How to Crack the Product Manager Interview by Gayle McDowell

[0:00] Alright, well thank you all so much for coming. So I'm the author of Cracking the PM Interview, which I know I saw at least one copy floating around. But to tell you a bit more about my background, I come from a computer science background, did bachelor's, master's, and then was at Google for a while. Did a ton of interviewing there. I was on the hiring committee. And then kind of broke off onto my own thing. Started Career Cup, which is sort of a... Q&A forum, I guess you could say, around technical interviews, wrote a Crackling Coding Interview, Crackling PM Interview, as well as a third book, Crackling Tech Career.

[0:31] Some of the other things I do, which I mention because they're going to come up a little bit later on in some of the things I talk about, so just give some initial context. who are trying to reform their hiring process, structure things. So rolling out interview training, creating a structured hiring process across engineering and product management and all that. And then the other thing that I'll mention, because it has a lot of stories that will come in, is I often get hired by startups to do what I call acquisition coaching. So when startups go through acquisition or acqui-hire interviews, they The engineers and the PMs get interviewed just like typical candidates would.

[1:09] if you were just applying off the streets. And so I'll tell you about a few of the things I've seen there, some stories from that. Because it's given me a... very interesting sort of look at data where I get to interview the same person repeatedly, I get to actually talk to their manager to see, how my perception maps to what they're actually doing, things like that. So some of the stories I'll mention are going to be in that context. So just giving that initial kind of heads up. Without further ado, slides are online. People always ask this. So slides are online at go.gale.com/pmprepslides.

[1:42] Or if that's too long to remember, shoot me an email, gail@gail.com with the subject PM. Prep, that is one word, must be one word, and that'll give you immediate auto response with the slides, a handout that I'll, I think I'll show later on, and a bunch of other different materials. And then people are doing this anyway, but pictures are fine. I know people use pictures to record content on the slides, so that is totally fine. Okay. What's up? some quick definitions. So PM can refer to a lot of different things. It's an abbreviation, so that can mean product management. It can be an associate product manager, which I'm I guess it would technically be APM.

[2:22] And sometimes people also use PM to refer to project management or program management. I'm going to be talking about product management and associate product management. So not project manager or program manager, although there is some overlap between these things. The associate product manager role is a product management role, but it's typically for new grads or people early in their career. Typically not always, but typically. It's certainly an entry level PM role though.

[2:52] often has a rotational component, but certainly a training kind of program. So, the PM, the product manager, is managing the product, not the people. Thank you. As many of you all know, but if you don't, it's managing product is not necessarily In fact, typically I'd say it is not a people management role. And your job is to figure out things like who are the users, what are the features, how are we going to launch, When are we going to launch all these kinds of things? You have some authority, some leadership of the developers, but not necessarily actually authority over them.

[3:27] So that's all very, very relevant stuff. That said, let's talk about What is the perfect PM? Who do you want to be to be a PM? So perfect PM has these kind of attributes. technical skills, they have product skills, so they can think about who is the user. What features do we need? These sort of things. They have the kind of business skills. So these are the kind of things you might pick up in an MBA. You understand things about marketing and all, you know, advertising, whatever it is. You have the ability to lead and execute on stuff.

[4:00] And then you also have what I call industry skills. What I mean by that is if you are a product manager for a A financial software company. Industry skills would mean financial skills, something like that. And so industry skills are obviously going to vary depending on what the actual product is. But that's sort of what the typical PM looks like. And the thing is that it is essentially impossible to enter product management. with all of these skills. You just... If you have industry skills because you are doing finance, you probably don't have...

[4:34] technical skills. typically. So it's really hard to have all of these different skills. So perfect PM is a myth. So a question for you all, when you think about landing a job in product management is How do you come as close to the perfect PM as possible? So you want to think about, okay, so of those, you know, five big buckets, what of these things do you have? And what do you need to acquire? And then from the purpose of interviews, there's this other thing. What am I gonna make what am I gonna assume about you?

[5:05] So this is a, this last thing is something that a lot of people forget. kind of assume, I guess, that there's this magic transferability where if you have some attribute, I'm going to know that you have this attribute. And that's in--. you know, realistically, that's not actually what happens. People make assumptions based on your background. So I'm going to start preferences by saying I'm a very blunt person. I'll tell it like it is and I'm not going to sugarcoat the reality of What the world is like and this is not saying this is not these are good things about the world. It's just saying there are these stereotypes that happen. And when you're thinking about, it being a candidate You can't just...

[5:42] pretend or you probably don't want to pretend like these stereotypes don't exist. And so I'm not just talking about you know, racism and sexism, these kind of things, which are real, which are happening. But I'm also talking about other stereotypes from your background. So, That's okay. Um, I'll try to be more specific. specific story. So I was, doing in an acquisition context, I was helping somebody prepare. who His background was, I walked him through initially his kind of initial, what I call pitch. So his two-minute kind of walk through his resume. And it's basically, well...

[6:23] I was an artist. And then I went back to school. and got a degree in HCI, so human computer interaction. And then I went to... See, I went to be a UI designer. Design, design, design, and then I started this company. And if you look at the company's product, It was beautiful. Very, very beautiful product. I'm not sure what the use case was in this and that, but it was a beautiful product. that he grew to a whopping two employees. Okay. So...

[6:54] you hear that and you don't think you know what this is someone I want analyzing data. I want him doing quantitative analysis. He can make real hard business decisions. You Okay. we have a great UI design role open for you. Why don't you come interview with that? But the thing is, he wanted to do product management. He didn't want to do design. He wanted to do product management. But everything about his background screamed design. Right? and That doesn't mean he can't do these other things, but when you have a background that just screams design, People are going to make assumptions based on that.

[7:27] So, What he wanted to think about there is, okay, look, there's no way when he thinks about this pitch that this overall view of his background, that anyone's going to walk away thinking, This guy sucks at design, right? They're going to hear art and design and design, design, design. He wants to think about how do I sell myself as like, I can do business. I can do numbers. I can be a PM. I can think really about the product beyond... you know, the prettiness of it. I can lead developers. And so we need to kind of reshape his background and reshape his how he did things to Focus on that.

[8:03] And so he changed his pitch into being a like, Well, I, you know, He talked, he gave this overall view, but he brought in numbers and business decisions as much as he possibly can. And the design piece was. was compared to where he started with was almost an afterthought. And you walk away from this new pitch being like, This is awesome. Here we have a PM. who can not only do all the PM stuff and the leadership and stuff, but he really, really understands design, too. What an awesome, well-rounded candidate.

[8:36] And so that's the way you want to think about it with your pitch is you want to think about What kind of assumptions are people going to make based on that? So if, If you have been, if you're entering product management from, or trying to enter the career, the field from a perspective of customer support. Yep. We can think at a high level of, skills and attributes of this thing you probably heard about withage. which is, you know, smart and can get things done. So if I see someone who's a customer support, has a customer support background, what am I going to assume based on them?

[9:15] Anyone? Right. Customer empathy. Fantastic. I love that in a PM. What else am I going to assume? Not that people that's good. in engineering. Yeah, probably not very technical. Customers for people tend not to know how to code. Doesn't mean it's true. I'm just going to make that assumption. What else might I assume? Great communication skills. Yeah, great communication skills. That's fantastic. But maybe they aren't really executors.

[9:47] So that doesn't mean these things aren't true, but if you're going to come to customer support, you want to make sure that you're really selling the like, I can do strategy. I can do these things. I'm going to assume that you have communication skills, that you have customer empathy. It doesn't mean you want to hide those things, but you don't need to oversell those things. There's limited time. and you want to really focus on selling the communication, you know, the the technical skills if you have any, things like that. What about marketing?

[10:22] So if I'm interviewing someone who's coming from marketing background into product management, what am I going to assume? non-technical at all. Yeah, not technical at all. Matthew Norris. marketing knowledge, which is very, very applicable to being a product manager. Do you have a number? Maybe good with numbers. It depends on what side of marketing. Some marketing, yes. Some marketing, no. I was just about to say. Yeah, maybe style over substance. Maybe they even oversell some things, which can be really dangerous when you have a product manager who oversells stuff, right?

[10:55] So, you know, you want to think about these kind of things. All right. See if my slides want to work again. Do-do-do. What about... development. Developer who wants to transition into product management. Or February of 19. Probably not so good at marketing, which is going to be a problem. That is an actually important skill for a developer. before a product manager. Everett Community. Average communicator, Yeah. You know, in fact, I would actually argue that developers are stereotyped.

[11:28] I actually think it's unfair somewhat, but developers are often stereotyped as being poor communicators. Thank you. Certainly technical. That means that if you're a developer applying for product management, you don't need to sell that cool algorithm you built. Look, we are going to get that you could come from a coding background. If you're a marketer, if you're a customer support and you've done some coding, You mentioned the word algorithm, fantastic. Right? Like now you're like, whoa, you're actually tactical. I did not think that. So you want to think about how do you, where are you coming from and how are you going to sell that actually you have a little bit of background.

[12:04] And that's death. I think the Google Slides is just not working properly. Okay. Thank you. So. So you want to think about not just how you present yourself, but also getting these other So, you know, for a, if you don't have technical skills, get some technical skills. It doesn't take, you know, you don't have to spend, years and years, going back to school to get a computer science degree, you can do the 10 week or 10 hour, you know, like course on Codecademy. That's something.

[12:37] Right? No, you're not going to be a great developer. You're not going to be able to launch your own app. But that is something. And for a lot of hiring managers, it's hard for them to wrap their head around You are a product manager. You say that you really want to enter product management. You say that you're passionate about technology, Why haven't you... taken a few hours to learn how to code. How do you justify that? And now I know realistically people are busy, they don't prioritize, they don't get around to doing it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the perspective of a hiring manager They often get stuck in this one thing. So if you don't know how to code, get those little bit of technical skills.

[13:12] Um, Product skills, you want to acquire product skills. Well, obviously, you know, product school. You know, you can start blogging. and start taking new products that are launched and start dissecting those and talk about product decisions and proposing new things. and that'll help refine your product thinking. and also actually show it. Industry skills are something that a lot of people, if you're entering product management, and you're not are trying to enter product management, and you're not coming at it as a developer, you may well be coming from another industry.

[13:46] iBanking, something like that. Find a field that you know find a company that will value those finance skills. That's a good way in. because now you have something else. No, you don't have the development skills, so you can get a little bit of that. You don't have the product experience, but you're coming at it from a perspective with a skill that's valuable, which is industry skills. for business skills. There is, of course, the NBA. And I'm going to, for instance, by saying I have an MBA myself, I and I'm also going to give the advice that, look, If you want to get an MBA for the sole purpose of breaking the product management.

[14:25] That's a really expensive way of going about it. That's two years. You're giving up. That's not just tuition, which at a top MBA program is going to be like 50K a year. But it's also that opportunity cost, you're giving up a, 100K salary, that's expensive. uh what else could you have done with two years of your if you're saying i'm gonna spend $250,000 in two years of my time. to break into product management, what else could you do? You could start a company with that. Right? So maybe an MBA isn't the best path to go about if it's solely from the perspective of getting into product management.

[15:02] If you want to do it for other things, building better network, establishing credibility, learning, et cetera, that's a little bit different thing. Just don't, from this, solely do BPM. It's a lot. It's a lot to do. That said, if you do have an MBA or you want to do it for other reasons, it does help you, particularly if you go to a top MBA program. I said I'm a pretty blunt person. You want to think realistically about where are you in your career, prestige, wise and what MBA program are you going to if you are going from a your Google engineer and you know or some other top company and you're going to a pretty low ranked MBA program it's not going to help you You're not going to get the network that you need. You're not going to get the right things. You're taking such a step down. You want to go to a really, really good MBA program, if you go at all.

[15:51] So you really want to be honest. And one of the major reasons to get an MBA is to establish credibility and build a network. And that is hugely tied to the prestige of the school, just realistically. If you want to go to learn, There are many way more efficient ways to learn than formal education. You can learn online. There are so many tools to learn online. You don't, frankly, I don't think you go really to almost any school to learn. You go to show that you've learned because you can learn any other, any number of other ways. But if you go through an MBA, be aware that Silicon Valley has its little bit of MBA bias.

[16:27] I actually think it's still overall actually people are on average positive about MBAs. But there are plenty of people who are negative. So it's like it balances out to positive, but there's still a lot of negativity. You want to be really, really careful you don't come off as arrogant or anything like that. You can take advantage. Good MBA programs have a lot of networking opportunities. Recruiters come there. But it's recruiters from the big companies that come there to recruit product managers. If you want to go to a startup, you're on your own.

[16:58] They don't come in large numbers to MBA programs. So you're really, really on your own. And what I'll say is also a lot of the startups, what I've seen from my friends, from my peers at Wharton, the startups which did really target... Wharton grads are often, particularly the very small ones who did that. are often not the ones in actually the best positions. They're the ones who thought an MBA is going to save everything and who probably need to prioritize engineers instead tackled MBAs and did not work out well generally said. So you really you really need to put on yourself to tackle those recruiting opportunities.

[17:35] Add. I want to talk about the interview process. So first up is talking a bit about behavioral questions. So I talked a little about the pitch. One thing you want to do is you want to be ready to give a quick walk through your resume. This is true, by the way, for any role, any interview you've ever done. Be ready to do this. So, major mistake I see people do is they just talk way too long here. They're talking like two minutes max. generally. And, you know, there's, I'd say most people's are, as long as they're the right length, are basically okay.

[18:10] Every once in a while I see exceptional ones. Most people are just kind of in this and then it's fine. You basically just told me the whole story of your resume. So you can do the okay, fine pitch by just walking from point A to point B to point C. Go in forward chronological order, not reverse. Reverse is very, very confusing. And it means that the last thing you talk about is the stuff from the very beginning of your career. Go forward chronological order. Talk about, hit on quick shows of success. What I mean by a show of success, I don't actually mean an accomplishment. I mean something slightly different. A show of success can include accomplishments. It can include launching a feature, something like that.

[18:47] but it's broadly things that demonstrate that you've been successful. So something like. oh, I spent X years at Amazon and then I left to join a startup after my old manager recruited me out to join him. That is not an accomplishment. Getting recruited out is not something that you accomplished. But when I hear that, I know you must have been doing very well for your old manager to really recruit you out to join them. Now, if it's your old friend from college, it doesn't say anything, right? But it is a demonstration that you were successful enough at Amazon to have somebody recruit you out.

[19:23] So think about quick ways you can show success. And then third, lastly, think about your hobbies. So any hobby you might as well mention. Don't, for the most part. Unless you think that your hobby might reflect poorly on you, which... I suppose it could happen, but it's rare. It'll almost never hurt you. But think about if you can actually make it a positive. So any technical hobby is going to be a positive. So taking Coursera class on machine learning, building app on the side. Somebody I interviewed was, his hobby was...

[20:00] Well, so first he started off with his hobbies, like he has a chicken coop and I'm like, all right, cool. Mention that. uh i mean it's not it's kind of crazy it's kind of quirky fun whatever like sure mention it but as it turns out he was he like only by like the third mock interview did he mention that one of the things he's done with a chicken coop though he was seemingly non-technical was he built some sort of like i guess mechanical arm to i guess trapped the chickens inside it, inside their coop at night or something like that. I don't know anything about chickens, but that was the base idea. He built an arm that can go up and down when it's dark.

[20:37] Well, that's actually pretty darn cool for a product manager. All of a sudden, he just showed that despite not being a coder, he got his hands dirty. He learned how to do something. He learned how to physically build something. That is really relevant for a product manager. I don't care that it's chickens, but that's really relevant. Somebody else I know loves to run. Totally relevant. Unless you're maybe running, Unless you're maybe interviewing for a company that is doing something very tied to running. Maybe at Fitbit it would be relevant. I don't know. But the running piece didn't matter. But as it turns out...

[21:11] He had signed up for a 100 mile ultramarathon, which is actually running 100 miles, not like biking 100 miles, which is wussy, right? But actually running 100 miles straight. So like four marathons back to back. During the actual race after all that training he ended up having to quit around mile 60 Which is still running 60 miles which is insane because at mile 30 he hurt his ankle so this guy Did this insane amount of training to get there. Then ran 30 miles, which is insane. hurt his ankle and rather than giving up, he like kept going for another 30 miles until finally he realized it's probably not medically advisable to actually keep going.

[21:50] So in addition to perhaps a lack of sense about his own health, What he did was he showed he works incredibly hard. He doesn't give up when... you know it's very easy to say let this be an excuse to give up uh that persistence that you know that pushing past really hot hard options and not giving up gosh i'd like to have that in somebody i hire i want to have someone who's persistent doesn't give up stuff like that Think about your hobbies. Often these things that seem totally irrelevant have some little piece that they are relevant. So bring those in.

[22:23] The really great pitchers bring all that stuff in and they have a message. They have a like, I'm a product manager who... loves to get my hands dirty, who is very persistent, who... is passionate about bringing people's stories alive. So if you can have some sort of message there. hard for a lot of people, but those can make really, really strong pitches. Sometimes those messages come out kind of through the way you tell the story. And other times I've seen people start off when I say, tell me a bit about yourself. Say.

[22:58] You know, I've been in product management for X years, or maybe I'm breaking into product management. And what I love about product management is using it to bring people's stories alive. Sometimes it's a very explicit message. You can do it either way. And you want to think about your pitch as I talked about earlier. What am I going to assume about you? And how do you correct that to show that you have a more well-rounded background? five minutes for your call. So bringing stories alive means not a i worked at amazon for three years and i worked on this team and i launched this and then after that i went to microsoft and i did this and then i did this and i did this but a you know i joined amazon because i was super excited about kindle i love to read i love to learn it's bringing that kind of color into your stories that's not just a dry just not essentially the walkthrough of your resume right if if you're giving a pitch that i could basically

[23:58] given your background, looking at your resume? It's fine. It's just not going to help you. If you can do these great pitches, that's awesome. The next piece of this is being ready to give great stories. So typical interview questions, behavioral questions, tell them about a time when you did such and such, when you showed initiative, when you took a risk, when you failed, some things like that. So you want to be ready to talk about that stuff. All right.

[24:30] First thing is just ways to be ready to talk about that stuff. What I found to be really useful for people is create this little grid. And across the columns is every job or a major chunk of your resume. So that can be a, certainly any job. If you worked on multiple teams, each team could be a different chunk. If on the side you run a circus group, that's another chunk of your resume. And then down the rows are big picture questions, leadership challenges, things like that. Fill that in, try to fill in every cell with a story.

[25:04] Bye. You're not going to be able to fill it in with all different stories. That's fine. There's going to be some overlap. Lots of stories fit into both leadership and mistakes, something like that. But try to get as many there as possible. If you can boil that down into a single keyword after you're done kind of fleshing out, that'll make you a lot more ready to be able to find a story to match whatever the interviewer is talking about. The other way that I found to be super, super useful for people to find stories is to actually start from lists of strengths and weaknesses.

[25:36] You can find one in my book. There are many online as well. But pull up some lists of strengths and weaknesses and just go through that list. What are your strengths and weaknesses? That's a question you want to be ready for anyway. I don't like it as an interviewer, the question, but it is asked, so you want to be ready for it regardless. But what this does is mean that when I ask a question about time out of time when you showed initiative, You have stories that really bring out particular messages. That can be super super useful for people to find stories especially because the way that a lot of people Think about their stories are like these huge big-picture things the story of this product launching. And a lot of good behavioral stories are very, very particular interactions.

[26:21] It's something that happened on one particular day when someone got mad about the way that you showed it, you gave feedback. And it's often hard for people to remember these stories when they're just thinking about stuff that happened. So starting from strengths and weaknesses can be really, really useful to just jog your memory. So you see, yeah, you know, I am kind of a risk taker. I do have persistence. Okay, let me find a time that I can show that when I am persistent. So what's nice about that is it's... It comes when you think about it that way you have a clear message in your story.

[26:55] So when you think about an answer. you want to think about, well, what is the actual content of the message of the thing you're saying? And then how do you say it? So. Responses should generally answer the actual question. So if I'm asking about initiative, it should actually be an example of initiative, right? And that's where a lot of candidates just kind of stop. They're like, "Have I found a story that matches that thing? Awesome. Great." And not enough about, "Is this really delivering the message you want to send about yourself?" So I'll ask someone about an example for when they... One of my generic questions I'll start off with is, "Tell me about a technical..." This is often for developers. "Tell me about a technical challenge."

[27:36] Sure, I, um... One of my more challenging technical projects was I built an FTP server which did X, Y, and Z. Cool. What's the challenge? And the stories just kind of fall flat. The better stories are, you know, and what was really challenging about was this particular thing and here are the ways I went about. So you want your stories to not just literally answer the question, but also deliver that positive message. That's why those strengths coming up with stories based on strengths can be really useful because the message is really, really clear to you. That's why you pick that story.

[28:09] And then the third thing is be well-structured. Even if you fail at these first two things, at least you can have a good structure. So there's two structures that I like a lot, and they actually go kind of hand in hand. The first one is what I call nugget first. And this means that the answer to the question I ask is the very first sentence. Tell me about a time when you showed initiative. Sure, let me tell you about the class I started in college. Now I know when you're talking about how your university had this problem, its curriculum, and you went to talk to this professor and all this other stuff, the challenge is going to be around a class. I can prioritize the information you're giving me because I know what you're getting at. And moreover, you will focus on the right details because you already have it in your mind that the point is this class you started.

[28:59] And this is, by the way, general good communication advice. This works for a ton of things, not just interviews. Start off with the quick keywords of the story you're about to tell. The other one. is what is often called SAR or STAR, very similar things, but Situation, Action, Result. And often you'll preface that with that nugget anyway. So this is what it sounds like. You say the situation, you say the actions you took, and then the result of those things. The other piece you want to think about though is that message.

[29:33] That goes hand in hand with that. So big mistakes I've seen with behavioral things, mistakes I see over and over and over again, is too little action. The point of a story, when I ask you about a conflict with a teammate, the point of the story is not what was the conflict, it's how did you address it? What were the actions that you took to handle that problem? The point is this action thing, not the situation. The bulk of the time talked. about that you discussed is the action itself. So focus on the action.

[30:04] The other mistake is no message. So, um... you an example of that is I asked somebody, tell me about a... Tell me about a high pressure situation at work. And they tell me, sure, so... we had a supplier who was Amen. who was, you know, they're supplying some product and they were falling behind deadline, behind their deadline, and that ended up having this consequence.

[30:35] on us where we couldn't meet our deliverables as well either. And then to go into detail about here's the product and why and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, that doesn't really matter. They tell me, so I got a list of all our customers. I emailed all of them. I told them the situation. In the end, we lost one customer, but retained the others. What have you learned about this person? So they emailed people, they know how to use email? Um, They maybe had a list.

[31:07] All right, you've learned nothing about this person. A stronger answer is something like, So, you know, first thing I did was I knew we had a couple of really important customers who aren't just important but highly vocal. And I knew that those were our key influences in the market. I knew I really needed to target them first. So with one of our customers, I knew that they... really like to know that they're first. They want to know that they are a priority. So I called them and not only did I call them first, but I let them know that I called them first. I make sure that they knew they were the first ones I called.

[31:43] Next person. I knew that they... want to have all of the facts. I know that they get frustrated if they think that I'm holding things back. So I went overboard to make sure I gave them all sorts of details about the product in what's going on, even details that they actually didn't really need to know, just so they knew that they had all the information possible. When you approach it like that, you're hearing Gosh, this is a person who... understands people. And they are willing to customize messages depending on who they're talking to. Those are things I'd like to happen to PM. So, we will think about what are the messages.

[32:16] Then the third mistake I see is, I see this very, very commonly for many, many people. disproportionately I see it for people who are have been in leadership roles which is most product managers, as well as women. So, and that is people saying we instead of I. So, you should say "we" when it's truly "we," when it's truly a team. But what happens for a lot of people in interviews is they use this global "we." I see people saying we. even when It's really all them. I mean, I literally seen people do we say we when It is their own project and literally nobody else could possibly have been involved.

[32:51] and it's still well, we were falling behind schedule. It's I. So really focus on your wording. You say we, it should mean we, when you say, when it's really something you did, say I. When you're talking about leadership, We're talking about your team, things like that. I'm not hiring your team. I'm hiring you. So leadership matters, that interaction with your team matters. But you should still be articulating what your place was, what you did, how you influenced the team, how they reacted. based on that, but you should try to use I.

[33:24] Now, you, of course, do not want to ever take credit for something someone else has done. That's really, really bad. But when it's yourself, when it's your actions, you should say hi. And a whole lot of people fall back to we. And what I found is that this tends to be relatively binary. Meaning that when I hear an answer that starts off as we, it usually stays as we the whole time. So pay very careful attention to the first few sentences you say in answer. If you hear yourself saying "we," be really careful about the rest of your answer. Make sure to correct by saying I.

[33:57] Okay, and then put all this together. make this kind of grid. So this is, so take, You want to have, I'd say, at least five major stories that you're really well-talked prefer to talk about. Stories that cover those leadership mistakes that earlier grid. and fill in this this little grid here. So talking about the situation, the action, the result, Know what the message is. What is this saying about you? How does this show that you are a better person? PM. And then also be ready to talk about what you do differently. That's just such a common fault question.

[34:32] So take your five stories that you really want to be followed on. and be able to fill in that whole grid. So. There's this last thing about what would you do differently. So, and you know, mistakes, failures, things like that, weaknesses. Be ready for this stuff, interviewers. This is... some of the interviewer's favorite questions, be very, very ready for it. And The... Most important thing here is don't sugarcoat the bad stuff. When I ask you about failures, when an interviewer asks about failures, mistakes, things like that, one of the major things that they're looking for is will you really admit to bad stuff?

[35:11] I do a lot of interviewer training, and that's when I ask people what their favorite questions There's always somebody who says mistakes or failures. I ask them why, what are they looking for, and it's The big thing is I want to know that the person will admit to failures. A second thing is if you've really failed, there's an assumption that If you've really been an important positions. making important decisions, you can't be perfect, so you must have really failed. If you haven't really failed, you haven't really had impact in the past. I think that's-- somewhat fair when you have a very experienced person.

[35:44] somewhat unfair for someone with less experience, but that is a common assumption. And then they also want to see how do you respond to that bad stuff. So not just will you admit to it, but how did you actually respond to it in that situation? These are stories-- a lot of candidates think about these as, how do I not screw myself up by answering these questions? And that's really the wrong perspective. These stories can make you look much, much better if you tackle them the right way. So what you want to do is you want to be real. You want to be kind of emotionally vulnerable.

[36:15] I'll talk about that in a little bit. You want it to be something that was compelling, that was significant. And that changed you in some way. Almost always. the I'd say Almost always Tucson. I'd say 95% of the time. Candidate stories are too weak. there's five percent of the time when that failure is like, ooh, maybe that's too much. But 95% of the time it's, Okay, you need to amp that up a little bit. Um... This is where I'm going to get into gendered advice here. I'm a pretty blunt person.

[36:50] Typically, men will do better. by being more by making a point of being more emotionally vulnerable. These are things that where you failed. where you screwed up, you let the team down, you had to fire people, something bad happened. And you don't want to go in acting all like this did not emotionally touch me at all. You actually want to be a little bit more emotionally vulnerable. On average, these are just averages, it depends on you as a person, but typically men want to be a little bit more emotionally vulnerable. That means things like softening your voice, admitting that things hurt you, admitting that it was hard.

[37:23] Her women It depends on your personality. These are just generalizations. But for women, if you come in being super emotional, that can backfire. So you have to look at your personality how do you come across if you come across more emotional in the first place Amping up the emotional vulnerability is probably not going to help you a whole lot. You want to be just clearer, more specific about what happened and not necessarily be more emotional. Men, Probably want to amp up the emotional. emotional side. Again, this is based on your personality, but also a bit on stereotypes that people have.

[37:58] So be aware of those things. The best stories connect. Whether you're a man or woman, the best stories connect with people. They show that They show that this was-- you know, hard that it changed you in some way. Okay. Next topic, product design. So putting away all the soft-ish. Kind of putting away, product design. So this is kind of the crux of PM questions, of the prototypical PM questions. These can be a lot of different things. There is a whole set of questions which is, How would you design blank for the blank disability? Blind, deaf, et cetera.

[38:34] So B, you know, there's a huge number of people who ask questions like that. There's, you know, how would you design your favorite app? That's a ton of questions like that. And then there is a pick this particular product. How would you design this? Or how would you improve this thing? Or sometimes, you know... That first question, how would you design a better blank? So With these questions, what interviewers are looking for is communication. That's always a piece of any interview question, communication. But user empathy. to some extent creativity, But that's kind of balanced by good instinct. So it's kind of this bounded creativity.

[39:08] Good ideas, essentially, is what it comes down to. And then general product insight. So. standard kind of way of thinking about these questions. Define who the user is, So when you're designing a Google product, a whatever it is, define who that user is, Ask a bunch of questions here. So. How to design a pen. Where do you start? Who are you? Children. Oh.

[39:39] How old? It's a really important question. I've seen people and I've asked this question, And I said, "Okay, I'll let you assume." So what age are we going to assume? Three. That's perfectly reasonable. I've seen somebody who said, OK. age two to 10. Now, Two-year-old. It's like this. A 10 year old is like writing essays. Right? Like that was a crazy big range. Now, as I will say, as an interviewer, I actually personally would advise against a question like that because I think it's kind of has a bias towards parents.

[40:18] But unfortunately, this stuff. happens a lot for you know, for candidates. You know, be really aware of who those users are. Three-year-olds. Now where do we go? beforehand. Thank you. What are they going to use the pen for? Yeah, I mean, this kind of matters. So there are, even for a three-year-old, there are different use cases. Are you trying to teach them how to hold a pen correctly? That's a very different kind of thing. Is it supposed to be fun? Is it supposed to be teaching them about colors. There's lots of different things people could be using a pen for. And as you ramp up the ages, that is even more true.

[41:00] A pen, you know, an eight-year-old could have many different uses. go into adults, Right. I asked you to design a calculator. Well, who's using that? Where? At work? At home? When you're designing a product for children, The children are, that's one user. When I say that the user is children, But so are parents. So is their little brother who is 18 months and got a hold of it is now sucking on the It's another, you know, at least stakeholder that you want to be aware of. You want to be aware of their walls, things like that. So you want to really, really be careful about the user.

[41:37] One major thing, interviewers have basically this checkbox where they're like, "Has this person properly defined the user?" make very, very sure that you have really, really properly defined the user. Go a little bit overboard here. Make sure that you got down the user. Then discuss their use cases, problems, goals. That's going to be things like the walls. Be aware of this issue. Be aware of toxicness of something. unexpected use cases like throwing the pen across a room, stepping on it, stuff like that. A pen that's super fragile for three-year-olds is not a very good pen.

[42:07] It's not one that's going to last very long. And then you go about designing it. And then you do this overall wrap up. And... Don't forget the user. Don't forget the user. Be really, really clear about this. There's one thing you want to do in anything that even has a width of product design, product to it, something. where you're thinking about how to do something, define that user, make sure that's really, really clear. So, then there's another thing, another poppy type of question, and these are fundamentally product-side questions.

[42:39] But it's just, you know, What's your favorite product of this type? So mobile app, physical product, et cetera. Also product from that company. So particularly if you're interviewing for a company like Google, a big company, have a product, have a subproduct there that you can talk about. And then how would you improve that? Never, ever, ever, ever, ever walk into a PM interview without having questions ready, answers ready for all of those types. Big, big mistake, because you're such a common question. Thank you. So what you should know about your product from each of those categories.

[43:12] Why do you love it? It should be something that you use. It shouldn't be... "Oh, my grandma uses this cool thing." Now, You can maybe get by with if you have kids, a product for your children, only to the extent that you're really interacting with it a lot, Maybe. But it should ideally be something that you use that you love, not just other people think is cool and you think is well done. Define who the users are. You should be one of the users of course, but there might be other use cases.

[43:43] Why do other people use it? You should be able to talk about who the competition is. What are the alternative products or solutions? to that. What kind of issues are there? always be ready to talk about why do you improve it. How would you program? Remember that. Point of this whole thing is You want to show that you are a good person. Canada. A lot of these answers literally answer the question, These answers are not unreasonable. They're actually perfectly reasonable, valid answers. They do nothing to help you.

[44:14] And in fact, I'd say that's a huge, huge portion of them. So, Example of this. What's your favorite product? Um... Someone goes where? Heard this answer many, many times. Uber or Lyft, one or the other. Why do you love it? Amen. Convenient. Sure. Cheaper, yeah, than taxis. Cool. What else? Easy to use, yeah.

[44:45] Those are all valid answers. I mean, that's what I would, if I'm talking to... you know, my my mom and I'm trying to sell her on, hey, you should totally, you know, download Uber or Lyft. What, what, what, why should I do that? Oh, it's super convenient. you know, pull up your phone, you can click a button and order, it's really convenient. A lot easier than taxi, stuff like that. Those are absolute valid answers. But when you hear that, you're not like, Wow, that's some really interesting insight. I think you make a good PM. Anybody will give the answer. Terrible PMs, someone who should never ever be a PM will give that same answer.

[45:18] You want to make yourself look like a good candidate. You want to give answers that aren't just true. but actually show insight. And that is the tricky piece of these questions. So Let's have someone take a, well, let me give an example of insight. a Somebody I interviewed. is was talking about Snapchat. And this was three years ago. So Snapchat was not new, but newer than it is now. and they gave an answer.

[45:51] which was It was something about how... snapchat they talk about communication in the real world is inherently ephemeral. I say something to you, unless it's in this context. It's not recorded. I can do whatever. I can make a funny face. I can say something stupid. I can say something offensive. Nobody knows. Right. And that makes people so much freer. As soon as you turn on video camera and start recording everything, You're a little bit more careful about what you do. And online communication is inherently recorded.

[46:22] And it changes the way people act. And text messaging and all these other things will never quite resemble that because-- You know you're being watched, and you know that anything you do can come back to bite you. Snapchat, they argued, went a lot closer to resembling-- real-world communication. because it allowed people to say things that were temporary. And they talked a little about the specific implementation of that. But their core part was, look, this is resembling real world communication. much, much more than other online communications. That kind of answer showed insight. It showed an understanding of how communication affects people, how recording effects people. And that showed insight.

[46:59] This is a fun thing, I get some funny pictures from my friends. Valid reason to like it, but it doesn't show me anything about you. So someone want to take a whirl. at their favorite Um... website. Pinterest. Great. Why do you love it? It's... I mean, that's my concern. Okay. also have the a lot of varieties I could choose. and capital. Okay?

[47:30] So allow-- Preferable. Yeah. Okay. So allows you to kind of explore things, create your own walls and something like that. Bye. Perfectly valid answer, and that's Not to be hard on you. That's the answer I'm going to give to my mom. Right. Actually, I should really start using it. My mom's actually incredibly technical. But it's like the classic example. No, seriously, she's like a PhD in electrical engineering. She's actually really, really technical. She's my stepfather. Still learning about emails. It's all recorded, right?

[48:02] So yeah, so this kind of answers like that's, You know, it's a valid answer. It was really, really hard to get that insight. to show something that's like, this is a really unique perspective that really shows that PM skill. So someone take another world. You can take Pinterest or a different thing. Yeah. Oh, Allah. Thank you. one of the reasons I'm using it. Four. is because I've grown up in my country. copy and paste society. Um, but-- things that are online.

[48:33] Look out. can that in and why it extends to inspiration as well. So if I want to get inspired, Bye. Right. Go on. look at. tables or I can look up um, how, I would design my mix. Well, well, well. Okay, so that's a good start. Let's talk about more though. What is it that Pinterest did in their design that helps you get inspired. Thank you.

[49:05] Image heavy. So that's starting to get a little more, right? Like they really focused on, putting the images first and foremost there, and pretty much hiding the text. Because the way we get inspired, is really through images. Text doesn't actually really help us a whole lot to get inspired. by a lot of, particularly you can argue Pinterest is heavily around creation of things and you really need those visual images to inspire creating stuff. as opposed to focusing on knowledge, which is going to be much more text-based. So you want to try to really think about, How can you show things that don't just literally say why you love something, but really bring out product insight, which is it is hard to do this.

[49:43] But those are the answers that really, really shun. Now, if you can't do this, you can still fall back. If you don't feel like you have a really solid answer that shows insight, or even if you do, you can still fall back on, Here are the use cases that Pinterest tackles. And here's how they go about doing that in a very effective way. and that'll still do a pretty good job. One thing to be aware of when you think about these, when you think about what product you want to talk about. is Not all products are created equal. Some products are really, really hard to do.

[50:14] So, and a lot of times the social products are very hard. it's very hard to talk about why Reddit is you know, is your favorite website. because there isn't as clear, well, here's my use case, and here's how Reddit goes about solving my use case. Because the use case is like having fun. Unless you can give an answer that really talks about why it helps you have fun. But it's hard because there's not as clear use cases. Uber, there's a very clear use case and problem, and you can talk about how it solves that Pinterest.

[50:45] is social. but it still start to have some use cases. some clear This is a problem and this is how Pinterest solves it. So, Be aware that when you think about what product you want to talk about here. You may not truly want to take your favorite. You want to take something which has where you can really talk about use cases and how it solves those problems. Because that's how you can then start talking about how could it be better? How can it be better at solving that? So I could talk about Pinterest. One of the things I've loved to do, I love to create.

[51:16] whether you can look at my Facebook thing for this, but like I've gotten to woodworking and I've gotten into, you know, making kind of, crazy fancy cakes and Pinterest is awesome. It's all about creation. But one of the things it's bad at is It's really good at inspiring. But what it's not as good at is, okay, but how do I get there? How do I do that thing? And there's some linkage to you know, what, site it came from, but it's very weak. That site's often, you know, the links are dead. It doesn't give that instructions. I would love to be able to when I'm really looking at, let me actually do this, to actually filter by things that have clear steps.

[51:55] Think about Google Images has You can filter for things that are you know, have certain Creative Commons licenses, something like that. I would love to be able to filter on Pinterest. for Here's how I actually do that thing. There's so many images anyway, let me filter on that thing. So I can actually not just be inspired, but also go about executing on that. Uh, But a lot of the social products are not that easy to do that with. So just be aware of that. Okay. next topic estimation questions this one will be a little bit faster so These are the kind of the things that you hear about as brain teasers. They are not brain teasers.

[52:30] If you've heard websites like Business Insider say that you know, Google banned these questions, that is totally untrue. Google has not banned these questions. Someone was either misquoted or misspoke, I don't know which one. and said that Google banned brain teasers like these. These are not considered brain teasers. Also, brain teasers were banned many, many years ago. But these are not considered brain teasers. These are called estimation, Fermi estimation questions. They're really problem solving. not brain teasers. What people are looking for is...

[53:01] basic measure of intelligence. smarts. You know, if The way people essentially interview for intelligence developers is through algorithm questions. If you can't do that for a PM, they fall back on these. So they're looking at smarts, they are looking at A lot of people feel that The ability to ballpark a number is fundamentally an important skill for a product manager. Because you want to know does it matter to do this feature how many users should we expect how many people even need to filter based on this attribute.

[53:37] So a lot of people feel that ballparking is a fundamentally important attribute. They also want to know, that you're okay working with numbers, that you're not scared of numbers. So that's what people are looking at. They are not, unless you have a really, really bad interviewer, exceptionally bad interviewer, they're not looking at the final answer. They probably don't even know with the actual final answers. So a way to tackle these questions is to really, really believe me here. These are problem solving. They're not about the number you get to know, they're problem solving. So, you first of all want to ask a bunch of questions to resolve any ambiguity. structure your approach, have a structure.

[54:10] break down those components, and then standard check. So. let's take a question like, How many airplanes? fly over the U.S. every day. Thank you. What do you want to know? just summer show flights or-- All planes. Great question. All planes. I think they're fine. Both domestic and . Both good questions. How do you define airplane? Like are helicopters included here? Do I literally mean airplanes or am I talking about aircraft?

[54:45] Um, I'm talking about paper airplanes, right? Probably not. But drones. All right. Are there middle ground things? Do these matter? I use this really weird phrase, "over the U.S." So is that like literally, like cross-country flights, is that airplanes that take off and land somewhere in the US, even if it's, you know, up a coast or Yep. San Francisco to San Diego, something like that. Does an international flight taking off from China landing in San Francisco, is that over the US or not?

[55:19] So you want to define these. You want to be really, really careful. Make a point of defining this. That is one of the things interviewers are actually looking for is can you define a problem properly? and not make bad assumptions. Then you come up with a structure. it's often useful if possible to kind of have an idea of multiple structures in your head. So, you could tackle how many airplanes fly over the US every day? by starting from a perspective of, People? How many people need to fly and how often do they need to fly?

[55:50] and Also, are there things other than people that need to fly? Or you could start from perspective of airports. So two different approaches, both could work. I don't know which one's going to be easier. I don't know which one's going to be better. It doesn't really matter which one's better anyway. But having an idea of two different approaches in your mind can be helpful. Then you start to break down these components. So suppose I'm doing how many books are sold every year in the U.S. and you've done some definition on what that means. I'm Well, how many people are in the US? You should hopefully have a basic idea of the US population.

[56:24] If you don't, that's something which That's, I think, fair game to ask the interviewer. Particularly if you're not from the US, that's even more forgivable to not have a basic idea. But use a big picture round number. Don't use whatever the answer is, 312 million, something like that. use 300 million. We're talking real, real ballparks here. So 300 million people. Okay. So You typically break that down. You typically segment that somehow. Um, for books sold in the U.S., What I would do is I would probably segment based on education level.

[56:58] or maybe income. but probably education level. So I'd probably say, okay, let's take College Grants, let's take people who, and let's take people who didn't go to college. And maybe we want to figure out how we want to deal with people who've dropped out. Maybe of college grads, maybe we want a further segment by income. Maybe should have segmented by income in the first place. I don't know. But you segment that population. And then you're gonna take some basic idea. At some point you're going to have to basically come up with numbers. So how many books per month does a typical grad from, you know, a good university working a good job read.

[57:35] I don't know. At some point you're saying, Here's what me and my friends are like. But be careful that you really do understand, this is you and your friends, this is not all people. I had a guy in an interview who... assumed that the typical American reads based on his friends. reads probably about four to six books a month. I think a lot more of Americans than is really true. I knew another person who was asked how many piano tuners there are in the US?

[58:08] And, um... What made it worse was this person was, this is a new grad from Duke, and Duke kind of has a stereotype anyway of being like, lot of rich kids and she assumed that one out of every six Americans has a grand piano. Like, wow, pretty sure that's not the case. So you want to be really, really careful. Like people are not overly picky. about what numbers you assume, as long as you don't demonstrate a complete inability to understand that you are not the typical person. Right? Okay, so you assume people like you read four books a month and it's actually two.

[58:46] Okay. That's very, very frivolous. When you're assuming like, it's six and it's like not even one. That's a little bit more problematic. Because then I'm going to wonder, do you Do you have an inability as a product manager to put yourself in someone else's shoes and realize that you are not the typical person? For the most part, you can just pick reasonable things, make assumptions. Do a basic job of backing them up. I think it's probably about... I'm a pretty active reader. I read about four books a month. but I know that I'm unusual for my friends. I expect the typical American is more around four, more like one.

[59:20] Or a typical college grad working a highly paid job reads more like what? Do a basic job backing up, but it's not that big of a deal. And then you go along and make this thing. The total, you can practice this, but the total amount of time should be like... A couple minutes to solve this, not 20 minutes. These are not extensive things. A couple minutes. Let's do this. And then Sam you check. This is an important piece that a lot of people forget. So if you come up with, you know, Gmail, you're at, you're calculating how much money Gmail makes and you come up with, you know, $15 billion.

[59:53] Maybe you don't have a good feel for how much money that is, but what's $15 billion divided by 300 million? Someone did that for me, I don't know. I think it's like, I don't know, $15 a person, something. That's a lot. There's no way that Gmail is making $15 per person across all Americans, which are not all Gmail users. There's just no way. So do a basic Java sanity check, checking it. And that's where that, if you have an idea from step two what those other approaches are, that's where that's often really useful.

[1:00:25] So do a basic Java sanity check. So I went through all these. Okay, so major mistakes people make is getting lost in minor details, so going off to go calculate something that just doesn't matter. It's really useful if you voice that things like for how many books are sold a year, and you just introduce the, you know, hey, should we be concerned about books that are sold multiple times?

[1:00:55] But then you probably don't need to care. Like, that is probably not a huge factor. Should we be concerned about how many books a library uses, buys every year? I don't think so. And the reason why I back them up, again, this is coming from an author, but I can't imagine as an author that that constitutes a large number of sales. So for the overall book sale market, it's probably not a big part of the sales. But the fact that you bring that up, that you are even aware of these little edge cases, shows something positive.

[1:01:27] So, remember, think about this other source of data, like those other sources of book sales, but you can still dismiss them. You don't have to calculate everything. And then those crazy assumptions, the one out of every six Americans has a grand piano at their house, right? One out of every, you know, people, somebody else assumed that like the average American takes like six business flights a month, and I'm like, oh my. I don't think the average American takes six business flights a year. I mean, the average American is not like making $200,000 a year.

[1:01:59] It just doesn't work. So, you know, most people are okay on assumptions, and then there's these people who take crazy assumptions. So just try to check yourself there. Okay, last thing, I think, is these kind of case and miscellaneous questions. These are all over the map. You can ask a lot of different questions. So these are some basic types of questions you can be asked. You can be asked to kind of problem-solving things. So you launch this feature, and this was the result. What would you do? You launch this new sign-up flow and revenue dropped.

[1:02:34] What would you do? So being able to tackle things like that. Should we do X or Y? What would be the better strategy? How would you market this product to this user base? How would you price this product? Amazon particularly asks a lot of pricing questions. How would you launch these things? And then there's these weird brainstorming things. How would you, you know, name as many things as possible that you can do with a paperclip? Sometimes futuristic questions. Where do you see this thing being in five years, or ten years, or fifteen years? There's a huge, huge, huge bucket, you know, idea of questions.

[1:03:06] So, when all else fails, you can often fall back to some of these major things. Defining what the problem is. Doesn't work for all those things. It doesn't work for, you know, a to find as many find as many things as possible you can do this paperclip but this kind of structure often works find a structure and then solve that what you might be able to do even with something like how many you name as many things as possible you can do with paperclip which is a stupid question but what you might be able to do is something at least like okay let's think about standard uses for a paperclip first and then let think about things you can do by modifying the shape of the paperclip but still keeping it basically intact Let think about things you can do by if we can use many paperclips what can you do with that?

[1:03:53] And then let's think about what you can do with the raw materials of paperclips, so like melting it down. That's a structure, right? It's not the only structure you can use, but it's a structure, and you can start tackling it that way. And even if you don't come up with the most things, you probably come up with some different ideas. and at least I'm going to say, that's a very structured, methodical way of thinking about it. I like structured, methodical people. I'd like to hire them. And so at least you can do that. So try to find a structure. And then try to drive discussions. Try to be the one, it doesn't mean you don't listen to the interviewer. Absolutely listen to the interviewer, but you want to be the one who's doing the bulk of the talking.

[1:04:26] You want to kind of drive that discussion. Empathize with the user. If at all possible, if there's any opportunity to show user, that kind of user empathy, show that, that's really important. and then try to show insight. Try to find stuff that says, gosh, that's a smart comment to make. So there are some frameworks you can read. If you like frameworks, you can read about these frameworks. It's the kind of stuff you learn in an MBA program. But it's really, really not the point. So these are things like customer purchase making decision process and the marketing mix, SWOT analysis, 5Cs, portals, high forces.

[1:05:01] You can read those. For some people, that might be useful. It doesn't hurt you to do it. But interviewers are almost never looking for you to take one of these frameworks and apply them to a problem because you're not expected to have an MBA unless you are interviewing for MBA specific roles. But where those can be useful is just to get an idea for what frameworks might look like for a problem, hypothetically, and also to have you think about aspects you might not have thought about. So when you're launching a product, do you think about placement?

[1:05:32] That's part of one of the four P's, as I recall. Do you think about the aspects of the five C's? I don't remember them anymore, but customer, things like that. You're thinking about some of these things that you may not have thought about. So you can look at these. Just don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole, as they say. Don't try to just blindly pick one of these frameworks, because it's almost never one of these frameworks. And then no metrics. So big picture metrics, user acquisition stuff, activity, so what kind of things are people doing, and all the money stuff.

[1:06:09] How much does it cost to acquire your customer? How much is the company's revenue? What is the profit? What are their margins? Things like that. Those are really useful things to do, not just in thinking about a hypothetical product or how would you launch something, how would you price something, but also when you're going into interviews with a specific company, being aware of those metrics for the company. In many, many, many cases, you will not actually be able to get these metrics. That's fine. Do it if you can. For bigger companies, you might be able to get some of these things. You might be able to get, in some cases, even if you can't get metrics for that company, get metrics for something similar.

[1:06:44] So you have a company which is supporting itself through ads. Okay, you can't get the information about it, but can you get a feel for how much ads make and when they make more money and when they make less money? And the other things you can think about is what is the company's strengths and weaknesses and goals and things that they maybe don't prioritize as much. So certain companies care a lot about certain things. So some companies are very, very focused on revenue. Some companies are very focused on, you know, a lot of startups are very focused on growing the user base.

[1:07:21] And when you walking to that interview and you thinking about improvements to the product you ideally want to be aligned on improvements to the product what they caring about is growing the user base And maybe they don care about the revenue piece It's hard to tell because that startup that hasn't done anything with profits and has just been really growing users, there might be increasingly something in the background of a company saying, we really got to figure out this profit thing. If you see a company that's been, you know, growing users pretty nicely and keeps experimenting with different monetization strategies, that's a good signal that they haven't figured out this money piece yet.

[1:08:03] And maybe you want to walk in with some basic ideas of things they've tried, what works, what hasn't, and maybe some things they might try. Be generally aware of these kinds of metrics. Understand in these interviews that if you've ever done consulting interviews with the top consulting firms, those interviews are like, you know, you get some case and you're like, well, you know, I'd really like some information about the customer acquisition products. And they're like, well, what do you know? We have a slide showing exactly this information. PM interviews are not like that.

[1:08:35] PM interviews are much more based on your gut instincts. So, you know, you don't have this data because that's what the life of a product manager is. You're not able to spend $3 million researching something to come up with a new idea to shape shape the strategy of something, it's, well, here's what I think, here's what I believe, and here's why I believe it. So when you're thinking about design of the product, improvements, things like that, you want to walk in with, you know, you want to walk in being willing to use your gut instincts and back things up and change direction when you get pushback. No, I don't say pushback when you get dated to the contrary. And forget everything else. Know who you are and what people are going to assume about you.

[1:09:19] So know what of those big picture things do you have good coverage on and what maybe do you have good coverage on but maybe isn't as obvious. And then try to make up the gaps to the extent that you can. Everyone should learn to program if they haven't done that yet, at least a little bit. But remember to focus on the user. If it's at all relevant who the user is, make it clear that you are the person who cares about the user. And then find a, if at all possible, find a structure for your approach. Then even if everything else fails, your ideas suck, whatever, at least you will have demonstrated that you are a structured methodical thinker.

[1:09:52] And hopefully the structure will actually get better content as well, but at least you will have demonstrated that you do communicate in a structured fashion. So with that, happy to open up to some questions. Yeah. Oh. Yes. Did I hear you say the first question is you have to solve it within two minutes? I wouldn't. So the question is, do you have to solve the Fermi estimation questions in two minutes? I wouldn't say two minutes. I'd say five-ish is a good kind of general ballpark.

[1:10:25] It's going to depend on the question, some other things. But yeah, in the scope of around five minutes, maybe less. Yeah? How would the role of PM differ at a big company versus a startup? So PM at a big company versus a startup. So PM roles, they're just all over the map anywhere. You can have a PM role at Microsoft or Amazon, which across the company is doing wildly different things.

[1:10:56] You'll have a PM at Microsoft, just thinking of specific friends I've had there, where one is doing really customer evangelist stuff. They're very close to doing marketing. They're talking a ton with customers and doing high messaging And then you have another PM who is like doing low level very very very very very technical writing out specs So they can be a huge huge huge range Big picture, I'd say PMs at big companies have a lot more resources.

[1:11:28] So they get focused much... They are, in some ways, they're more focused on true PM stuff, which actually is really problematic to say, but they're going to be much more like, here's this thing, I'm tackling this one problem, and here's my spec for it. A PM at a startup is doing more of the wear multiple hats, which is kind of core to the PM anyway, so I don't want to say that's not core PM stuff, but they might be jumping into code when it's needed. They might be jumping in to do a lot more marketing work. They might be going out and talking with customers. So they just might do a lot more things, but it can vary a ton across companies and the stage of a company and things like that.

[1:12:10] Yeah. So for someone who is interviewing for a marketing review, you have a way of studying for making an internal PM role for a way of, for the bigger tech companies, how would you suggest they study and become like a really great team as opposed to just a good one? So, question on interviewing for APM roles, how do you become a really great candidate, not just an okay one?

[1:12:40] I mean, it's hard to say because there's so much to say there. I guess one thing I would think about is finding a role that really leverages what you... Like finding the right role, finding a role that really leverages your strengths. So some people are, if you are super technical, find a role that is really technical. Those are really, really valuable skills. If you are really good at finance or you're really passionate about music, find that role that really leverages that. Developers in a lot of ways can be slotted into many different roles in many different products and be kind of equally good.

[1:13:20] I wouldn't say multiple plays in the stack, but be equally good in product that does this, product that does that. the product manager role is more tied to what the product is find a role that really fits your background if possible and then you know a lot of other stuff I talk about with really being clear about your messaging what your strengths are having stories ready to go be you know sometimes people I this ironic come from me but some people put way too much focus on interview prep and like spend months and months and months doing interview prep without a lot of thought of like how do I actually make myself fundamentally a better candidate. So I would put, I would encourage people a little bit less interview prep, a little bit more, make yourself a great candidate. So that's the learning to code, that's the, you know, for product managers, reading books about product design, reading blogs about product design, starting to do that now, make yourself truly a better candidate and not just somebody who appears better in interviews. Yeah?

[1:14:19] What would you recommend for someone who did product management in the public sector and wants to transition into the private sector? So what I recommend for someone who did product management in the public sector and wants to transition into the private sector. So public sector is vague. My initial thing is product management in the public sector. You've probably been working with a lot of bureaucracy. You have maybe not been working on super technical things. The product management role itself, I wonder if product management in the public sector means something very, very different. And so as an interviewer, I'm going to be a little bit like, okay, what are you really doing? As opposed to if you're a product manager at Google where I kind of So I would just be very prepared to really be able to articulate what you did, what that product manager role was.

[1:15:08] and establish credibility because people are going to make negative assumptions about people who worked in the public sector.