Qualities of a Senior Candidate

The other day a client asked me to provide them with a checklist of what one needs to do in an interview to sound senior.

My first reaction was two-fold. First, I was worried that giving a checklist to a large group would end with a junior PM having a false sense of confidence. I feared this would result in them not thinking and simply memorizing a framework that wasn't intended to help them. Then my second thought was, this is tough.

I spent the next week thinking about how to approach answering this question.

Ultimately, I concluded there are two big things senior (L6/7, GPM/M1) candidates do that junior candidates do not or things that senior candidates do that make them sound more junior (resulting in down leveling).

1. Clarity of Communication: Senior candidates communicate in a measured, controlled manner. They don't rush through their points, but rather, they articulate their thoughts clearly and confidently. They naturally leverage their knowledge and frameworks, not just recite them from memory.

2. Insight Identification (The 'Aha' Moment): Senior candidates can identify high-level issues or insights that junior candidates might miss. This comes from experience working on many different products. Senior Product Leaders can pinpoint the most important aspects to focus on in a discussion or project almost immediately, and they can confidently decide on the areas to delve into when time is limited.

These two aspects, when combined, make senior candidates stand out in their roles and interviews. It is not just about having more years of experience but about using that experience effectively to communicate and make strategic decisions on various product types and issues.

Let's dive in more deeply.

Clarity of Communication.

Clear communication includes speaking in a measured tone, not too fast and not too slow. Being in control by sharing your frameworks and leveraging those frameworks naturally, not just checking off a memorized checklist.

Speaking to My Own Issues

When I coach my clients, I am perfectly calm. I can explain everything we should be focused on in a measured way. But when I get an interview, my nerves kick in, and suddenly it all seems to fall apart.

• I speak much too fast, even worse than my normal fast.

• My voice gets higher.

• I forget to explain why I am making the decisions.

• I get lazy with short-hand that can lose my listener.

When you combine those four factors, I sound unsure of what I’m doing and as if I am trying to rush through everything when I am not.

On the flip side, I sound senior when measured in my delivery. When I remind myself, the person on the other side will wait and listen to me. I know this is true, but when my nerves kick in, so does my fight-or-flight response. I suddenly don’t sound senior, even though if you took me out of the interview situation, I would have complete confidence, provide excellent solutions, and identify deep insights.

Insight Identification

While a junior candidate can learn to control communication and sound very senior in tone and delivery cadence, they often don't have the experience or exposure to sound very senior. They haven’t seen enough to identify the higher-level issues the interviewer is looking for. (Part of why people coming from a start-up might have more insights is they have seen much quickly as the company makes a lot of mistakes, learns, and pivots. Or why someone at a large company that got moved around might know more than the average.)

When discussing strategy for a large company, senior candidates can identify the flywheel of success and how the product at hand would help that flywheel spin. Senior Product Leaders can identify the next-level challenges the product is facing, even if it is a hypothetical product.

To identify the complex or next-level issues in a short interview, you must have enough wherewithal to say, here’s the most important thing we must focus on in our time together. This is where I wanna dive in. Then confirm with the interviewer. Making that decision and being confident in that decision is crucial. You need to know that you’re not gonna try and tackle everything. (It is yet another form of natural prioritization.)

Junior candidates often don’t have the instinct (built by having seen enough products) to quickly identify the twist or stressor for anything thrown at them.

Tradeoffs

Identifying trade-offs is an extension of insights identification. Many candidates try to save the tradeoffs until the end. The best senior candidates discuss tradeoffs "inline" as they navigate the case. A sure sign you didn't share the tradeoffs appropriately is an interviewer constantly interrupting you to know why you did X or Y. They will forgive a junior candidate this and/or get enough from one or two poking questions to know their thoughts. But senior candidates, on their game, preempt questions by sharing the tradeoffs they make for small, crucial decisions throughout the interview.

Another way to think about trade-offs is as a display of the natural prioritization process PMs go through every minute at work. Product prompts are either ambiguous or very complicated. You have a short amount of time to tackle them, so you need to prioritize where you focus your discussion. You can check with the interviewer before you proceed, but you need to propose where (and why) you will make a compromise and where you will choose not to focus. This is what they mean by tradeoffs in an interview.

You make a trade-off in how you present in the decisions you make to move forward. You can’t save them to the end. Otherwise, you create a jarring experience where your interviewer can't follow your logic. You appear to be jumping from that concept to another.

An Example

The prompt was "Design a meditation app for kids." The fairly senior candidate jumped to a niche they were passionate about. The whole time I wondered: Why are you building for a niche when you haven't solved the basic pain points for anyone yet? When we did the de-brief, they tried to argue their logic as if I didn't understand they were following the framework. (That was obvious.) I did understand it. My point was they had not yet established the fundamental problems in the space and justified the jump to a niche problem. The candidate had memorized the framework and was checking off the box of a super-specific user without aligning on the fundamentals of the space and observing what was universal vs. niche and what was solved already vs. greenfield. My grading was "hire" for L5 but "no hire" for L6. Insights are crucial to success at the senior level.

Advice For Junior Candidates

Junior candidates should focus on what they can control: Communication and Delivery. Master the framework and be able to talk about the core problems and most critical metrics. If you are a junior candidate trying to sound senior, you’re are most likely going to get flustered by trying to cover everything, as you not sure what is truly most important.

Advice For Senior Candidates

If you have mastered the framework, focus on leveling up your problem-identification process. Get comfortable controlling the narrative and pre-empting the "Why did you do that?" questions. Slow down, but not too much. But most importantly, get better at ruthlessly prioritizing what you focus on in the limited case and share that logic with your interviewer.