Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (Cracking the Interview & Career)

by Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Ask about who you’ll be working with on your core and extended team. Find out how much of your time will be spent writing specs and how much you’ll be working with designers.

Not trusting the engineers’ estimates and promising other teams that the work will be done sooner than the engineers agree to is one of the fastest ways to ruin your relationship with the team.

Innovation To encourage innovation, Google has a program called “20% time.” This is a policy where engineers and PMs can spend 20% of their time on a company-related side project. To start a 20% project, you don’t need any approval; you just start working on it. There are internal sites where you can post your project and try to recruit other people to join you. Many big products at Google such as Gmail, Google News, and Orkut started in someone’s 20% time. All of this innovation and freedom can make Google a PM’s dream. If you have a project you’re passionate about, not only do you get the time and freedom to work on it, but you’re also surrounded by brilliant engineers who have extra time to help out!

At Microsoft, the program manager role is unique in scope and influence. A PM serves as a business analyst, a project manager, and a creative force. Microsoft also has one of the highest PM-to-developer ratios. These combine to make the Microsoft PM role a very hands-on position. Teams are frequently PM-driven, with the program manager making every user-facing decision. As

Microsoft is a company where many employees expect to spend their whole career.

Microsoft looks for program managers who are big-picture thinkers, who can solve problems, and who can get stuff done. Uche from Microsoft says, “We wants people with inquisitive minds. People who look at things from multiple perspectives. As a PM, you’ll wear many hats, so how you think is more important than any particular technical skill.” Microsoft

If you ask interviewers what they’re looking for in PM candidates, they’ll usually say that they are looking for smart people who get stuff done.

The requirements list will be more detailed, but it will ultimately boil down to two criteria: Can you be trusted to make the right decisions? Can you push through all of the potential roadblocks to deliver a great product? You will want to focus on these criteria when you’re thinking about what kinds of experience to acquire.

For example, whenever possible, see your projects through to the end. Focus on understanding the things you did and the outcomes of your actions. Understand not only if your outcome was successful, but by what metrics it was successful—or not. Consider what it is that drove the success or lack of success. It’s okay to fail sometimes, but you need to know why you failed.

There’s still room to build up your experience though: Launch! The most important way a product manager is judged is by the products she’s launched.

Take on responsibilities to round out your skills. If you’ve always been really strong in product design, see if you can learn data analysis. If you’ve been working on deep technical problems, see if you can spend some time doing user research.

Here’s the simple answer: many people without a background in computer science struggle to form a strong working relationship with engineers.

Here are some skills you can emphasize when looking for PM roles: Analysis. Do you work with data at your current job? Are you an Excel ninja? Many software companies are looking for data-driven PMs who can make sense of metrics and draw insights from usage patterns. Customer Focus. Are you in a customer-facing role? Have you learned how to translate customer feedback into action? Companies love product managers who understand customers and their needs. Business Savvy. Are you comfortable putting together business cases? Do you know how to size a market? Your experience can be a real asset in making the right business decisions. Marketing. Do you have a background in marketing? Can you effectively communicate the value of a product? Marketing skills can help a PM design a product that will do well in the marketplace. Industry Expertise. Do you have deep knowledge of how your industry works? If so, you have a leg up on applying to PM jobs in that industry. Your understanding of the industry means you can be a productive PM in a short amount of time.

One of the best ways to improve your candidacy for a product management position is to start a side project.

Tips and Tricks for Career Advancement

Ship great products

Get some launches under your belt

Become the expert

Find teams where you can pick up new skills

Pick the company where you’ll learn the most

Choose a growing company

Find a manager who believes in you

Focus on your own efficiency.

Help your team with something tangible early on. Most teams are a little bit suspicious of new PMs. They’re worried you’ll create busy work for them or slow them down in other ways.

Work on something that’s important to your team and the company.

Take on cross-team or company-wide tasks. At some point in your career, your visibility across the company is going to matter if you want to be promoted to higher positions.

Define and measure success.

Depending on the project, success might mean more user growth, increased revenue, or increased customer engagement. For other projects you might have a more specific feature-based goal. Think about what you’re aiming for, communicate that to your team, and measure whether you’re hitting it. This makes it clear when you’re achieving your goals

Demonstrate you can consistently deliver work at the next level.

Build credibility. “Credibility is the currency of a PM,”

The most straightforward way to build credibility is delivering results.

What advice would you give to a PM who wants to advance in their career? It’s important to realize that, in a lot of PM roles, you get to a tipping point, after which making decisions and working with a team become a lot easier. Things flow more naturally. You get less cynicism and skepticism from engineers, and it enables a friendlier environment. Reaching that tipping point should be a big thought when you start a new role. Circumstances can make it easier or harder.

If you’re interviewing to be a PM, it’s good to look at every problem starting with “Who is the customer?” and “What is success?”

You get thrown into a new problem like redesign a bookstore. With little guidance, you go out and talk to users, take pictures, come back and synthesize, prototype, and bring your prototype back to user to see how it works.

Young PMs can do that on their own. If you live in Mountain View, take a potential task, such as how to make the Caltrain ticket machine a delightful experience, and go through those steps. Observe, take pictures, talk to people using the machine, and find out who they are. Figure out your personas - maybe they’re commuters or tourists. Then synthesize the problems. Maybe there’s glare on the display. You synthesize, prioritize, simplify down to themes, and then build prototypes. You can

I talked to a company who wanted product advice. I asked them who their users were, and they said wedding planners, bakers, personal trainers, the flower shop around the corner. So then I asked how many of those customers they’d actually talked to and they said zero. So I told them the first thing they needed to do was go out and talk to their users and find out who their users are.

Communicate what you are doing. In a big company you really need people above you who will allocate resources and get conflicting projects to be on your side, so messaging what you are achieving becomes important.

Twitter PMs will generally not be asked coding questions, but they may be asked how to technically design a product. You should understand concepts like preloading and calculating on the fly.

Once you’re in the door, you go through two phone screens with other PMs who ask typical PM questions about your favorite products and potential improvements.

These will include PMs who ask product questions, engineers who go through a technical screen, and product designers who may ask you to design a new product workflow on the whiteboard.

Dropbox has a very focused set of products, so be familiar with all of them and think through what you would do if you were a PM there.

Rule #1: Shorter is Better

Rule #2: Bullets, Not Blobs

Rule #3: Accomplishments, Not Responsibilities

Instead, you want to focus on your accomplishments. Prove to the resume screener you had an impact.

Making your resume accomplishment oriented goes beyond that, though. After all, if you took the earlier example bullet and converted it to past tense, it still wouldn’t be a true accomplishment.

Instead, list the concrete ways you had

an impact. Focus on the impact itself; the “what” more so than the “how” (altho...

As much as possible, quantify your accomplishments. How much money did you make for your company? How much time did you save your team? By how much did you improve c...

If you have an existing resume, it might help to start from scratch with one of these questions in mind: What are the five things you are most proud of? What would your team...