Breaking into Product: How do interviewers evaluate a PM candidate (Part 1)

Hey there!

Welcome to “Breaking into Product” — post #6.

If you are planning to enter (or have recently entered) the Product space, you will love our posts! With this series, we aim to share exclusive content and insights on preparing for product management interviews, common Q&A, interview preparation strategies, etc to help you ace your interviews.

You are here — so you must be or will be attending a Product Interview in the near future. In addition to practicing mock interviews, having a strong grasp of how interviewers evaluate candidates would help you understand where to focus and improve quickly. In this post, we will provide insights into what interviewers look for and how they evaluate candidates using various types of questions.

If you want our case studies to reach straight to your inbox, subscribe at: https://tearthemdown.substack.com/

PS — These evaluation/assessment pointers may differ for specific PM roles such as Tech PM or Data PM, etc.

Through a “Guesstimate”

What the interviewer would be looking for in a candidate:

1. Problem-Solving Skills
   Did the candidate take an unfamiliar problem and break it down properly? Did the candidate develop a plan to solve it confidently?
2. Communication Skills
   Did the candidate clearly communicate the action plan to the interviewer? Is it easy to follow the candidate while he/she is solving the problem or did the interviewer ask for many clarification questions?
3. Comfort with numbers
   Did the candidate solve the numbers by hand? Or did the candidate get confused? Did the candidate round the numbers too much unnecessarily just to oversimplify the effort required in calculating?
4. Judgment
   Did the candidate use valid & logical assumptions? or was the candidate making silly assumptions thinking they do not matter?

🧐 To understand how to solve/approach such questions, take a look at our previous post:
Breaking into Product: Part 1 — Guesstimates

Through a “Product Design Question”

What the interviewer would be looking for in a candidate:

1. Goals & Objectives
   Did the candidate understand and define the objectives before answering? Were the candidate’s selections/assumptions reasonable?
2. Target Persona & Pain Points
   Did the candidate choose a target persona? Did the candidate explain the persona’s pain points to the extent that it demonstrates real user insights?
3. Prioritization
   Did the candidate prioritize competing use cases or pain points with proper reasoning? What frameworks is the candidate aware of for prioritization? How does the candidate prioritize when there are limited data points to back the reasoning?
4. Creativity
   Did the candidate demonstrate creativity in identifying the pain points or while defining the solutions? Are the solutions really creative or were they just copied from competitors’ features? In the case of big/high-effort features, is the candidate able to define any small/quick experiments to validate the ideas before?
5. Implementation
   Did the candidate have a reasonable answer on how the feature could be implemented? Is the candidate able to break down a complex/big feature into smaller parts for faster implementation and an iterative (build, learn & improve) approach?

🧐 To understand how to solve/approach such questions, take a look at our previous post:Breaking into Product: Part 2 — Designing a Product

We will cover the other type of questions in the next post. Stay tuned!

We hope this helps you understand interviews and perform better. Feel free to reach out at thehustlers2021@gmail.com for any questions or guidance.

We have put our sweat and tears into creating this post. Share it in just a click and help us grow! 😃

If you want our case studies to reach straight to your inbox, subscribe at: https://tearthemdown.substack.com/

Will come back with another interesting post. Bye!