Book Review — Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology
By Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro
Define yourself
Selling yourself is a crucial part of an interview. Interviews almost always begin with the open ended question: Tell me about yourself. This means you are basically pitching yourself to the interviewer for him/her to get a better sense of your background, experiences and who you are as a person. Taking the time to properly highlight these aspects of yourself will further help you down the line of your interview, as your interviewer wants to know why you want to work for the company or what your strengths and weaknesses are. It all balls down to knowing who you are as a Product Manager or a Technology person, and properly articulating it to your interviewer in a way that is clear and concise.
Researching the company you are applying to will take you a long way in your interview. Knowing several aspects of the company can help in answering a lot of interview questions and this shows the interviewer you are interested in the company and the role. For example, downloading the company’s product(s) and exploring the features can help you ask questions towards the end of the interview about certain things that were unclear; while researching the head of the department you are interested in to learn about the kind of work they do, can help in stating why you want to work at that company.
Expressing passion for the role is another aspect interviewers look out for in aspiring candidates. They need to know that you really want to be here and you have the right amount of passion to depict that. You can express this by clearly stating your experience or interests that are relevant to the position or fit into the company’s culture or industry. For example, if you are applying to an advertising agency, talking about how you started a business and created your own company branding, is a way of showing your interest and experience in that industry. Other passions that you have outside work are also welcomed, as long as it adds value to you and makes the interest convincing to the interviewers.
Behavioural questions
Communication is an integral aspect of any interview, especially when talking about your past experiences or professional situations you have been in. You want to keep the interviewer interested as well as answer the questions by keeping it simple and straight to the point. Having a structure, when being faced with behavioural questions helps you focus on what you have to say and not giving off irrelevant details that may derail the interviewer from the point you are trying to make. The S.A.R framework (Situation, Action, Result) is a guide to aid candidates approach these kinds of questions. Here, candidates are to talk about the:
- situation — sufficient background information on what you achieved,
- action — what you did, and
- result — what your actions led to.
One way to ace the behavioural aspect of your interview is to get your story straight, therefore you have to be prepared. One way to prepare is to create stories across the 5 major aspects of behavioural questions:
- Leadership and influence
- Challenges
- Mistakes/failures
- Successes
- Teamwork
You can document stories on these topics for your past work experience and extracurricular activities. Also, refining your stories to ensure you are properly presenting yourself in a way that shows the interviewer you are a great candidate for the role, is another key aspect in this section of the interview. Make your stories substantial enough that puts you in a good light, also clear and understandable especially when talking about the technical aspects of your job. Lastly, ensure that your stories point out good characteristics about yourself. Are you creative, analytical, empathetic, technical, ambitious, etc? Your story must highlight these features.
After documenting your stories, practicing these questions and rehearsing your response out loud with a friend or colleague will get you more comfortable and confident. It also helps if you stick with similar responses every time you are asked that question. Sometimes, interviewers will ask follow up questions to your responses, so knowing every aspect of that scenario will help you to answer them accurately without being caught off guard.
Product questions
This section of the interview is considered the most important, as you get to show yourself as a good PM. For product questions that deal with designing a product, your approach matters and determines how well you answer it. You should start off by asking questions to understand the question better in order to provide an accurate solution. Also, provide a structure that will take the interviewer on a journey so they are not confused or lost along the way as you arrive at your solution. Who are the customers? What weak spots in the product are they currently facing? What features can be developed to improve those weak spots? Providing answers to these questions will aid in your approach.
For questions that deal with improving a product, you should first understand the goal of the product, that is, the problems it is solving for the user. Next up, determine the problems the product faces and how you plan on solving them. Crazy ideas are always welcome, the interviewer just needs to see how you can take risks while arriving at a solution. Finally, stating how you would implement these solutions and also validating them will determine how good your solution is.
When answering the question “What is your favourite product?”, a common mistake people make is they list out all the things they like about the product and that’s it. A proper approach to this is to first of all, state the problems it solves for the users. How does it accomplish these goals? Why do people love this product? What makes it better than the alternatives? This helps you go in depth about what makes this product impressive and why it is your favourite. Then you can go even further and say how you would improve the product, based on any follow up questions your interviewer may ask.
Interviews are usually never easy and it takes a lot of preparation to be successful at it. Writing your points and stories down, also practicing it out loud will help you gain confidence to ace it.
