Breaking into Product: Part 4 — Common mistakes during Product Interviews
Hey there!
Welcome to “Breaking into Product” — post #4.
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.
I have interviewed 10+ PMs from some of the top Product centric companies in India over the last 2 weeks and found some very common, easy-to-identify red flags with these candidates. Any Product person who carries these on to an interview is less likely to convert. Your interview might be with an early-stage startup or a large company or B2B or B2C company — all these points are valid. If you are attending a B2C company interview, you should certainly not make these mistakes. In this article, we not only show the mistakes but also give you tips to overcome those.
Read these now, Bookmark this article for later, and Review these before going to any interview. Thank us later! 😜
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1. The what and why of your current/previous job
During your Product fitment round, this is a very big red flag. You might have a lot of projects to show, you might have a lot of metrics/quantification in your resume. But if you do not know why you picked those projects, it becomes a big reason for not being able to convert the interview into a job.
Great PMs question everything, try to understand things deeply, if not build hypotheses to test out and then understand. These may not be the right features/projects always — but great PMs always have well-thought-through reasoning for why they are prioritising/building something.
2. Know your existing company
As a PM, you are not only responsible for building features, but also for improving business through your features. As you get promoted to higher levels in the Product vertical, this becomes even more important. For this, firstly, you should be aware of what your company is trying to do, who they are doing it for, and how the business model is working out. If you appear clueless about these during the interview, it just indicates that you have not been much involved in your previous job and hence, it acts as an indicator of how you might operate in the next job.
As a Product person, know the ins and outs of your company properly. This is not only good for your interview prep but also for you to do well at your job.
3. Understand your goals/OKRs
Every Product person is assigned certain goals either quarterly or half yearly, depending on the stage of the company you are working at. Some companies follow the OKR framework but others may follow something else. Irrespective of the framework followed, if you are not aware of how your goals are set or why they are set, or if they are set in silos not tying up to the company goals — you are not in a good place. It could also mean that your work is insignificant to the overall company. In turn, you will not be able to tie up how your work or projects drive impact for the company.
As a Product person, understand why/how your goals or projects given to you. Do not just take anything that’s given to you. Question its relevance and need. If something is not tying up to the company’s overall business, go with data & recommendations, push back, and request for better goals/projects. You will be clear about your goals during your job and hence for your interview also.
4. Deep-dive into the problem statement and the overall business
During the case round, the interviewer might give you a company and ask how would you improve retention or how would you make more users use feature X, etc. A lot of candidates go with a framework that they have studied and come around too well-prepared for the interview. Although it is good that you are well prepared, it is not good if you just sound like a textbook.
Do not jump right into solving the case. First, understand why you should do this (apart from the fact that you need to crack this interview 😜) — meaning how is this going to help the company. Always get the full context.
5. Identify the problem/use case before jumping to solutions
The interviewer asked you how would you improve retention for the product (or any product problem-solving case). You are taking a minute to think and you came back with 10 feature ideas to implement to improve retention. Now, you can safely understand that you are not getting the job. Do not jump to solutions as soon as you hear the case. A PM is not only there to identify the right solutions — your team (designers, developers, marketers, founders, etc.) can give you 100s of great ideas. But not all these can be implemented.
As a PM, one of the most important things in your job is identifying and prioritizing the right problem to solve. This no one else on your team can do. You should do the same during the case interview. First, understand the problems leading to retention not improving previously or why previous projects did not work, or why users are not getting retained. Then give your solutions.
6. Customer/User first thinking
Consider the same case question as above. You understood the company objective, you understood the problems through data and now you are giving solutions. While this is the approach you can follow, it is not 100% right. Product folks (including Designers, PMs, Product Marketers, etc.) should be more user-centric than anyone else. Being user-centric does not mean you will ask about the target audience and leave it aside.
Understand your target audience and user persona (attributes/characteristics of these users). When you are looking at data, divide based on user segments. When you are identifying problems, mention which user segment this problem is relevant to. When you are proposing solutions, mention how those solve the user problem or improve the experience for a user.
7. Prioritize, Prioritise, Prioritize
So far, you have understood the company you are solving the case for, you understood your users & their problems. When you are facing such a case, it is unlikely that everything can be set right by solving that one problem. You will come across multiple problems. Given the time constraint (both during the interview and in your job), you will not be able to focus on all the problems. You have to pick the right problems. This is where you should not just give trivial reasons for picking a problem.
Try to do a simple sizing of how many users are impacted by each problem and how much uplift you can get by solving each problem. For this, you should pick the right metrics first and then do the sizing. Based on the numbers obtained, you can pick the one that can give the highest impact. If you cannot do not have numbers, have some user/business centric reasoning to back why you would pick the problem.
This is not only relevant in picking the right problems to solve but also important in finally giving the solutions. There might be 100 ideas to solve a problem. But towards the end of the interview, you cannot give all 100 as your recommendations. You should prioritize and only give the top 3 to 5 ideas. Prioritize well with proper reasoning!
8. Avoiding silly mistakes
While sizing or assessing the impact, you will definitely have to use multiplications, %s, additions, etc. basic math. You are unlikely to face integrations, differentiations, trigonometry, etc. (hopefully 😜). It is very easy to miss a decimal or multiple of 10 here and there. It is not the biggest red flag but it is something you can solve easily. Try to cross-check your calculations before you say the numbers out loud. The bigger red flag is when you do not know how to solve a simple arithmetic problem.
These are all simple arithmetic problems and ideally, you should not be stuck. Even if you are stuck, think or be upfront and seek help. To avoid such scenarios, you can practice some arithmetic problems before your interview. Easily accessible resources could be the Quant section questions from GRE/GMAT. The problems you have to solve during the case will usually be simpler than those.
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