Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology

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.

take broad ideas and make them tangible and actionable.

Teams follow PMs when they’re convinced that their goals align and that the PM will help them better achieve their goals.

One reason product management is such an appealing career is you get to sit at the intersection of technology, business, and design. You get to wear many hats and learn multiple points of view

You can also think about these goals at a higher level. You can think about not only what you do with a product, but why you do it. What is the underlying motivation? For example, the underlying motivation for the keychain might be independence.

One online product.
One physical “offline” product. Interviewers love to try to “stump” candidates by asking them to assess a physical product.
One product you purchased recently.
Your “favorite” product or website.
A product you think is well designed.
The company or team’s product.

always expectations for time/benefit trade-offs with any feature. A lot of these calls end up being forced during a production cycle, and the product manager has to be a couple steps ahead of potential issues to ensure that the final product strikes the right balance of time to market and success in the market.
Analytics – in the end, the team largely depends on the product manager to have run the numbers, and have the detail on what pieces of the feature are critical to hitting the goals for the feature. They also expect the product manager to have a deep understanding of the performance of existing features (and competitor features), if any.

Product specification – the necessary level of detail to ensure clarity about what the team is building.
Edge case decisions – very often, unexpected and complicated edge cases come up. Typically, the product manager is on the line to quickly triage those decisions for potentially ramifications to other parts of the product.
Project management – there are

uite simply, it’s the product manager’s job to articulate two simple things:

What game are we playing?
How do we keep score?

Well, let me first think a bit about what the market looks like right now, including the company, competition, customers, and general landscape.