics I will generally ask you to pick a project that you shipped and explain how it happened. Successful PMs know that shipping is the key currency of the job - delivering valuable features to users. Can you explain the feature clearly and concisely to me, and explain why it was valuable for users? Too many people I talk to cannot clearly articulate the customer value of the things they worked on. Instead it sounds like random projects with inconclusive results, or things that never actually shipped to customers. Or the project was driven according to some internal company dynamics rather than actually serving paying customers.

Once you've described the feature and its value, now talk about the process of how you built it and shipped it. Who did you work with? Did you collaborate with the design team to create the design? How did the engineering get done? Were you driving an agile process and helping with project management, or did the engineering team take care of those details? There isn't a particular right answer here, but you should be able to describe the process and reflect on how effective it was. Finally, how did you measure the success of the project? Did you measure an increase in sales or engagement, or improved NPS scores? Purely qualitative descriptions tell me that the organization wasn't disciplined about measuring results or connecting engineering work to business value.

Help yourself stand out

The best PM candidates are very clear and structured in their communication. They can tell a good, compelling story about their work, and they are organized and efficient in how they structure and tell that story. They are aware of the timing for the conversation, asking how long they should spend answering each question and adjusting the level of detail for their answers to match. I find too many candidates spending 50% of the interview time going into deep detail on some work experience that isn't particularly relevant to our job. This can happen with any candidate, but it is a killer for a PM - efficient communication is just a huge, huge part of the job. Come prepared to demonstrate those skills.