How to get into product management?

1. Breaking into Product
Management
Seshadri Vyas M
www.linkedin.com/in/seshadrivyas
https://twitter.com/izotope86

2. Breaking into Product Management
1. Understanding the obvious -
a. Understand the PM hiring process & excelling at the game
1. Exploring the new -
a. 2 exercises to build the PM muscle

3. Part #1: PM Interview Process

4. Understanding the process
Resume → Recruiter screening → Interview → Offer → Joining

5. Resume - overrated, but necessary
● You have 20 seconds
● Prioritise and show only the most important relevant information for that job
● Attitude
○ Key words like “learn”, “opportunity”, “desire to make an impact”
○ Side projects - are pure gold.
○ Did you adapt your resume for the job you are applying?
○ Don’t try to please
● Raw skills
○ Academic pedigree track record
○ Spelling mistakes
○ Sentence structure

6. Recruiter screening - there is no escaping
this
● Unfortunately,
○ recruiters are short on time, deal with a lot of low quality profiles and aren’t the most
talented in connecting the obvious
○ so they learn to develop rules to screen candidates
● It doesn’t matter to them if the rules are bad dumb
● So play the game and clear the filters by
○ Sounding professional
○ Listening to them and tuning your pitch accordingly
○ Attracting them to you

7. Here is what happens behind the scenes

8. PM Interviews - Master the dark art
Every PM interview process tests for 5 different skills
● Product design
● Problem solving
● Numerical skills
● Tech understanding
● Situational leadership (behavioral)
For entry level PMs, Product design is the single most important skill.

9. PM Interviews - some sweeping
generalizations
1. PM interviews are not fair
1. When in doubt most companies don’t hire
1. Most companies want to see a spike - you need to be good in all rounds, but excellent in at least
one
1. Referrals work the best

10. Here’s what happens behind the scenes

11. Here’s what happens behind the scenes

12. Offer - don’t immediately accept your first
PM offer
● Not all PM jobs are equal
● Assess your job offer in terms of (in order of priority)
○ Learning potential
○ Manager mentorship
○ Peer group quality
○ Designation
○ Compensation
○ B2B vs B2C
○ Product/Company maturity
○ Exit options
● It’s ok to ask the HR/hiring manager about these things. Good teams value these questions.

13. Traps to avoid
● Reasons to reject an offer
○ Interviewers make you feel small/talk to you condescendingly
○ Interviewers come late and don’t apologise
○ Interviewers expect you to call them Sir/Ma’am
○ Interviewers don’t like it if you ask them tough questions or call your questions as bad
○ Exceptions are ok, but if this happens
● It’s also ok join a company for a few months and exit if it doesn’t work out. But don’t do this
often.
● Avoid the Secretary Problem.

14. Part #2: Building the PM muscle

15. IQ contest or Bodybuilding?
● PMs are often the smartest people in a room. They’re well read, have an
opinion about most things in life and express it clearly.
● This leads most people to think that PMing is only for someone with very
high intelligence, great academic record or a tech guru.
● Truth is PMing is more like bodybuilding. Anyone can do it.
● But it takes dedicated time and effort to do get better at it.

16. Exercise #1: Getting better at Product
Design
Example: How will you improve WhatsApp?
1. What - metric
2. Who - user
3. Why - pain points/motivations
4. What - ideas
5. Which - priority
6. Why not - risks

17. The answer does not matter. Structure does.
1. Components of the answer
a. State your assumptions
b. Ask clarifying questions
c. Check-in with the interviewer often
2. Order matters
a. Talk about the what, who, why, what, which and why not in that order
3. Speed matters.
a. I’ve never rejected or been rejected in this round if I’ve gotten to two questions in 45 mins.
4. If you are stuck - make an assumption, then move on.
5. Accuracy or realistic solutions don’t matter much. But don’t be crazy.

18. Source

19. Exercise #2: Getting better at problem
solving
● Most entry level PM jobs are tactical in nature. This means that you’ll be
left to find answers to why some important metric suddenly dropped.
● Example: Google searches have suddenly dropped. How will you find out
what happened?

20. 1. Components of the answer
a. Repeat the question and catch nuances
b. Ask clarifying questions
c. Check-in with the interviewer often
2. Approach matters
a. Build your own framework
3. Breadth and depth of your direction matters
a. List the categories and ask for feedback. The go deep into that category.
4. If you are stuck - ask for help
5. Even though I didn’t find an answer, I’ve never been rejected in this round or rejected someone
who has a good structure.
The answer does not matter. Structure does.

21. Source

22. Practice
Mock interviews with people from around the world for free
● Lewis Linn’s community - here
● Product Management Exercises productmanagementexercises.com
● Exponent (Paid) tryexponent.com

23. Closing thoughts
PM Interviews -
1. Always be interviewing -
2. Start preparing well in advance
3. Stop preparing a few days before
4. Improvise and connect with your interviewer
PM Muscle -
1. Practice
2. Read

24. Reading tips - the two mistakes I’ve made
1. We trust websites/publications more. This tends to be a problem in quality
of articles. You want to read long form articles from smart people and
publications tend to average out quality. So the below table is a list of
people whose work I'll read, no matter what the topic is. Follow them on
Twitter and see everything that they publish.
2. Snack reading is useless. If what you read is not consuming you
completely, then it is not adding value. Articles you read must make you
feel like taking notes.

25. Good luck!