AMA: EzCater Director of Product, Fulfillment, Brandon Green on Product Management Interviews

I'll speak to commonalities in IC PMs since I have less experience hiring other product leaders. It's really just 4 things in my view: A clear ability to break down complex, multi-faceted problems into digestible, actionable chunks, as usually shown via some kind of case interview. Excellent ability to ask good, tough questions A clear track record of having an impact and/or continuous learning/improvement. This may not necessarily be demonstrated through previous work as a PM, but the candidate ...Read More

I have a few simple ones: Not being able to clearly denote what they (the candidate) did to achieve something of impact, as opposed to the team/partners/etc. they worked with. In a case-style interview, not having conviction behind your ideas. I'm always disappointed when really bright folks dance around a few ideas on shaping or tackling a problem but don't commit to them, and therefore misses a key insight or opportunity for an interesting solution. (Also - it suggests a lack of conviction whi ...Read More

I've sort of answered this in other questions asked, but to restate: Red Flags usually manifest in candidates who are Unable to speak to specific impact they (as opposed to their team/org) have had on the business, or point to any specific metric they impacted, and why that metric was important Unable to speak to experiences of learning/growth in the face of failure, or blaming others on said failures Unable to speak to a basic understanding of how the business they're interviewing for works, ho ...Read More

I personally bias toward PMs (or aspiring PMs) with a creative mind, whether that's shown through actual background experience in a creative field, or a highly creative or unconventional response to a question asked in the interview process. I find creative types (often with liberal arts degrees) to be highly effective PMs and leaders due to a common ability to connect dots and find problems and solutions others may not see or understand. This is not a requirement for a product role, but I do th ...Read More

I've found that the ability to speak clearly to your past experiences and how you've either (a) uniquely added value or (b) learned and grew from a given experience largely is the most important thing when talking to both hiring managers and cross-functional partners. This may manifest in many different questions or types of questions -- but ultimately, as a PM interviewing for a PM role, it's critical that you speak to how you've done one or both of those things, using real, specific experience ...Read More

I think going "above and beyond" is a totally subjective thing; it is up to each individual what is above their baseline of preparation for an interview. But - here are a list of things I think are table stakes, that every PM candidate should do at a minimum to prepare: Know the company you're interviewing with: their main products/features, how they make money, how they differentiate from competition. If you're interviewing in a division of a very large company (eg. Amazon Logistics or AWS, bot ...Read More

I like to ask two types of questions: (1) behavioral-style questions, which prompt the candidate to use specific examples from their past experience, rather than hypotheticals, to describe how they handled a particular situation; and (2) exploratory case-style questions, to see how a candidate thinks through an abstract problem.  It's worth noting that for the case questions, I don't love the classic Google approach of wild, out-there questions that are irrelevant to the real world. I much prefe ...Read More