Community Success Story: How I Landed 3 PM Job Offers

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Cracking a PM interview is possible but requires work: especially at leading companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Wish. In the third installment of our community success story series, we interviewed Janani, a PM Exercise Community member to learn about how PM Exercises helped her ace her interviews and get 3 job offers! 

Read on to learn more! 

Which companies were you applying for? 

I was applying for all companies that had a presence in Canada including Amazon, Microsoft, Wish, Dropbox, Yelp, Uber, and Wayfair.

Which companies gave you an offer? 

Amazon, Microsoft, and Wish

How did you plan for your interview? What was your interview prep process like? 

When I started initially, it was brute force. I banked heavily on my working knowledge and experience. 

I interviewed at Yelp prior to Wish, but unfortunately, I tanked the interview. I asked for feedback – something I’d highly recommend to anyone – was told that I could have been more structured in my responses. That set me on a path to Google “product management interview preparations,” which was the point I discovered  PM Exercises.

Outside of reviewing every single question and answer on PM Exercises I delved through all the answers, I also spent hours on YouTube prep videos. 

My prep schedule was like this:

1. Weekends – self-learning. I spent about 8 hours every weekend on self-preparation.
   1. I would look through these three resources for frameworks, and I figured out a framework that I was comfortable with for all types of questions. 
   2. I would listen to YouTube videos of product management mock interviews to get a sense of the type of follow-up questions and the general structure of answers. 
   3. I would pick a type of question each day of the weekend, and I would try to answer it aloud. Invariably I would get stuck at two stages – Identifying users and defining user pain points. This step gave me insights into where I was faltering. 
   4. Then I would look through PM Exercises for answers from Platinum level users and responses from Bijan for some answers. This step gave me an idea of different perspectives in answering questions. Notably, it helped me in areas that I lacked – helped me understand how to think. 
   5. I had several Google Docs that listed down the frameworks to internalize them and had answers for each of the question types. 
2. Weekdays – mock interviews. I had an average of 1 mock every day – about 1.5 hours each – so, 7 hours each week.
   1. Mock partners were primarily from Lewis Lin’s community. I had a Calendly that I had set up with my evenings after work. Over weekends, I would send out a message in the Slack community and get meetings set up for the next week. 
   2. Initially, I was a novice, so I wanted folks who had much more experience in the mocks. But it was a chicken and egg problem – I was a novice but wanted experienced folks to help me level up, but experienced folks wanted to practice with other experienced folks to fine-tune. So, I offered to listen in to other mocks so that I had mock interview numbers. 
   3. Once I started taking mocks, I rotated between different question types – Execution, Strategy, Sense, Design, Estimation, etc. One tip here – this helped me stay on track for all kinds of questions. I found that most of the mock partners insisted only on Sense/Design type of questions for them, and I found that they were thrown off when asked an Execution/Estimation question.
   4. I realized that with more mocks, I became more comfortable coming up with Users and their needs – the areas where I felt I needed work. 
   5. I was also very good at providing feedback for my partners that helped them grow and surprisingly, it helped me understand what not to do and how not to think. 

How many questions do you think you practiced? 

In total, I prepped for about 8-10 weeks. During the week, I would practice about 2 questions per day, and over the weekend, I would practice 4 per day.

How many mock interviews do you think you practiced? 

I probably did about 20 mock interviews during my preparation.

How did you find the interview questions and answers on PM Exercises? How did you practice with them? 

PM Exercises helped me most when it came to product design and general product know-how! 

How much did you follow the frameworks in PM Exercises? 

I had a combination of frameworks for Sense/Execution. I loved the frameworks for Estimation/Pricing/Design/Strategy, and I followed them “to a T.” 

What is your advice to people that are preparing for their interviews? Do you have any tips? 

1. Be methodical – I found that there were a lot of mock interests for weekends. While understandable that people are preparing while working, I wondered (from some mocks) if the interviewee would benefit from some introspection rather than simply knocking off practices. After every mock, I would write down the feedback I got and try to incorporate them in the next mocks. I could visibly see my improvement day after day. With improvements in my delivery and answers, my confidence greatly improved, and this became a virtuous cycle. 
2. Be humble – There will be some actual interviews you will bomb, no matter what. Take them as “real-mocks” instead of failures. I had a few mock partners who fell off the wagon due to low morale as they started attending actual interviews and couldn’t make it. 
3. Be healthy – I managed a very rigorous lifestyle. I maintained a very predictable routine on weekdays and weekends – a time to study, a time to exercise, a time to take my mind off all these. 
4. Sleep – I cannot stress enough the need to sleep well. Initially, when I started, I ate up some of my sleep time, and it was disastrous. I was tired all day to even think about practice. Once I fixed my sleep schedules, I improved in my responses and ideas! 

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