Never say no to an interview. What PM managers looking for when they hire PMs.
What is most important is why you are building it, why you are doing it? Its for your consumers of course of the product. But what are the goals and metrics you are going after? Whats the goal of the company that your tying your products back to. ❓🗣️
If you are talking about product, you’ll get this question a lot:
<aside> ❓ What would you build if you are at this company?
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<aside> 🗣 1- The companies goals and mission are x, y, z. So I would wanna build a product to tight back to the goal of the company or mission of the company. For example: Facebook → to keep the world more connected.
Whatever it is you are talking about needs to tight back to the mission of the company, otherwise it’s a red flag without even starting.
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<aside> 🗣 The other one is the metrics side. If you say I wanna build “xyz”, in the reason is it tights back to the one of the goals in the company. and how I measure that is bla bla. Or the key metric that Im going after is usage, adoption, trip or whatever it is.
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So whats gonna happen is after you mention that I wanna build “xyz”. You need to explain how did you decide to do that “xyz”. You don’t wanna say, “because it’s really cool”. You wanna say “it is really cool, because, data supports my argument”. There is a banners around in Facebook says: “Data wins arguments” It’s an awesome phrase for PM’s.
<aside> ❓ How would you prioritize X over Y? Why would you do that?
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<aside> 🗣 The answer is always, beacuse data tells me that. It is not necessarily a sql data or google analytics data, also qualitative data which is coming from your users - some sort of data that is support your arguments-
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The queston about what would you like to build, the reason why they are asked that is not just for the goals and metrics, also for the innovation. How are you gonna raise the bar of the company? How I define that when I do these interviews, I just want one good idea, just one. The way we do that usually is
<aside> ❓ “Take out your phone. Pick any app you use and tell me if you are a pm of that app, what would you build?”
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Wrong answer is as you know, I know, I have a new idea ❌
<aside> 🗣 I know the goal of the company, I assume your KPI is xyz.
Sometimes that idea doesn’t come right away. Fell free to note down, sometimes you will be brainstorming with the PM in the room. Keep thinking and keep iterating. Jam with the manager.
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For those people they are not technical, what you wanna do is ask to recrucuiter, how technical it is gonna be? They are some companies, they don’t care at all being technical, but sometimes it requires.
The way Facebook did it, they first ask you a very technical question, if you did not get it, it is ok. Then they ask you another SQL based question and if you don’t know, it is also ok. They just try to understand where is your level is. To be able to understand they ask you to build a movie web page data modell.