What are interviewers looking for?
As the recession continues on, the competition for product management roles has increased, and the need to nail interviews at a wider variety of companies has increased. What Google and Meta seek are well documented, but most other companies are not.
I have been interviewing the interviewers at a number of mid-sized tech companies, and I am finding a number of different expectations and a number of common pitfalls. They are as follows:
Candidates think every question requires user segmentation. This is not the case.
Answering prioritization questions as if they are design questions.
Asking too many clarifying questions.
Assuming the interviewer is out to get you and trying to find the trick question. Most companies don’t want to trick you. But at Meta and other of the big companies, interviewers do try and trip you up.
Candidates list solutions as problems. For example: a notification doesn’t arrive. That is a technical solution; the problem is forgetting, and the technical solution is the reminder notification. If the reminder doesn’t arrive, that is a technical problem with the company’s attempted solution.
How to know what to do?
Sadly, there is no simple answer. But there are a few rules of thumb.
Interview people at your target company and ask what the company looks for in candidates.
Use the assumption questioning method that has you taking control.*
Listen carefully to the question, don’t assume everything is a design question.
If it sounds like a design question, but you know they are measuring something different, modulate your response accordingly.
*This is what I mean with the assumption as a question:
Prompt: Improve the worst post-booking experience for X product?
Assumption-as-Question: When you say worst post-booking, I assume you want me to define it as we go. But I just want to check, particularly on the post-booking definition, do you want me to limit it or can I consider from X to Y as fair game?
Common Complaints from Interviewers
It was a prioritization question, and they focused on user segmentation
It was halfway through the funnel, we both knew the user segmentation, but they segmented anyway.
The candidate asked me to define worst. This is frustrating because that is the whole point of the question to have them define worst.
It was a metrics question, and the candidate started designing solutions.
Ambiguous vs. Specific Prompts
Meta and Google are famous for ambiguous prompts. Candidates get soo focused on these larger companies that they get thrown off when asked about an existing product with a highly optimized product. It throws them off even more if they get asked about a specific part of the funnel of a well-known product. When this happens, the interviewer is often looking for optimizations of easy-to-identify user pain points and not some moonshot idea.
Summary
Not every company is looking for the same things. What one interviewer would expect you to ask can bother another interviewer. Listen carefully. Pay careful attention to what the interviewer asks. Check in to make sure you are headed in the right direction.
Photo by Nathan Bingle on Unsplash
