AMA: Grammarly Monetization Lead, Product, Farheen Noorie on Product Management Interviews

Here are some of the top attributes I have observed Empathy for the customer: Understanding and describing their customer segment's pain points. This usually comes from a natural curiosity to understand your customer, empathize with their pain points, and be dissatisfied with the status quo to do something about it. Focus on outcomes vs outputs: It's important for PMs to distinguish between outcomes vs outputs for their customers and the business. For, eg, launching 10 experiments in a year is a ...Read More

Technical questions are usually asked in a few contexts within a PM Interview. Understanding a PM's experience working with engineers: These questions are usually asked in rounds led by engineering stakeholders. A typical question concerns making a hard prioritization decision due to a technical constraint. A PM is expected to know enough technical details to understand the various choices, their pros and cons, and make prioritization decisions accordingly. Data Analysis and SQL: Most PMs do som ...Read More

Ownership of a key business metric/s: Almost all head of product roles involve ownership of one or more key business metrics. Cross-functional partnerships with experience of successfully managing up: As PMs grow in their career, it becomes critical for them to identify the right cross-functional partnerships for their teams, align on common goals and outcomes, and inspire their teams to accomplish said goals. It also includes building skills to manage-up by ensuring C-Staff/leadership visibilit ...Read More

Resume: Usually, the biggest red flag for me in a resume is when either the candidate doesn't describe any impact metrics or focuses on a vanity metric, eg, if a checkout PM describes an increase in the number of payment page views instead of an increase in checkout conversions Initial Interview: PMs are often advised to use a variety of frameworks for their interviews primarily to showcase a PM's structured thinking to a problem. This is good advice as long as the PM uses a framework for refere ...Read More

PM interviewing tools like tryexponent, Igotanoffer, product alliance, etc have a good breadth of various PM interviews, especially for popular companies like Meta who have focus rounds for Product Design, Product Sense, etc. Mock Interviews: Similar to above, there are various services that offer both paid and unpaid mock interviews, usually done in a real-life interview setting with time dedicated towards the end for feedback. You can also rope in friends and your PM network to help with condu ...Read More