Main takeaways: -My story! What went well and how I did it. -Mini case study- where I solve a PM question live. -Pointers to effective resources (what books to read and how to prepare). -Walk away with a PM interview toolkit.

1. Preparing for the PM Interview
by YouTube Product Leader
www.productschool.com

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5. Preparing for the PM Interview
Practical Guide for early-mid career PMs
Debbie Biswas | Product Leader, Youtube
Nov 7, 2021
Product School

6. DISCLAIMER
Content presented in this deck is my personal opinion and is in no way
related to any of my current or previous employers

7. Agenda
(~30 mins of practical PM interview tips)
➔ [10 mins] My story (Entrepreneur -> PM)
➔ [10 mins] How to prepare?
◆ What to focus on/ not focus on?
◆ Free access to PM toolkit
➔ [10 mins] Mini Case Study

8. My Story...

9. Career path: Entrepreneur to PM

10. Why be a PM?
Enjoy ‘building’ products/business end-to-end, not necessarily
code, comfortable leading w/o authority, go broad than deep,
enjoy talking to people, comfortable with data, business acumen
Transferable Skill Sets
Built a business, worked with engineers, did my own user
research, held user interviews, guided my UX team, launched a
marketing campaign, pitched business to investors
Writing your resume
● Craft your resume to talk about PM skills - Stakeholder
Management, Roadmap Planning, Prioritization of
features etc
● Do a side project to showcase your PM skills (e.g build an
app, build a small service etc)
● Take professional course (Stanford PM), (Kellogg PM),
(Product School)
Find the right role
There are many types of PMs - Consumer PM, Data PMs,
tech-specialized PM, Backend PM, Research PM - Make sure you
evaluate what type of PMing suits you, DO NOT interview for
every role under the sun

11. How to prepare…
(5 things...thats it)

12. Read ‘Cracking the PM interview’
● This book is sufficient in itself to get a good overview of
PM life, PM interview, sample questions etc
● PMing is not a ‘read a book to learn’ profession,
therefore reading a tonne of PM prep books is not the
key, practicing PM skills is.

13. Four broad interview question types
● Product Strategy (‘Should Tesla invest in
wind powered automobiles)
● Product Design (‘ Design an app for
delivering emergency equip/medicines for
road accidents’)
● Product Estimation/ Analytical (‘How
much memory is needed to store Google
maps data?’)
1. CASE QUESTIONS
● Resume Related (Describe the
challenges in xyz project, how did you
overcome it)
● Situational
○ Imagine your eng partner is being
unreceptive to your proposal, what
would you do?
○ Imagine you have two features, x1,
x2, how will you prioritise b/w the
two?
2. BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS
4. COMPANY/ ROLE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
● Questions related to a specific technology,
previous experience in a role
3. TECHNICAL QUESTIONS
● System Design: Design a facebook
notification system
● Other Technical: What should be the
refresh rate of the instagram feed?

14. Continued...
● Product Strategy (‘Should Tesla invest in
wind powered automobiles)
● Product Design (‘ Design an app for
delivering emergency equip/medicines for
road accidents’)
● Product Estimation/ Analytical (‘How
much memory is needed to store Google
maps data?’)
1. CASE QUESTIONS
● Resume Related (Describe the
challenges in xyz project, how did you
overcome it)
● Situational
○ Imagine your eng partner is being
unreceptive to your proposal, what
would you do?
○ Imagine you have two features, x1,
x2, how will you prioritise b/w the
two?
2. BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS
4. COMPANY/ ROLE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
● Questions related to a specific technology,
previous experience in a role
3. TECHNICAL QUESTIONS
● System Design: Design a facebook
notification system
● Other Technical: What should be the
refresh rate of the instagram feed?
GOOGLE

15. Practice is KEY
REPEAT WARNING!
You cannot learn to be a good PM by just reading a book, you need to PRACTICE
for interviews and in real PM life skills too
BEST WAYS TO PRACTICE:
● Find a practice partner: e.g Lewis Lin Slack channel (link)
● Glassdoor past interview questions: Use glassdoor to get a sense of the types of
questions asked by a particular company, invest time to collect these questions in a
spreadsheet, use it to practice
● 25-5 Rule: Most case questions last 25 to 40 mins , for practicing take 25 mins to
solve and use 5 mins to gather feedback from your partner then repeat.
● Quality over Quantity: Practicing 10 cases properly, improving using feedback >>
Practicing 50 cases but not incorporating feedback
● Create your own frameworks as you go: No case can be moulded into a cookie
cutter solution, develop your own unique frameworks - keep it to 5-7 frameworks and
use them to attack a problem.

16. Focus MORE on PM Skills than Technical Skills
Guess what! You are being hired to be a PM, not an engineer. Focus on honing and
showcasing PM skills, do not try to learn a new coding language or database design just
for an interview.
● System Design Questions Practice: Grokking the system design interview (link)
● Good high level (ONLY) understanding of how tech of the product/company
works: If you don’t know what the best database is (that’s fine) as long as you
understand at a high level how databases work

17. Know your Industry
Be curious and follow your industry very closely, know the recent trends, news articles
etc. Its not just good for interviewing but in the future for your job as well.
● Strategic Articles: www.stratechery.com
● Technology News: www.techcrunch.com
● NYT/Bloomberg/venturebeat
● Industry Specific dailies: bitcoin, AR/VR tech, e-comm etc

18. Time to solve a case

19. Product Strategy Question
Should Tesla invest in the ridesharing economy? If you had to
create a 10 year strategy for this, what would it be?

20. First understand the scope of the question clearly
Should Tesla invest in the ridesharing economy? If you had to
create a 10 year strategy for this, what would it be?
● Do not jump to conclusions immediately- e.g the answer to the first question could be NO
based on your analysis
● Ask for clarifications - e.g what does ridesharing economy mean?
● Detailing your solution, based on the time you have - e.g 10 year strategy in reality could
take months of planning and probably a 30+ pager deck (the interviewer is not expecting this
from you)

21. Use a rough framework to start and work through it
New business/feature dev framework
(adapted from Porter’s 5 Forces)
Industry/
Environment
Company
Customers
Competition
New Entry/ Threat to
Substitution

22. Jot down questions that are relevant
Industry/Environment Company Competition Customers Entry/Substitution
How mature is the
ridesharing economy (US,
World)?
What is the reason it was
successful?
What are the current socio
/economic challenges?
How would the industry
evolve in the next 10 years?
SWOT
What resources do we
have? Need?
What other areas we are
investing in?
Does it align with our
core business?
Who are the competitors in
this space?
How big are they? How are
they doing?
What is their business
moat?
Why would it be hard/ easy
for an outsider to compete
against them?
Who are our customers?
Who are ridesharing
customers?
Is there an overlap?
How big is the customer
base? How big is the
addressable market?
What is the switching cost
of the customer?
How easy is it to enter this
market?
Are there any substitutions
available now or in the
future?
Draw prelim conclusions
Pre-lim concl. 1 Pre-lim concl. 2 Pre-lim concl. 3 Pre-lim concl. 4 Pre-lim concl. 5

23. Guesstimate numbers as you go
● Size of the industry
● How much investment would be needed (People, Infrastructure)
● What is the TAM?
● What is the value of our other businesses? (rough estimates are okay)
Use quick back of the envelope calculations to get to numbers you can use to make a decision

24. PM Interview Toolkit
https://bit.ly/3BQNrgB

26. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training