AMA: Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability, Kara Gillis on Product Management Interviews

These are two different questions with two different answers. How to break into product: I always tell people to try to transfer into PM within the company they are currently working. When changing something about your career, it is easier to change industries and geographies instead of functions - but typically you can only get two out of those three. So if you want to change functions - I recommend not changing much else. Why? People who already know you are solid at some of the following core PM skills, such as problem solving, working with customers, decision making / prioritization, writing and communicating coherently, and developing and executing strategy, are more likely to pull you into PM. If you are looking for a new industry, I often tell people to get hired in their current function in that industry and try to break into product once they've established themselves for 9-12 months. How to uplevel your PM career: This is all about skillbuilding and depends on what level you are in. If you are a junior to mid-level individual contributor (IC), I suggest learning how to write as well as you can. Good documents sell ideas, get funding, and often spark good questions that lead to coherent product strategies. You can also take PM skillbuilding courses are bootcamps. I completed Reforge during the pandemic for fun to learn more about B2C/PLG product management, which is not necessarily my background. I'm heavily B2B/enterprise tech in practice. If you're a manager, taking executive communication classes and/or executive coaching are two of the most important things you can learn. Executive communication is not just communicating with executives - it's also how to communicate to your team, how to build culture, how to set priorities clearly and how to communicate with empathy and transparently. Executive coaching can help you work through conflict that can arise as a manager, as well as work on yourself to be a better leader.

This really depends on the role I'm hiring for and what the current team lacks in skillset. And frankly, I probably didn't write the job description well enough for you to know exactly what that is - but hopefully I was transparent enough in the job description to give you a hint. A few scenarios I've hired for include: 1. I needed someone who needed little to no training on how to manage a mature product in a very specific technology category (aka I needed to hire from a competitor) who could become my successor and run a team. That required me to hire someone who was ready to become a manager to lead a team but hadn't been given a chance yet, was happy to stay in the same industry/domain BUT was looking for a change. I hired someone who was referred by a colleague and is probably one of the best hires I've ever made. I was able to promote this person pretty quickly, and they now lead a team. 2. I needed someone who could help me fix a renewal rate / churn issue for a mature product - someone who could delve deeply into problem solving and execute on solutions to that problem, someone who was good with tracking metrics and communicating out the strategy and impact of that implementation. I wanted someone with consulting experience and outbound go-to-market experience. I found someone who had worked in product marketing at Accenture, who helped improve the renewal rate by 20% in 1.5 years. 3. One time I wanted to invest heavily in machine learning and AI capabilities within a product, and I wanted to hire someone who was hungry to make an impact, who was junior but could lead products relatively self-sufficiently. I found someone from an internal team who was incredibly high potential, but not necessarily getting the projects he/she was desiring in the current role. I was able to provide more upward mobility and autonomy right away, which was attractive to pull him/her over to our team. 4. When hiring a manager, I use something my husband calls the "tropical fish test." If I had a few tropical fish with a very complex set of feeding and care requirements, and I was going out of town - would I trust this person to take care of my tropical fish for a week? Would they be dead when I return? This is a proxy for "will you take care of this team the way I would, and are you able to take things off of my plate if I delegate them to you?" I have had remarkably good success in this area, and also not so great choices made in this area. I have learned my lesson and hire managers more slowly if I can.

Technical questions for product management are often trying to measure different aspects of the job - which varies highly day to day. Incredible context switching is required for PMs, but there is also a rhythm to the business with planning cycles happening every quarter/month that retains consistency. Some of these categories include product sense, market segmentation and focus, business model, critical thinking, competition, decision making, pricing and packaging. Communication is also pretty important, but not often considered "technical" part of the interview. There are so many resources for interviewing for MAANG that would help you prepare for a PM interview no matter where you interview. Interviewing at Google or Meta is quite different than interviewing at a Series C/D or mid-size public company, so I'll just drop some resources I've used: Bijan's PM Exercises, Exponent, Reddit r/ProductManagement, and Diego Granados' YouTube videos. Cracking the Tech Career is also a great book to read - it's still relevant. These resources have mock interviews, interview question banks from recent interview candidates, and ways to use frameworks (but not overly so) to answer technical questions. I always ask the following questions: Tell me about your product. How does it work? How was your product differentiated from the competition?

The questions I ask are probably not best to share here because I still want to use these questions when I'm hiring, so I'll give you the question BEHIND the question: Are you good at the following things: * Hiring the right people for the right job - tell me about how you approach hiring or give me an example of a good vs bad hire * I care a lot about how you manage a team, how you organize your team, how you organize work for your team, how you communicate with me, with our leadership, and with your direct reports. * How do you communicate with cross functional stakeholders, customers, or sales - especially when things are tense? Tell me about a time you did it well - or not well - and what you learned. * Do you know how to present information succinctly to higher levels of leadership? Can you get funding for a new project/initiative? * Can you manage dependencies with other teams without me getting involved? * Can you build and prioritize a roadmap for your team and present it to customers and other internal stakeholders? * Are you a good presenter? * Are you a nice person with integrity? Are you dependable? Do people like working with you?

I really enjoy working with people who are incredibly proactive / take initiative types who are naturally curious and motivated to solve hard problems. What typically correlates highly with this profile is a person with quiet confidence and intrinsically motivated to make a difference to customers. I screen for this profile as much as I can.

The most important thing I've learned about interviewing is to convey to the interviewer - as quickly as possible - warmth, competence, and the ability to succinctly answer the question asked. Warmth is often not talked about as a trait to embody or screen for - but it signals a lot of probable cues about what it would be like to manage or work alongside the candidate. Are you easy to collaborate with? Are you able to take feedback? Would you be a positive influence on the team? Would you be optimistic rather than fatalistic about solving hard problems? Competence is pretty self-explanatory, so I'll skip that one. The third - ability to succinctly answer the question asked - is so important. Please do not take up all the time we have on one or two questions. Please actually also provide an answer that is somewhat relevant to the technical or behavioral question asked.

The best product management candidates indicate that they fully understand what the role requires by asking questions that get to a level deeper into what the role description may not have indicated, and throughout the interview are able to provide evidence that they have the ability to fill those requirements. They also convey warmth and competence as indicated in my other answer.