How I got hired as a product manager

A guide to early career product management interviews

I gave a bunch of product management interviews in the last few months. The following is a guide entailing how to get interviews, real interview questions, case studies, learnings, and cold message templates. It was initially intended to be a personal guide which evolved into a longer post. The guide will be more useful for folks in early career roles (<5 YOE).

The article will focus on the things which we can control. This will not be a rant on how the hiring process is broken, unfair or subjective.

Applying for jobs and getting an interview

1. The obvious one. Linkedin jobs. Apply to all relevant postings. Check alternate portals like wellfound as well.

2. Find hidden jobs by searching “hiring product manager” on linkedin posts. Some companies will ask you to send an email or fill out a form. These will have lesser competition.

3. Directly write to the job poster if their profile is displayed as a part of the job advert.

4. Write cold emails/messages to other product mangers asking them to refer or connect you to the relevant person.

5. Write to the CEO. The response rate would be pretty low, but for those who do reply, the first round of interview is guaranteed. If the HR receives a profile from the CEO, they always get back. It is a magic bullet. I have secured a bunch of interviews using this method. The chances of success are inversely proportional to the size of the company.

6. Use tools like hunter, rocketreach to find emails. If you run out of credits, try to decipher it yourself. Generally, it is firstName@companyName.com or firstname.LastName@companyName.com. Check the official support email listed on the website to identify the pattern. Entering the email on gmail and seeing the profile’s image is a good way to confirm. Else, use free email validator tools.

7. Send out a lot of cold messages/emails. After a point, it becomes a game of numbers and probability. Send enough messages and someone will revert.

8. Ensure that your message is concise. You can find my templates towards the end of the article.

9. Rather than sing praises about yourself, show proof of work. Add a link to your portfolio. This is the most effective way to differentiate your application. It increases the chances of the other person reverting. A portfolio can contain past projects, case studies, RCAs, product thinking exercises etc. When I started, my portfolio was my medium blog. Later on I created a proper miro board containing work projects. Here’s a snapshot.

   

   Snapshot from my portfolio

10. Have a linkedin presence. Post content pertaining to your field. It is also a portfolio of sorts. It might create inbound opportunities.

Real interview questions, case studies and learnings

Interview questions

1. About yourself. Walk me through your journey and how you landed here.

2. Reason for leaving previous jobs.

3. What are you looking for in your next role?

4. Why this company? Why product management?

5. Walkthrough and discussion of a real work project (this is where the portfolio comes in real handy). 50-60% of the response should focus on the problem statement.

6. You have 2 requirements which have similar impact and effort. One is from the customer while the other one is from the CEO. You can only pick one task in the upcoming sprint. Which one will you pick?

7. How do you handle conflicts? Any real world challenge you faced while working on a project. How did you navigate it?

8. How do you gather project requirements?

9. How do you run sprints? How do you prioritise tasks? Can you quantify your approach?

10. How do you drive adoption?

11. How do you plan GTM?

12. What are your core values?

13. If your friends and family met behind your back and spoke about you, what would they say?

14. What drives you?

15. How do you keep up with industry trends. How do you learn about product management? What books have you read about product management?

16. This ain’t an easy place to work in. A players thrive here but B players find it very difficult. This would be a challenging role. Why would you choose this over other easier options?

17. Why remote work? What are the key requirements to succeed in a remote role?

18. What do you see yourself doing 5/10 years down the line?

19. What does the competitive landscape look like in <your previous company’s> industry? Who are the key players?

20. What is your understanding of <the company you are interviewing for>?

21. What are we doing wrong (as a company from a product/business perspective)?

22. How do we win against <incumbent of the industry in which the company operates>?

23. What is the one question you hoped I would ask but I didn’t? <You respond> Assume that I asked that question. What would be your response?

24. What feedback did you get from the sales/cs/product teams in your past roles?

25. How have you been using AI in your day to day life?

Case studies

Some of these were asked during the interview while others were take home assignments. The following are the problem statements. It is your job to get further clarity by asking relevant questions. For all of the following you are expected to understand the user persona, prioritise problems, create an MVP with prototypes, identify potential risks, define success metrics, think about execution amongst others:-)

1. Imagine that Facebook is launching movies. How would you drive its adoption?

2. What is your favourite product and why? <You respond> How would you double it’s market share?

3. What would be the top 3 metrics which you will track for Swiggy’s (a food delivery and quick commerce app in India) one subscription (a monthly subscription to get discounted products and other benefits)?

4. Imagine you are a part of a team responsible for developing a cutting-edge product tailored to the needs of event management businesses. Your goal is to create a product to streamline event management processes which focuses on proactively eliminating potential risks that could arise during the planning and execution of events.

5. Pick any platform of your choice and improve one of its feature. For eg. Slack’s save for later experience, google calendar’s event creation experience, jira’s task creation experience etc.

6. You are a Product manager at “Sugarcane Juice Leasing Company”. Your company manufactures sugarcane juice machines & then leases on a monthly subscription to your clients aka sugarcane juice producers. These are new-age machines. They not only can produce juice but also provide all the data you may want (e.g. # of sugar canes juiced, amount of juice produced). Hence, the machines are 10% more expensive than the market. However, using data, your clients can optimize their operations to generate 10x ROI. Now, your clients run juice enterprises. They get 100s of machines from you, run their sugarcane through the machine, package the juice and sell it to distributors. They are currently on a pilot program and after 1 month of the ongoing pilot, they will decide whether to continue with your machines. Create a Dashboard. Assume the client will login and see their relevant metrics. Assume the metrics. The dashboard demonstrates all the analytics that get the clients to buy your machines. Assume your clients are tech-savvy and they lease around 100 machines at a time.

7. You are the PM for an online store creator platform. Identify one major challenge that new creators face when setting up their online store. Propose a simple product feature or improvement that solves this challenge.

Learnings

1. Ask questions. Remember that an interview is a two way street. Here are some questions I always ask in product interviews. The response to these would give you a good idea of what you are getting into. Make sure that the company has a proper PM function or you will have the freedom to create one.

   1. When was the last time you spoke to an end user of your product?

   2. When was the last time you shipped something?

   3. How ahead is product from engineering in terms of planning?

   4. How important is domain knowledge for this role?

   5. What challenges are you are facing right now?

   6. How would you define success in this role?

   7. How does the product team look like at the moment (how many PMs, designers, team structure)?

   8. Are the business metrics shared internally with all the employees?

   9. Who would I be reporting to?

   10. Apart from these there are company specific questions like “I see that you are bootstrapped, are there any plans to raise funds in the future?” or “Why are you focussing on marketplaces when Shopify is a much bigger ecosystem” etc.

   11. How does the onboarding plan look like?

2. Be very explicit about what you are expecting from the role and what all you do not want to do. For example, I do not write to want product copy.

3. Understand the problem and status quo in its entirety before diving into the solution.

4. Each problem can be looked at from two perspectives: business and user. For eg. churn or decreasing MRR is the business problem while a user not being able to sync designs from canva is the user problem. Define both before diving into the solution. Both are interlinked to each other. Typically they will have a cause-effect relationship.

5. Avoid frameworks unless you have created it on your own. For eg. I have always struggled with product analytics questions. So, I developed a framework to tackle those questions. The framework does not have to make sense to everybody, as long as it solves your problem, you are good to go. Here are some of my notes to handle product analytics questions:

   1. North star metrics tell you whether your hypothesis was correct or not i.e whether the problem you intended to solve is getting solved or not.

   2. North star metric will be the number associated with job to be done for the end user (JTB for the business will be different). For eg. in the swiggy subscription question mentioned above, the job to be done for the subscription feature was to help the user save money by getting discounts on all products for a flat monthly fees. So, we should look at the total money saved by users before and after the feature was incorporated. This can be further broken down at a per user level.

   3. Product analytics track usage of the product. To determine product analytics metrics, I would draw out the user flow and define the physical action the user is supposed to do at each step of the flow. For eg. if they are supposed to view a dashboard, then the physical act is seeing and the number associated with that is “for how much time was the dashboard viewed”. Similarly, if the action is clicking on a button, then the number associated is “how many people clicked on the button”.

   4. Think whether the identified number can be broken down into sub groups? Say by plan: Free or paid. By designation/role: primary user, team member etc.

6. Always think about risks associated with your solution and defence mechanisms to mitigate those.

7. Think mathematically. It helps you be much more structured and exhaustive. All problems can be looked at mathematically. There is an end outcome you want to achieve i.e the job to be done. The number associated with that job can either be defined as a formula or a function.

   1. For eg. you work at Shopify’s creator team. Your job is to help the creator monetise. The number associated with that is Sales. Sales can be defined formulaically as number of orders*avg. order value ($). Now, to increase sales I need to increase the number of orders and/or the avg. order value. The order value would depend on the creator’s pricing strategy, I might be able to help with upselling. To increase orders, I need to increase the conversion rate i.e convert more views into purchases and so on.

   2. Another way to look at things is to draw out the user journey of a typical e-commerce flow. All the steps in the flow are variables which impact the end result. Your end result is directly proportional to those variables.

   3. The steps towards the beginning of the flow will have a greater impact because they will have a downstream effect.

   4. Identify potential risks by artificially decreasing the directly proportionate variables and thinking why that variable’s value can go down.

      

      For eg. if sales are going down, then either the number of orders or avg. order value is going down or some part of the above flow is broken.

8. Use AI tools to create prototypes. They make your assignment stand out. I believe this will get table stakes in the near future.

9. Don’t accept an offer immediately. Think it through. Always negotiate.

10. No offer is better than a bad offer. Do not accept an offer out of desperation. There are times when you spot red flags during the interview phase but ignore them because you don’t have any other option. If you can’t see yourself working at the company 6 months down the line, there is no point in accepting the offer now.

11. Bad orgs can kill your curiosity. Be in a place where your curiosity thrives.

12. While interviewing, you would be able to identify whether you can see yourself working with these people or not. If not, do not accept the offer.

When to leave a job

I have left jobs in the past when I felt that the place is not conducive to my growth. The sane advice is to not quit a job until you have a back up in place. This is the advice I would give to someone else as well. But, if you feel suffocated in a role, quitting might be the answer assuming you are not putting yourself in financial jeopardy. The answer to this question would vary depending on the individual and their circumstances but no job is worth your mental peace.

Knowing what to optimise for

Know what you want to optimise your career for. For eg. my priority order would look something like this:

1. People and Culture

2. Money

3. Domain

When I started working, domain used to be top of the list. But over time I realised that you won’t be solving ground breaking problems. Those opportunities are rare. And finding good people to work alongside is even rarer.

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Templates for cold messages

Email and Linkedin direct message

Template 1

Hi {name},

I wanted to express my interest in the PM role at {company name}. I have 3YOE as a PM in B2B SaaS at {past companies}. I am attaching my resume and work samples below.

Portfolio: {Link to portfolio}

Writings: {Link to newsletter}

If you believe my profile aligns with your requirements, do let me know. Thanks for your time and attention.

Best regards,
{Your name}

Template 2

Hi {name},

I wanted to reach out and ask if {company} is hiring product managers at the moment? If yes, would you be able to connect me to the relevant person?

Here's a bit about me: I have 3YOE as a PM in B2B SaaS at {past companies}. I am attaching my resume and work samples below.

Portfolio-> {Link to portfolio}

Writings-> {Link to newsletter}

Thanks for your time and attention.

Best regards,

{Your name}

Template 3 (Linkedin invitation note)

Hi {name}, I wanted to express my interest in the PM role at {company_name}. I have 3YOE as a PM in B2B SaaS. Attaching relevant links. Portfolio: {link} ; Writings: {link}

💡 Use URL shorteners to truncate the link where there is a character limit.

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If you want me to answer any of the interview questions listed above, let me know in the comments!

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