93: What to expect from your face-to-face product manager interview

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned the hard way about product management. You can catch up on the previous entries if you like.

Your product manager interview is as much about you getting to know your interviewers as it is the other way around. Here’s what you can expect along with my tips for standing out from the crowd.

In this article

• Introduction
• A bizarre social dance
• Types of questions
• Clarify and take time to think
• Scenario exercise
• Cultural fit interviews
• Asking questions
• How to ace the interview
• Final thoughts

One of my most endearing job interviews was just before I graduated from university. It involved a CEO taking me for an informal lunch, then making me do crossword puzzles in lieu of anything resembling an interview. He later offered me a job, and whilst I slightly regret not taking it, to this day I still have no idea what job he was recruiting me to do.

A bizarre social dance

Interviews are a bizarre social dance and you’ve just got to go through the steps. It annoys me that interviewers seem to correlate how a candidate is dressed with their ability to do a job well. I’m only ever going to wear a tie to weddings and funerals, so I’m probably never going to get a job ever again. My stubbornness aside, given it’s a known bias, we might as well use it to our advantage.

Other people might say that a candidate dressing smartly is a way to show respect for the interviewer and that you’re serious for the job. Personally I think that turning up appropriately early (15-20 mins before your interview time), being polite and prepared, following up to thank the interviewer for their time and consideration are all better ways to convey this. Just maybe don’t turn up in a clown costume.

Types of questions

Face-to-face interviews can take lots of different forms. Some interviewers walk step-by-step through the candidate’s résumé. I don’t as I’ve typically asked about anything unusual on a quick screening call long before this stage. I expect a résumé to be concise, truthful and well-presented, but it tells me little reliably about how someone thinks and acts in person.

Some interviews follow what’s called a competency-based framework. This is typically of the form, ‘describe a time when you’ve had to manage conflict’ (or some other competency the hiring panel is looking for). Usually, there will be 3-4 competencies associated with the role and the panel will score your example based on how well (and realistically) your example demonstrated it.

I can’t speak for other interviewers, however I’m always sceptical about ‘happy ever after’ examples that seem to resolve too neatly for the candidate. Real life is more messy than that, and I expect a bit of self-reflection from a candidate on what they had learned and would have done differently, given the chance. By far the worst response to a competency-based interview question was a candidate who told us in unflinching detail how he’d run his startup into the ground, then was adamant he’d do it all again in exactly the same way.

You’re almost certainly going to be asked why you left or are leaving your last job, so have a good response ready. Even if the parting is entirely bad-natured, contain any strong emotional response and avoid saying precisely what you think about your (soon-to-be) former co-workers or manager. Maintain some emotional distance and instead think of yourself as the editor taking some messy content and teasing out some coherent narrative threads.

Clarify and take time to think

Under the pressure of an interview, it’s not uncommon for candidates to go off on a tangent and forget the question they were originally asked. Doing this once or maybe twice is forgiveable, but if you keep doing it you’re only going to irritate the interviewers and will be unlikely to score very highly. If the question is unclear or ambiguous, seek clarification of what the interviewer wants to learn about.

Along similar lines, don’t be afraid to think about something before you’ve answered, or to talk through your thinking if there’s a few different alternatives depending on the context, but don’t use that technique for every single question. If you leave a massive pause while you’re thinking before you answer any question, it just gets a little bit tedious.

Scenario exercise

Given how much of product management involves solving problems under a bit of pressure, your interviewers will probably give you some kind of scenario to work through to simulate that. I’m not personally a fan of the ‘estimate how many gas stations there are in the US’ kind of question (Fermi estimation), because it tells me little about your ability to be a product manager. I appreciate the point of the question is about a candidate’s approach to critical evaluation rather than getting the right answer, but in real life everyone would simply Google the answer and get on with the next thing.

More often you’ll be given a case study to prepare and present. Jason Knight posted recently about the different types of task:

Toy tasks (“Imagine you’re a PM at a fireworks company and you want to increase conversion. How would you do it?”)

Free Work tasks (“How would you handle this very specific situation that we’re solving right now?”)

Hiring Company Past work tasks (“Here’s some scenario we’ve already solved, what would you have done?”)

Candidate’s Past Work tasks (“Tell me about a time you did something that is similar to what we care about”)

Jason Knight on LinkedIn, 12 July 2024 (retrieved 14 July 2024)

I find tasks like this to be a two-edged sword. What I want as an interviewer is a good insight into how a candidate thinks, communicates and behaves ‘normally’, i.e. without the interview performance. I don’t think there’s any one perfect way to achieve that, however I do like getting candidates to talk through an exercise they’ve only had 20 minutes to think about. Pre-prepared tasks, where the candidate has had a couple of days to work on it, tend to become overly rehearsed.

Nevertheless, I believe set tasks do have some value. They provide useful insights into how well a candidate is able to identify and convey key points of information succinctly and clearly when under time pressure, as well as their approach and instincts to the exercise itself.

Any interview exercise is going to be artificial when it lacks the messy context of a real world scenario, and there’s never a single ‘right’ answer. I appreciate when a candidate goes a bit meta and challenges the premise of the exercise rather than simply tackling it at face value. For me, it shows that they’re also thinking about why the question is being asked, and how that provides extra context to the way they approach answering it.

Ideally they can also show they understand what skills or thought processes they’re being asked to demonstrate by then ‘playing along’ with the exercise, while continuing to acknowledge its artificial nature and explaining what context they’re lacking and how they’d seek it out.

Cultural fit interviews

Sometimes you’ll have a technical interview where somebody checks to see whether you’re good at product management, and then there will be a further interview where the bosses decide whether they like the look of you.

I loathe these so-called cultural fit interviews because they’re often more a subjective reflection of the biases and norms of the senior manager than an objective assessment of the candidate. They undermine all the efforts to reduce unconscious bias throughout the interview process, and ultimately lead to less diversity within an organisation. If someone’s competent, capable, motivated and emotionally intelligent, that’s all that should matter. Whenever I have any say in the matter, I will always discourage these from happening.

If you find yourself in a cultural fit interview, I would always advocate being yourself because you can never truly know what the interviewers are looking for.

Asking questions

At the end of the interview, you’ll usually be given the opportunity to ask questions. I don’t think you should ask about things like salary, bonuses or benefits at this stage, because it’s going to reflect badly on your motivations. That discussion will happen later as and when you get a job offer. Do ask about the product team and its ways of working, if they have not already been described.

Don’t be afraid to ask reasonably searching questions about the product and its performance, but do so diplomatically. You’re assessing as much whether you want to work for the organization, as much as the interviewers are assessing you. The interviewers’ willingness (or not) to talk openly about problems can be a useful insight into the culture there. It’s a tricky balance to strike so be attentive to the reaction of the interviewers when you’re asking certain questions.

If you get a really defensive response to a particular question, you might have touched on something that’s dysfunctional, or which the interviewers are not comfortable to talk about in an interview setting with someone who is still currently an outsider. Sometimes you can talk about a situation where you’ve dealt with something similar. This can be a way to defuse the tension while also showing that you are able to help in those scenarios. Otherwise, make a call on whether to drop that line of questioning and move on.

How to ace the interview

For me at least, you can ace the interview by showing me you know and care about what you’re saying.

Prove to me that you’ll be able to do the job, not just adequately, but really, really well. Make me feel like you’ve been a part of the team for ages already. Give me the confidence that you’ll enhance the team to be greater than the sum of its parts. Show me you have understanding, intelligence, self-awareness, good grace, and wit.

You don’t have to be a perfect human being by any stretch. You don’t have to be the perfect product manager either, but show me you’re a good human being who is able to and wants to solve problems, rather than one that will create and fuel them.

Good luck!

Final thoughts

No matter how much you want a job, you can only control how well you prepare and how you present yourself on the day. Other factors, such as what the interviewers are looking for in a candidate, how objectively they’re running the interviews, and which other candidates they’ve seen, are outside of your control. I can only advise you to be yourself and to try as best you can to show the interviewers how much they need you on their team.