My Journey to Acing Junior PM Interviews

Hi there, it's Carol here ☁️. I'm keeping my promise of writing 1 blog post per month. It is hard for a new writer as me, but I'm pushing myself over the resistance by thinking about the long term benefit of writing my thoughts out (and by the FOMO feeling from the product community as well 😄).

My story

Since a couple of months ago, I started working towards my new chapter, which including 2 things:

• Figured out the best practices of Product Management in the tech industry.

• Found a new workplace with greater challenges and opportunities.

The first point was completed via my participation in Breaking into Product Management community (view my review on LinkedIn). The second point was a big struggle, as the job market at the time was not the best for job hoppers.

After 3 months of job searching, my statistics are:

• 10+ Job Applications (via LinkedIn, company website, referral, etc.)

• 5 Interviews 1

• 4 Interviews 2+

• 2 Offers

My interview process can be divided into 2 phases, phase 1 - naive and nature-based, phase 2 - purposeful and practical approach. The 2 offers that I received all falls into phase 2, when I revised my way of interview and started doing my homework intensively.

In this post

I would like to share what I did in my interview approach that landed me 2 offers in Product Management positions.

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What I cover:

• "Tell me about yourself"

• "Tell me about a product or feature that you did in your past job."

• "Describe a product or feature that you did in your past job."

• Question for freshers

• Reverse interview

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Hope this could be helpful 🌤️ Especially for those who are starting your career in Product Management!

|| ~1,600 words. 15 minutes reading.

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🔔 Please kindly note that I am only a junior PM with 3+ years of experience, therefore what I cover here might come across as not relevant for more senior positions. I do recommend my readers to view my blog as your reference of a real Product interview case study rather than a replication, as company's offer may depend on multiple areas.

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1. "Tell me about yourself"

This question is asked quite often in the beginning of the interviews by (almost) every interviewers that I met.

My initial response to this question was to give a summary of my past titles and companies (which can be found in my CV), with some kind of overconfidence that I am the (super) right candidate for this position. This came out quite wrong. And I left the impression of being pretentious all over the room.

In my own experience, people would let this go when I applied for internship position. But as I grew older, things were much harder.

Then how should we approach this question?

I have followed Aakash Gupta for a long time to learn about product growth and product interview, he happened to release a blog post covering this question in the middle of my application. I read and adopted his principle, really to see differences in interviewers' responses before and after.

His principles are (in my own recap):

• Cover your weaknesses and flip them into strength.

  • Covering your weaknesses upfront to put an ease to your interviewers' mind and reduce their friction of asking you tricky questions to review your weaknesses.

  • And while addressing your weaknesses, make them feel like you are in total control of your weaknesses.

• Subtly answer "Why you choose this role and this company" by telling the story of your (most relevant) career until now.

• Keep your answer in 2 minutes, longer will put your interviewer out of focus.

Aakash shows off his points really well in this video.

2. "Describe a product or feature that you did in your past job."

To prepare for this question, I selected some of the key features (either big success or great failure with long list of lessons learned) that I delivered and placed them under a product wall in my portfolio. This helped me to recall in clear details what happened in the past and prepared for any follow up question of the interviewers.

I practice a story-telling approach for each of the feature following the STAR model, which stands for Situation-Task-Action-Result. The model allows me to show how much involvement I have in the outcome based on the amount of information I provide.

Always expect to have follow up questions after you are done with you past product story. My tip for this is to practice as much as possible. The more experience you have, the more you will know what to include in your answer, and what to exclude in order to save yourself from painful-to-answer follow up questions.

3. "What would you do if you are a product manager of <company name>"

I only encountered this once when I was interviewed in a B2C company. To be honest, I don't think I ever hit the best case of finding answers for this question, but since the reaction of the interviewers were alright (and I did receive an offer for that company), I would like to share how I prepared for this question as well.

Before the day I interviewed for that B2C company, I did a mental reflection on what problems I and others around me encounter while using their products. I brainstormed in my notebook the following points:

1. The customer segment that I want to target.

• Example: Office workers order food in food delivery app.

2. The problem they have while using the product in the form of a job story:

• When I <current state>

• I want to <emotional or functional need>

• So that I can <desired state>

• Example: When I am hungry after long hours of work which creates mental exhaustion, I want to easily select the food that I know I like to eat, so that I can be free from another mental burden and have an ease of mind.

3. Some suggested solutions and supporting arguments for the solutions.

• Example: For busy office worker, they might have a tendency to repeat the same food order every week. What if we highlight the past order block in the first view of the app homepage and sort the restaurants position by number of past orders. This might reduce the time user scrolling to find the food they want to eat, which could lead to churn if they are unable to decide what they want to eat, this is more likely to happen if their head is exhausted by their busy working day.

4. Metrics to evaluate hypothesis before implementation.

• Example:

  • Percentage of users with repeated orders within a month.

  • CTR of past order block on home screen.

4. Question for freshers

What if you are interviewing for a way out-of-your-league company, they know you have the potential but lack the experience?

Well, I have never been in a B2B or SaaS company, and my experience when interviewing a B2B company included 2 questions that the first thought that popped up in my head when I heard them was "I definitely gonna fail":

• "If our company wants to build this [...] feature as in your previous company, how can you make it more successful?" - SVP of Product

• "If I give you 1 billion dollars, how can you build an e-commerce product that is better than Amazon?" - Engineer Manager

I don't remember clearly my answer for those questions because I was really nervous. Luckily, those questions happened within my last interview, therefore I had enough of failure experience before that to calm myself down (by making some jokes with the interviewers here and there) and start thinking rationally.

How would you answer those questions if you were asked? Comment below so that I can learn from you as well :D

5. Reverse interview

Reverse interview is when the interviewer say "Do you have any question for us?", unless that interviewer is terrible and I don't want to spend any second in the interview, my answer will always be "yes". Since this not only shows my interest towards the company and leaves off some good impression, but also a chance for me to check if there is any matching core value.

My reverse interview questions including:

• Questions regarding the company's strategy

  1. What is your vision for the development of the product?

  2. Why did the company decide to enter Vietnam market?

  3. <some customized questions for each industry>

• Questions to detect 🚩

  1. How do you measure success in your product team? (this question is asked to check if we share the same core value)

  2. Have you ever been in situation when you had to choose between deadline and quality? And how did you solve it? (a company that values deadline over quality is a clear red flag for me)

  3. When was the last time you talk to a user? (the answers of this question tells me how they conduct discovery for their product)

  4. Does the current team and company have any problem? (if the answer is no, then it is a big red flag for me since problem is inevitable)

  5. Why is this position vacant? (to check what happened in the past and what is looking forward in the future)

  6. If I were lucky to receive this position, then what is your expectation for me? (my favorite question to check if the future work is what I want)

Conclusion

"Practice makes perfect" and "fake it until you make it" are my all time motto when doing interview. In this blog I cover rather the easier part of a product interview, there are harder things such as homework assignment or case study questions (which I was lucky enough not having through those in my previous job offers).

Hope this blog can give you some reference for your product interview. Good luck!