There’s a common misconception about what it’s like to do a Product Manager interview. Most think that it’s difficult and challenging. Because they have this perception about the process, they also think that the Product Manager interview prep is going to be as grueling. 

I believe it’s the opposite. It just takes practice and persistence. Through these, you will really learn how to think and operate like a Product Manager (PM) over a period of time which help you ace your PM interview.

I’ve put together this Product Manager interview prep guide that provides steps on how you can steadily prepare for a PM interview. 

I’ve learned throughout my career that the Product Manager interview preparation is a marathon, not a sprint. You start small and continue to grow steadily. 

At times, it gets so frustrating to remember the structure of the answers that are expected from you. It’s just as hard to think on your toes and come up with an out-of-the-box solution on how to improve a product or service that seems ‘already perfect’ (for example, How would you improve Google Maps?). 

But once you go through enough exercises, you’ll realize that the questions and the process itself are easy to do as long as you stick to the structure and mindset that’s expected of you during the interviews.

I am hoping that PM Exercises will give you what you need to prepare for your job interviews and have a better career.

To stay up to date with the latest Product Manager interview questions posted on PM Exercises, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to send me an email.

Good luck!

Bijan

How to Prepare for Product Manager Interviews

Here’s our guide on how to prepare for product manager interviews using PM Exercises. Both existing and soon-to-become Product Managers are welcome to use this guide:

1) Familiarize Yourself with the Product Manager Interview Process

The Product Manager interview process will be different depending on the company you’re applying to, your seniority, and the type of Product Manager role you’re aiming for (example, Technical Product Manager).

All of the interviews, however, have common elements. It will be to your advantage if you know what these common elements are. Let’s start with the basics:

Duration

The duration will depend entirely on the company. There are cases when the process is wrapped up in 4-8 weeks but there are also some cases where it can go as long as 3 months. 

Typical Process

Usually, the process involves submitting your initial application (cover letter and resume with references), doing a phone interview with HR or with a recruiter, then 1-2 phone interviews with the company’s hiring manager. 

After that, a candidate will be invited onsite to do about 3-7 interviews. Please take note that the onsite interviews will not all happen in one day. You will have to go through several rounds set on separate days. After this, the decision will be made.

2) Go Through a Self-Paced PM Interview Course

At PM Exercises, you will find a Product Manager interview prep course that contains the knowledge you need to master your PM interview skills. There are over 100 video hours plus more than 100 online lessons that will equip and make you feel more confident before your interview.

The lessons include the most common questions asked during PM interviews, sorted into the following categories:

• Product Sense
• Execution
• Analytics
• Strategy
• Technical
• Behavioral

Aside from these, you will also learn valuable tips and insights from seasoned PMs. You might also find value in the Company Guides found on the PM prep course. If you’re aiming to apply for companies like Google, Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and more, the Company Guides are something that you might want to study thoroughly. 

Note: You would need an upgraded account to access the full course.

As you are going through the PM Exercises prep course, you’ll encounter different questions that are asked during PM interviews. You can stick to learning how to answer the questions through the course, or you can check out the “Questions” section on the website.

3) Learn How to Answer Product Manager Interview Questions

PM job interviews consist of multiple rounds. In each of the rounds, you’ll be asked a series of questions that are related to one or more of the following categories:

• Estimation
• Metrics
• Product Improvement
• Problem-solving
• Product Design
• Strategy
• Product Launch
• Technical
• Behavior

You have to be prepared to do well in all of the above categories to excel in the whole Product Manager interview process. This is why it’s important to familiarize yourself with and understand the questions that might be asked. So how do you do this efficiently and systematically? Our suggestion is to:

Pick One Category at a Time

During your interview preparation process, it’s best to focus your energy on improving your interview skills one category at a time. Once you get comfortable with your interview skills in one category, you can move on to the next one.

Practice Answering PM Interview Questions

On PM Exercises, we have compiled over 2000 Product Manager interview questions with answers from our community. 

Some of them have multiple answers and feedback from the members. Spend time reading the questions, answers, and feedback. This step helps you see how PMs take various approaches to answer a question.

Definitely, all the good answers or solutions follow the same format and structure.

Pay close attention to which answers get the highest number of likes from the community. The feedback people post generally hints at the reason they are good answers. 

What’s interesting about this step is that after reading a few questions and answers, you’ll soon realize that while the content of the good answers might vary, they all follow the format and structures described in the Product Manager interview course.

To give you an idea of what kinds of questions you can read from the database, here are some of the most popular PM interview questions listed:

Product Improvement

• How would you improve Google Maps?
• What is your favorite product? Why?
• How can you improve Facebook Stories?

➡ How to Answer Product Improvement Questions

Problem-Solving

• You are the PM for a streaming video service. You come into the office and see that one key metric has dropped by 80%. What will you do?
• You’re a PM at Amazon. You released a new feature in the items search functionality recently and found out that searches increased by 10% but the results page load time is 2 seconds longer. What would you do?
• You launched a new signup flow to encourage new users to add more profile information. A/B test results indicate that the % of people that added more information increased by 8%. However, 7 day retention decreased by 2%. What do you do?

➡ How to Answer Problem Solving Questions

Metrics

• If you were the PM for the Save feature at Facebook, what metrics would you use to define the success of this feature?
• How would you measure the success of Facebook Likes?
• What metrics would you look at as a product manager for Instagram ads?

➡ How to Answer Metrics Questions

Estimation

• Calculate the number of queries answered by Google per second.
• How many dentists are there in New York?
• If you are opening a new Walmart branch, how would you decide how many cash registers are needed for the store?

➡ How to Answer Estimation Questions

Product Design

• Build a product to buy and sell antiques.
• How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?
• How would you design a web search engine for children below 14 years old?

➡ How to Answer Product Design Questions

If you would like to check out more questions from the database, visit the Questions page under the Interview Prep menu on PM Exercises.

Post Answers to Questions

This is the step where you will be compelling yourself to follow the suggested structures on the guides by giving your own solutions to the PM questions posted on the database.

You will notice that it is easier to post answers that have already been answered by others. If you prefer to answer questions with existing answers first, then do that. But as soon as you feel comfortable, put your interview skills to the real test by answering questions that have not been answered yet. These questions are generally harder to answer because you have to start from scratch, but they represent the realities of a job interview a lot more than a question with answers that have already been provided. 

Chances are during your interview, you will be asked a question you have never practiced before and you will need to be able to come up with an answer right away.

Continue posting answers until you reach a point where you realize that your answers are receiving very positive comments and feedback from other members of the community. It’s an indication that you have learned to answer the questions properly.

Don’t Forget to Give Feedback to Others

This is the step where you give feedback to other members’ answers by providing your opinion or input in the form of comments in the PM interview questions database. 

This step is essential because it helps you see how interviewers think. It teaches you to become good at noticing when your own answers do not follow the expected structure of a good answer.

Additionally, giving feedback sets you up to become an active and valuable member of the PM Exercises community. It will come in handy later on when you want to find a partner within the community to do a mock interview.

When sharing feedback, you must keep the frameworks in the online course in mind.

4) Do Mock Interviews

Earlier, it was already suggested to give feedback as practice for yourself and as a form of being active in the community. Once you have done this, you can easily find a practice partner to do a mock interview with. 

On PM Exercises, there’s a section where you can search for members of the community who are also willing to do a mock interview. After signing up, you simply add your profile, browse through others’ profiles and then click on the “Request Mock Interview” button when you have chosen your partner.

For sure, other PMs will be checking out your profile. The more active you are, or the more quality your feedback and answers are, the more likely that they would want to partner with you.

➡ Find a mock interview partner today

In terms of how many mock interviews you should be doing, there’s no definite number. However, doing a mock interview is not a one-time thing. The practice should be done repeatedly until you feel comfortable. A good advantage of this would be getting more interview experience which will likely set you up for success when your actual interview comes. 

5) Repeat the Course and Move to a New Category

Once you feel comfortable that you can do well with the questions in the category you started with and have posted a couple of answers that other members upvote and submit positive feedback for, move to the next category and repeat steps 3 and 4.

It is easy to forget the structure and format of a good answer to an interview question. That’s why it is important that after you sharpen your skills in one category, you continue practicing your skills to keep honing them while at the same time focusing most of your time on other categories.

On top of that, you may want to go through the PM interview course again. Actually, you can go through the entire course or part of it as many times as you wish until you feel like you’ve got a good grasp of the lessons.

PM Exercises Blog

Lastly, you will also find a blog on PM Exercises where we constantly share Product Management career advice, tips on how to break into Product Management, updates, and more. 

Some of our most recent content include:

Are Tech Companies Still Hiring Product Managers in 2023?

With talks of a recession happening, news has emerged regarding big names in the tech industry implementing a hiring freeze. Because of this, it’s essential to find out if Product Managers are still being hired by companies in 2023.

Do Product Managers Need to Know How to Code?

Do product managers need to code? It’s a common question that aspiring PMs ask because they are worried that their tech skills may not be up to par with the industry standard. Through this article, you will get to see if coding is a requirement or not.

How Much Do Product Managers Make in the United States (2023)?

If you’ve been wondering why Product Management is a career that is highly coveted, one of the reasons why may lie in this article. It would be interesting to know how much PMs make, especially PMs in the tech space.

Complete Guide for Behavioral Interview Questions for Product Managers

It’s always a big plus for any aspiring product manager to have a good set of hard skills on their resume. But a good set of soft skills, which involve interpersonal and behavioral skills, should not be put in the back seat since they are just as important.

In this article, we tackle behavioral interview questions for product managers including common mistakes, popular questions asked during PM interviews, and tips on how you can respond with confidence.

Free Product Manager Resources to Sharpen Your Tech Skills

It’s advantageous to sharpen your technical skills even if you are not dealing with a highly technical product. What’s great is there are enough resources online for you to learn from for free. We’re compiling some Product Manager resources for you to enhance your technical competency.

Final Thoughts

The Product Manager interview prep process is not difficult at all as long as you have the drive and perseverance to practice consistently. 

Make use of the resources on PM Exercises to your advantage as much as you can. Go through the course, practice answering PM interview questions, give feedback to others’ answers on the questions database, find a partner, and read up on as much information on the blog as you can.

Repeat the process until you feel more comfortable and confident even before you go for an interview onsite. Good luck!

FAQ

What should I say in a product management interview?

It depends on which stage of the PM interview you are in. If you review the PM interview prep course, you will learn what a hiring manager might expect. You can also check the PM interview questions database so you have a good idea of answers that are clear and well-structured.

What is a PM interview like?

Again it will depend on which stage of the interview process. More so, it will depend on the company a PM is applying for. Each company’s process is different so it might be advantageous to go through the Company Guides on the PM interview prep course so you would have a good idea about what the interview in companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber is like.

How should I prepare for a Product Manager interview?

The best way to prepare would be to go through the PM Exercises materials – the course, database of questions, using the practice feature, and reading the blog. You have to, of course, have the persistence and the drive to go through the materials repeatedly until you feel confident and ready to conquer any interview that comes your way.