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

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 some level of data analysis themselves. Especially for early startups or lean teams where there is either no or insufficient data support, PMs are expected to know the basics of SQL, understand and prioritize where they need instrumentation, and even create some reporting/dashboarding for themselves and the company. For such a role, it's quite common to have a round on data analysis and sometimes even SQL. * Platform, Infra PM roles: If you are applying for a role that is platform or infrastructure-specific, it's expected for PMs to have a degree of understanding of the same. Technical depth also depends on the role (early or mid-career). For eg: Dev API PMs, Authentication PMs etc.

* 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 conducting these mocks * Building a story bank: Usually a number of PM interviews start with a specific question that leans on an example from your career. I recommend creating a story bank from your experience that addresses some of the most common cases. * What was a product/feature you are most proud of? * Tell me about a time when you worked on a project with a cross-functional partner (engineer or designer are the most common ones). What were some of the challenges in collaboration? How did you overcome them? * What is a hardware/non-tech product that you like? Why? How will you improve it? How will you monetize it? * Tell me a time when you relied on your intuition vs data? Why?

* 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 visibility on the most important projects or initiatives their team is driving, building a business case to get the required funding/staffing for it, working with their teams to drive the project, unblocking the team as and when required and ensuring that the outcomes are well communicated to create confidence in the next project/initiative they undertake. * Asking the right questions: As HoP, you will most likely not know the details of either the problem or the solution your teams are working on. Plus, you will make multiple context switches across various critical initiatives throughout your day. Hence, it's important for you to ask the right questions in the limited time you have to get a good understanding of what your team is working on, such that when you are asked to make certain decisions, you have enough context to make an informed decision. * Mentorship: For HoP roles, it's important for a hiring manager to know that you can inspire and lead your teams. Skills in managing high- and low-performing PMs, inspiring PMs and teams around an important but difficult outcome, and mentoring PMs and/or other team members can describe a HoP's skills in this area well. Previous experience with anecdotes specifically addressing the above skills can help candidates in interview settings.

* 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 reference instead of answering questions with the framework alone. As a hiring manager, I am more curious about how you thought through a problem, what real-world challenges you came across, and what the outcome was. The idea in an interview isn't to understand a PM's knowledge of the various frameworks available but to understand the depth and breadth of their thinking in a real-world use case.

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 an output, vs increasing key feature onboarding by 10% is an outcome * Being a team player: Product Management is a team sport without any titles. It's important for PMs to be able to influence their cross-functional partners to accomplish a shared goal or outcome.