Interviewing in Lockdown

While your kids make S'mores on your stove top, thanks to online school

I recently cleared the Google PM and Facebook PM interviews. I prepped for six weeks (couple of hours daily) from Jan 1 and then went to my kitchen counter in the middle of lockdown, interviewed at both companies, and surprised myself by clearing the interviews. I felt sharing how I went about this may help others, especially working moms/parents who are navigating the pandemic to either return to work or land their dream jobs whether this is at Google/Facebook or otherwise.

Where do you interview from in a lockdown?

My kids were in online school, my husband working out of our garage, and I was winding down my last gig, which involved selling my business when I decided I need to go work at a big company and picked Google and Facebook as our home is physically located right between these two giants.

My kids constantly circle around me like most young children, and are full of the most innovative tricks to make me pay attention to them. After a ton of trial and error, I just caved in and planted myself right in the middle of my home, in fact at the kitchen counter which is at the heart of our home as the ideal location for my interviews. I have to mention I have a high tolerance for noise, or this wouldn’t have worked. I figured it was a good way to see if my target employer would be a fit for me, based on how they react to seeing my kids milling around me. It’s also safer when I can keep my eyes on my kids, they surprise roast marshmallows on the stovetop for some emergency S’mores, just to get my attention.

How do you prepare your desk and video conference to interview?

The small things make a difference. Think about the lighting as you get on the video conference so the interviewer can see you - rule of thumb, the light has to be in front of your face, not behind your head. Have your laptop charger by your side, a clock in front of you so you can keep tabs on time, and invest in AirPods. I tried playing with the virtual background on the video conference (Google hangout, Blue Jeans, as well as Zoom). It gets a bit weird when you have a kid’s head pop out of nowhere, so eventually I gave up, but you may have better luck. Are you going to whiteboard or use paper? You will need to figure this out, as you would in an in person interview. I picked the easiest option and just got very comfortable using Google Docs, especially the Drawing tool (go to Insert -> Drawing -> New), just so you can have a shared space to whiteboard with the interviewer. In addition, have paper and black/blue pens so you can whip out a wireframe or an equation on demand, that can be viewed easily over video conference. 

How to get started with your interviews?

• If you haven’t interviewed in a while, pick some companies outside your target companies to get some practice. You can get recruiters and hiring managers to contact you if you turn on your LinkedIn profile to indicate you are looking for a job, LinkedIn lets you do this in a discreet way so only recruiters can view it. 
• Go through referrals at your target companies, so you can get a recruiter to notice your resume and invite you to interview. Having an internal advocate helps you understand the culture of the organization to see if you will actually enjoy working there. 
• Spend time preparing for these interviews, don’t just wing it. It doesn’t matter if you have an Ivy league CS degree or have filed a dozen patents or sold a company - the valley is full of people with those credentials. These interviews are not very typical conversations and require preparation.

How to prepare for the interview

• Most of your interview preparation is learning or creating frameworks to structure your conversation with an interviewer. There are several books and materials out there you can use for frameworks, the recruiters seem happy to help you with that. Cracking the PM interview is a book that I enjoyed. https://tryexponent.com/ is a subscription based website that walks you through recordings, I played them while doing housework, some of it was fantastic material and well worthwhile. The interview is a dance with the interviewer and you want to be the one leading the dance which can happen only if you can structure the conversation.
• Understand the vision of the organization - this is information easily available especially for publicly traded companies. These companies take their vision seriously and it’s well worth your time to remember it and truly understand it. Find the elephant in the room, by that I mean, understand the top obvious issues that the companies are facing. Don’t do these just to get the job, there’s more to this: Would you spend your next four years rallying behind the vision, and to fix that elephant in the room? And if you are like me, you will likely automatically be calculating the ages and grades your kids will be at during those four years. This will set you up to ask the right questions to the interviewers.

Are you targeting a FANG?

It’s very hard to get accepted at Google and Facebook as a PM - the probability is really, really, really low. Use this information wisely. For me this meant two things:

1. Most people you come across who are preparing for a Facebook/Google PM interview are not going to get in. There are strangers, who assemble on slack channels through different websites (here’s one), who will do mock interviews with you. It may get your interview chops rolling to do a few of those, but may not be the best way to spend your time as the majority of these folks aren’t going to clear the interviews - as we discussed the probability of getting into one of these companies in a PM role is low. Instead, here’s what I recommend:
2. a) Find a friend or two at your target company who will spare the time doing a mock with you.
3. b) Find people who were previously employed in your target companies and see if they’ll spare the time.
4. c) There are actual (ex) employees who provide coaching sessions - these are paid sessions with people who have work(ed) at these companies. I’d say find out what type of interview you need the most help with and invest there, and pick someone who is at your level or higher for at least a couple of sessions. Here are a few options.
5. intrico.io
6. https://app.igotanoffer.com/coaching/tech/
7. https://www.jinaldalal.com/
8. d) If you are still going to pick strangers off the web, be selective and keep it a small group, ideally at the same level as you likely will be at, in your target company.
9. I was prepared not to clear the interviews myself. Call me an underachiever, but I figured if the probability of making the cut was pretty low, I wouldn’t clear it anyway. This should tell you two things: if you are counting on getting a job by a certain timeframe, and are considering a FANG, please have backup options. I didn’t luckily have that additional stress, but when I realized I won’t likely clear the interviews, the pressure was off - I decided to instead enjoy the conversations during these interviews, and really connect with the interviewers just as I would with someone interesting I meet at work. With each interviewer I tried to remember their name, what they do, and learn at least one new thing, just as we would in regular life outside interviews. This was exactly what I needed to help me just be myself, which I think helped greatly in the interviews.

Your mindset during the interview

Always don your product manager hat. This is the converse of the last point and is important if you plan to interview especially from your kitchen counter. The people who interviewed me from Facebook and Google were incredibly nice and really felt like the type of people I would love to work with on a daily basis. They ask you casual sounding questions like “Tell me about your hobby and what would you do with it?” or, “Tell me five of your favorite apps that you use daily and now let’s pick one and improve it”, or “In your opinion, how will the lockdown affect employee productivity if it is never lifted?”

The challenge often when someone sets me at ease, especially as I sit at my kitchen counter, keeping an eye on my kids, while drinking chai from my favorite teacup, and thinking about my hobby or favorite app or the lockdown, is that I’ll talk for a good 20 minutes about how I love my hobby or what’s so cool about my favorite app as a user or the pain of being in lockdown. You want to avoid this - the interviewer is asking for you to toss your “user” hat and don the PM hat! What this means - proactively map it to the type of interview (product design, estimation, system design, product execution, etc) and come up with a structure for every conversation.

There’s plenty of PM interview prep material out there, so I won’t actually get into that. The question is if you are willing to be a student and make the time to prepare and put yourself out there. I hope this helps someone land a role whether at Facebook, Google or whatever your target company may be.

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