The Master Mental Model for PM Interviews
The Master Mental Model for PM Interviews
👋 Hey, I am Deepak and welcome to another edition of my newsletter. I am currently writing two long-ish series of blog posts:
Product Interviews
Operating Well as a PM
I have previously written a long series (42 posts long) on Product-led Growth. You can get it in the email when you subscribe, or can find it on the newsletter home page.
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Let’s dive in the topic now!
It was a Friday afternoon, and I was interviewing the candidates for a PM role. The first interview started with the usual question from my end — ‘Tell me about yourself’. The candidate went on to tell about everything he had done for the next 15 mins. At various points, I felt that he was going to stop now but he didn’t. I was an inexperienced interviewer at that point but even I knew this is a red flag.
I went to my manager and explained how the introduction was super long, and we spent most of the interview time (15 of 40 mins) on Introduction. We discussed few other things about the candidate but this was the highlight.
If you are wondering why having a long introduction isn’t right, here is the explanation. First, it shows lack of research and awareness on candidates’ part on how long the Introduction should be. More importantly, given that there would be actual interview questions post introduction, it shows that the candidates can’t estimate/anticipate timelines well, which is a crucial skills for PMs.
I am more interested in the 2nd part, and would spend rest of the interview looking for clues on whether that’s true or not. For example, I would double click on estimations aspect of product sense problems.
We decided to drop the candidate.
I never found preparing for PM interviews exciting! They always felt disconnected from the job, and what I wanted to really master is how to become an excellent PM. So the interview prep always felt like a necessary distraction.
That is until I stumbled upon an insight which I cover in this newsletter.
Because it has helped me so much, I am calling it the Master Mental Model for PM Interviews. Here it goes —
“Interview prep isn’t different from your actual job. Doing one can makes you better at the other, provided you understand the link between both. Further, you need to understand that there is a clear 'Why' behind the interview questions of every company. And this ‘Why’ is also unique to every company in some ways. Understanding that unique 'Why' is key to become better at the job and interview preparation.”
In the story I shared earlier, what I was more interested in was whether the PM can be trusted to come up with right estimations, and anticipate blockers — the real skills in a PM job. I wasn’t evaluating the PM on a set framework, my concerns were real.
And so understanding the unique ‘Why’ is the difference between a great and a good answer in an interview, and we will see later in this post around how to identify it and craft a great answer.
So where do we start? Let’s start at the real job. Let’s cover different stages of a product and what sort of real skills one needs to do a PM job well.
Stages of a Product, mapped to PM Skills
Every product goes through 3 stages - pre-PMF (PMF stands for product-market fit), growth, and maturity.
The pre-PMF stage is when you are trying to build the product 0-to-1. In this stage, you are looking at the market and deciding
what product to build,
what to launch in the first version, and
what sort of iterations to do to get to PM/F
The growth stage is when you are looking to grow/scale the product that has gotten the PM/F.
The maturity is when the product is growing at the same rate as market is growing because it has hit the ceiling in terms of market share. This is the stage where you focus on diversifying your product portfolio so that you can find new avenues of growth.
Now that we have covered what the product needs in different stages, let's take a look at the skills needed in these stages
Skills in the pre-PMF stage
You need to be good with with market sizing so that you don't assess the opportunity wrong.
You need to be good with user research so that you can find and validate the customer problems in that market
You need to be good with problem-solving so that you can come up with few good solutions to the identified problem. You then further need to conduct research to validate the solution.
You need to be good with design, tech, and data so that you can get the right solution built at a faster pace than most people.
You need to be good with go-to-market strategy, which includes
defining the first version of product to launch,
pricing, and
channels to launch the first version
To summarise, you need to be good at market sizing, user research, problem solving, understanding design + tech + data, and go-to-market strategy to do your job well in a pre-PMF stage.
Skills in the Growth stage
In the growth stage,
You need to come up with growth features that can lead to higher activation, and retention of the product.
You need to find avenues of revenue/monetisation in the product
You need to find new channels of product-led acquisition such as referrals, SEO/ASO, community, etc.
You still need to be good at shipping products which requires most of the skills in the pre-PMF stage — user research, problem solving, understanding design + tech + data, and go-to-market strategy.
Skills in the Maturity stage
In the maturity stage,
You need to deepen your product/market fit by constantly improving user experience at par or better than competition
You need to figure out other strategic avenues of product growth, like what product to launch next.
The skills required are more or less the same in pre-PMF + growth stage, however the mindset to operate is different because you don’t have much freedom to make mistakes as it can affect millions of user.
The above provides you a good sense of what’s needed to become a better PM in different stages of product. Let’s use this knowledge to prod the next question — is there a correlation between the real-job skills and PM interview questions?
Correlation between real skills and interview questions
PM interview questions (across levels) can be categorised into the following 8 buckets:
Opportunity sizing and guesstimates
Market entry
Product sense
Technical
Go-to-market strategy
Growth
Behavioural
Leadership
At an APM level, you are expected to clear these rounds
Opportunity sizing and guesstimates
Product sense
Technical
Behavioural
As you move up to a lead PM role, these additional rounds get added
GTM strategy
Growth
Market entry
Leadership
The Master Mental Model states that
“Interview prep isn’t different from your actual job. Doing one can makes you better at the other, provided you understand the link between both.
Let’s see the link between both by going through these various types of questions. You may have already done a rough linking between real skills and questions. By the time you are done with this post, you would be able to clearly see why working hard on your real skills can become a true differentiator in the interviews.
Let’s go via types of questions one-by-one and see the real skills mapping to those.
Market Sizing/ Guesstimates
Most people feel guesstimates are about looking at your mathematical abilities. But estimations are an important part of PM job. People who are good at quick estimations are usually good at market sizing, estimating efforts for a project, and estimating impact (and confidence) for a project, among other things. All of the 3 listed skills are pretty important to do a good job as a PM. And if you improve those 3 skills, your guesstimates will improve as well. You will be able to introduce nuances which a candidate following a rough framework can’t.
As an example, when a company asks you to estimate the market size of self-driving cars, they want to make sure that you won’t make a mistake in estimating market size of a new initiative on the job. That’s also why they care about the structure and approach that you take in these interviews, and not on the accuracy of the final answer.
Market Entry
While a growth stage company is usually focussed on acquiring more and more of a market, market entry is pretty relevant for startups and mature stage companies.
For example, a Google PMs need to spot which markets are attractive for Youtube to focus on. Should Youtube be building a custom experience for gamers or podcasters? A PM building a good case around a new market can open avenues of deeper engagement and monetisation for Google.
If you have done a real market entry problem at a job, you are able to touch nuances such as
why is it important for the company now? Is there a sense of urgency?
who are the key stakeholders and why their buy-in is important + how to get their buy-in?
how much of difference does it make in overall P&L?
These are all practical questions you answer while doing a real market entry problem. Touching them in interviews goes on to show that the company can trust you with such problems in real-life.
Product Sense
Product sense is the most common round across companies. In a survey that I conducted earlier with this newsletter readers and discussed about in this post, product sense (also known as product design) gets asked in 100% of companies.
Common questions in the product sense round can be
Designing a unique product like Design a blind-friendly refrigerator
Favourite product like What’s your favourite product? How would you improve it?
Improving a mature product. like How will you improve Google Maps?
Product sense questions are common because these questions directly map to the day-to-day skills of a PM across companies and product stages. Let’s go through one of these questions like Design a blind-friendly refrigerator
A popular recommended framework to solve such problems is CIRCLES
And we usually try to go through every step of this framework in the interview to come up with a solution.
But you can also organically arrive at a similar framework if you ask yourself on how to design good products.
Imagine that you have estimated the market size correctly, and have concluded that your company should design the blind-friendly refrigerator.
The immediate next thing to do in real-life PM is to conduct user research to understand users well. The goal of the research is to identify the needs and preferences of a target user persona. This is tested in the product sense round of the interview. You are expected to talk about the customer (blind people), and their problems/needs when it comes to refrigeration. This ties to the Identify and Report step in the CIRCLES method.
Once you have concluded the user research, you end up prioritising the top user problems you want to solve first in your job. You are expected to do the same in the interviews (Cut through Prioritisation - CIRCLES
After prioritisation, what do you do? You sit with the team and create solutions, get designs done for the solution, do the tech estimation, and re-prioritise features to finalise the sequence of development. You are expected to do the same in the product sense interviews. The same sequence of steps are followed in a product sense interviews — List solutions of the problem you have prioritised, Evaluate trade-offs (effort-impact framework). At this stage, you can also create mock-ups, do a quick effort estimation, and then reprioritise what to build. The interviewer gets to know how well you can do these steps because they reflect how well you would be able to do it in the real job.
Once launched, PMs need to assess whether the launch was a success or failure. In the product sense round, PMs should define success/failure criteria. There are additional steps that you should include to impress the interviewer in a product sense interview.
PMs who are good at their job also end up doing richer discussion in these interviews, provided they don’t hurt themselves by sticking too much to a framework and are able to show their experience while answering a question.
The other two common questions in product sense are also relevant in real jobs. Once the product has entered the mature stage, the problems that often arise are like 'how do we improve this particular product'. Similarly, the taste of a good PM is their judgement around good vs bad products. That's where the questions around favourite, and least favourite product comes in the product sense rounds.
Technical Round
PMs work quite closely with developers, and a significant chunk of Product development is engineering. And so the technical understanding of a PM is gauged by allotting a different round for it because it is quite important for PMs to understand the choices made during development of a product.
We should note that PMs don’t need to code to do their jobs well, and so coding interviews don’t happen are usually involved in technical round. PMs need to understand the technical system design well. They also need to be comfortable with doing root-cause analysis of a product experience problem, happening due to a technical issue. And finally they should be able to communicate everything effectively across the board.
All the three skills — system design, RCA, and ‘explain it in layman language’ — are tested in the technical round of the PM interview. If you are looking for a useful resource to build your technical acumen, I wrote a book to solve this same problem for PMs without technical background — https://www.amazon.in/Tech-Simplified-Entrepreneurs-Deepak-Singh/dp/9355664990
Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy
One the product is built, it needs a GTM strategy to reach the right set of users. This usually isn't expected of APM candidates. But as you gain some experience, this is expected of you.
GTM usually involves the same steps as the real-life PM:
taking a decision on how the launch should happen - Experiments vs Beta vs Full rollout
finding right channels for acquiring initial customers. This again requires an in-depth understanding of growth, required in senior roles.
defining the right goal for initial launch.
pricing the product
The GTM interview questions can be around the launch plan including getting to first N customers, or pricing, or a combination of both.
Growth
Growth round can have questions around tackling a growth problem like low activation low, retention, or engagement. The round tests for quality of solutions you can come up with when faced with such a problem through product.
All of the above problems are very similar to the real-growth challenges faced by all products at one point or another.
Behavioural and Leadership
This should be self-explanatory as most of the questions in these rounds are around things you have done in previous jobs. The better you have behaved/worked in your previous jobs, the better will be your answers in this round.
The above topics should give you a fair idea on how PM interviews map to real PM skills.
Let’s move to the next part of the mental model
“Interview prep isn’t different from your actual job. Doing one can makes you better at the other, provided you understand the link between both. Further, you need to understand that there is a clear 'Why' behind the interview questions of every company. And this ‘Why’ is also unique to every company in some ways. Understanding that unique 'Why' is key to become better at the job and interview preparation.”
The ‘Why’ Behind Product Interviews
Most of the Interview Prep literature starts and end at - "Here are the problems that gets asked in Company A, and Here is how to prepare for it". And there is a good reason for it. What's the point of asking 'Why' certain questions get asked in the Interviews of a particular company? It might distract you from preparation. So isn’t it pragmatic to just prepare and crack the interview?
No!
You can become much better at Interviews over time as you understand that 'Why' better. PM interviews are subjective, and the ‘why’ provides you an insight into where to focus in the limited time you get into an interview.
So how do we understand the ‘Why’. There are two factors that affect ‘Why’ — role, company. Let’s start with role/level.
Role Relevance
The same question can be asked at various levels in an interview.
At an APM level, companies expect candidates to display the general skills needed for a beginner role such as APM. But as you move up the ladder, PM Interviews can change depending on the scope you manage in these roles. We have already seen how some rounds don’t happen for APM/PM level, but start happening in senior roles.
But even these senior roles have varied scope. For example, a GPM can have a very different scope than Director of Product. That is where PM interviews become confusion. How are we supposed to know what skills to display for the level we are interviewing?
It's almost impossible to provide a strict guideline across levels, but it is possible to predict by asking few question to the HR or hiring manager in the pre-screening rounds. These questions should try to understand why the company is hiring a person in such-and-such role, and what sort of scope do they provide with this role. In addition to these, understanding the culture of the company helps in crafting the answers.
For example, suppose that the company has been facing user growth problem due to low retention and wants to hire a product lead for this role. So while answering a simple question like ‘Which is your favourite product, and why?’, you can touch upon stickiness or retention aspects on this product while telling about it.
Company Relevance: Stage and Culture
Let’s try to understand how company’s stage and culture affect the ‘Why’ by taking an example of Booking.com. We know that it's a mature stage, consumer company in travel.
Booking needs PMs who are
technical because it’s a complex, mature product
good with experiments since the untested features can’t go live
good with process, collaboration and stakeholder management because the large company size demands these skills to get projects moving
good with product sense/ ideation so that they can come up with features to improve a mature product such as book
You can see these reflecting in the questions that Booking asks (Source: Glass-door)
Process oriented questions like
What is your process for working with Engineers?
Can you tell something about the impact you made in your previous role, and why do you want to leave your current company?
Stakeholder management questions like
Tell about a situation where you had to manage upwards on a product feature where you had a disagreement.
Product sense questions like
Add a feature to your favourite product
Data questions like
How would you explain the changes in XX (certain metrics)?
A/B testing questions like
How would you test a new feature? How would you decide on the best approach to decide on the traffic that should be tested?
Technical questions like
Tell me about a time when you had technical influence over a product
Compare it to a B2B product.
B2B products usually require an understanding of complex workflows. You have to think about how a simple change can affect the customers who are paying you. So it becomes essential for such PMs to display this acumen. In addition to that, you also need to understand the customer profile (SMB vs Enterprise), and GTM strategy.
B2B product management also focuses a lot on stakeholder management because your customer is an active stakeholder in the process. So you often get questions like
"Tell me about your relationship with Engineering: what do you like most about working with Engineers? How do you handle disagreements/conflicts between yourself and engineering? Using an example if possible. " - Salesforce
B2B product management relies on set process like agile and scrum because they oftentimes need predictability on their roadmap. So you can get questions like these in the interviews.
The above should provide you a good sense of the unique ‘Why’ behind certain questions asked by certain companies. If you can understand the role well and company’s stage and culture, it becomes much easier to provide relevant answer. It also becomes easier to anticipate questions. For example, someone hiring for a platform PM role would be much interested in seeing if you have a strong technical aptitude and would ask questions around that.
If you have suggestions, let me know how I can improve the future posts - https://forms.gle/q6b67rqVwwz5saaq7
What's Next in the Product Interviews Series
I plan to write detailed interview guide for all types of product interviews. Each post will have the following structure
Relevance of this type of questions
Companies that love this question
Most popular questions around this
Approach or framework to solve this question
One End-to-end example of each sub-type
Key Mistakes and examples of such mistakes
Test your knowledge of this topic (beginner vs advanced score)
Subjective Questions Database for further practice
Books around the topic (I have read vs haven’t read and rating)
Articles and videos around the topic and my rating
All of these posts will be free for the foreseeable future, so subscribe to stay updated and never miss a post!
Thank you for reading :)
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