Ultimate Guide to Product Management Interviews | My Answers, Frameworks, Question Bank, Courses

a PM video from Chloe yes it is we are long overdue my fellow internet co-workers if you're new here hi I'm Chloe I'm a tech product manager who's worked at these companies you might have seen me on Forbes or LinkedIn I am a LinkedIn top Voice by the way for four years I've been posting about Tech Career product management and navigating the twists and turns of my adult life in the last 3 months I've been secretly back on interviews so this is fresh in my mind I remember first preparing for these years ago so frustrated

with how nobody seemed to explain the clearly and simply I'm constantly baffled by how gate kept this career is and when you finally break through you're so exhausted that you don't want to think about any of this again PM interviews are notoriously difficult but if PMS are making $400,000 a year the challenge is worth it but there is no way to jam-pack all of PM interviews into one video so here is a crash course on how PM interviews work at a high level what questions they'd ask and what Frameworks to use to answer them wish

there was more to really Master everything in product well be careful with what you wish for stay tuned until the end of the video now let's crack the PM interview PM interviews are very specific to each company there's a couple of categories the PRD case study the product case interviews and behavioral Fang slring companies are very into pure product interviews these are product sense execution strategy and if I remember correctly LinkedIn Adobe wish use these interviews some companies are just behavioral like tell me about this project tell me about a time you blah blah blah

they just want to get to know you how you think how you work what you've done and what you've learned my PM friends say Reddit Roblox twitch epic games and into it are all like this Discord was a mix of PRD case studies and pure product case questions and we had seven loops and it was very long Tik Tok I remember was a mix of product and behavioral questions some PMS really love the Purity case study it's usually here's a big hairy problem how would you solve this write a doc present it in front of

all these Engineers designers and other PMs and then let them drill you with questions about it it's basically what the job is very accurate but before you agree to interview with a company you 100% need to get the lad down from the recruiter on what all of the interview Loops are some of my PM friends literally will only take interviews if they like the loops like they will refuse to do a p or they refuse to do product case questions this video will focus specifically on the product case questions because they're arguably the scariest ones

so what types of PM interview Loops should you expect at the top of the market five types the first is product sense SL product design how would you design a dating product for Facebook what's your favorite product and how would you improve it the second is product execution how would you define success metrics for Uber Instagram posts are down by 10% what do you do third product strategy how would you design sege pricing for Uber or lift fourth cross functional collaboration tell me a time you disagreed with design or engineering and fifth leadership tell me

a time your product failed what did you do I'm not going to lie if I done everything for all of these questions and it would have made this YouTube video way too long so we are going to focus on the first two questions because those are the most common and we're anchoring these around how meta and Facebook do these questions because they've literally revolutionized PM interviews in our industry let us start with product sense the most common PM question of all PM questions these are the what's your favorite product and how would you improve it

how would you design a fitness app for Google how would you improve Facebook's event product what companies are trying to gauge here is can this person turn big ambiguous problems into great products meta's product sense rubric is literally this there are two types of product sense questions one the product launch or design question this is like how would you build a live streaming product for SoundCloud how would you design a healthcare product on Facebook the second type is product Improvement how would you improve Facebook groups how would you improve recommendations on Spotify how would you

improve sharing on Tik Tok and yes one of these questions should take you the full 45 minutes in your interview perhaps the most popular framework in the product world is the circles method coined by LS Lynn this is a really great framework to start but it's actually really confusing in practice I never really remember it if you're having trouble with it there is a different way to think about this which is the cups PDM method coined by Akash Gupta step one clarify repeat the prompts and connect it back to the company's mission and vision step

two identify your user and what segment matters the most for this case and why you chose them step three is to work with the interviewer to prioritize a user problems step four brainstorm a variety of product based Solutions step five prioritize the bang for your buck Solution that's creative step six Design Your solution go through the user flow and your design choices and how that would impact your success and finally step seven explain how you would measure the success and its risks and again I actually wrote a whole mock interview for you but then that

would have made this video Ultra insanely long so for the sake of time let's do a quick and dirty exercise on how to improve Pro door Dash very high level so you get the idea step one first ask clarifying questions I usually ask if the interviewer has a certain goal in mind like growth monetization safety so let's just go with monetization then I say just to make sure we're on the same page the mission of door Dash is to empower local economies by connecting more businesses to more people is that correct okay cool we are

aligned next we identify the user segments involved so door Dash has customers restaurants and Dashers and let's just focus on customers and specifically dash pass subscribers because there's are already I believe 18 million subscribers and that's a lot of opportunity to go deep and transact more per subscriber then we figure out the problems to solve for I typically Orient these around people problems within the context of the goal that we set earlier for example as a door Dash user I think dash pass is far too expensive so I might cancel we've all been there or

I think door Dash deliveries take way too long or I want to order food from a restaurant but it's outside of my radius there is a lot that you can brainstorm here then we pick one I would say if there's existing information on why dash pass subscribers canc i' probably focus on that one but if the interviewer gives us absolutely nothing to go off of I'd probably just choose the one I think has the biggest opportunity anecdotally I think the most common use case is I'm a single person at home who's too busy or too

tired to cook and I just want to Door Dash some food so maybe we just pick that last one which is I know which restaurant to order from but I don't know which items are good and so I usually have to also open up Yelp to check which items are good to order and then go back to Door Dash to place the order why can't I just get enough information on door Dash super cumbersome then we brainstorm our Solutions there can be restaurant recommended items or friends or notable people have liked this or which one's

most popular which I think already exists there could be seasonal only tags which creates like a fomo effect there can also be a section where it says people who order this also order these this assumes you already placed an order and then we prioritize which is usually based on two things impact and effort does this solution have high enough impact on our goals and is low enough effort to try out I personally like the ones where it's recommended by people because those are always strong for me however if it's a friend recommendation it does open

up a lot of product complexity cuz you got to almost build another social network like how do you know your friends with these people do you import contacts into door Dash it becomes a whole thing if we do recommendations by notable people I think that's pretty cool too but it is not a scalable solution it's more of like a Partnerships problem and what if you don't have similar taste to that person the most scalable option I think is people who order this also order this the next step is to design the solution what does it

look like what are the user Journeys let's talk it out or draw everything on the Whiteboard maybe you see this page after you finish a cart or maybe you see it while viewing a certain item kind of like what you see on those fashion sites at the bottom where it says other customers also like these clothes the next step is to measure success usually this is an AB test the control is a current state and the experiment is the one where you see the feature I would say the main success metric is the total revenue

of orders place across a time period like let's just say 2 weeks because this feature recommends you more items that you might like we should expect that more people would order more items leading to higher Revenue per paying user and if we see higher Revenue it means this feature is successful and that is it seven steps and if that's still confusing just remember four steps cpsm clarify the solution identify the problem decide Solutions and measure success the next most common question is product execution these are the how would you define success metrics for Uber Instagram

posts are down 10% what do you do all of these companies use these questions and this is what meta specifically is looking for when asking for these questions take a pause read it there are three types of questions in product execution goal setting trade-offs and root cause analysis SL debugging goal setting is how do you measure success for this product for example you're the PM for Tik Tok live what goals do you set you're the PM for trust and safety at Discord what goals do you set there are so many different questions for trade-offs X

metric went up but y metric went down what do you do for example you're the PM for Facebook groups and you want new group posts to show up in the newsfeed but there are only so many slots and other teams are all competing for them what do you do and then for root cause analysis you're the PM for this product y metric dropped by z% how do you figure out what happened so let's talk about how we answer these questions let's start with goal setting first you got to understand the goal of the product why

does it exist how does it tie into the company's Mission and what stage of maturity is it in is it newly launched or has it been around for a while because that will tell you what benchmarks you need to set to be considered successful next you identify the users you break them down into segments creators versus viewers small businesses versus advertisers versus customers sellers versus buyers you get the idea also what are we trying to encourage the user to do on the flip side what are we trying to avoid are there any abuse factors or

unintended consequences lastly identify your metrics what would you measure if people are using the product in a healthy way which one is a Northstar what are the secondary metrics what guardrails are there and explain why you chose everything primary metrics or northst Stars are the most important metrics that we're trying to drive secondary metrics are like kind of cool and we kind of just want to track them they help us give more context to how healthy the product is but be careful about vanity metrics I got my definition on the side then we have guardrails

just like how guardrails on a highway help keep cars from veering off into dangerous territory guardrail metrics serve as guidelines to keep your product on track and ensure that it is headed in the right direction and not doing anything dangerous like in the case of Tik Tok live our guard rails would be the number of users reports in case there's something inappropriate or ficially going on it can also be bounce right like people literally leaving the stream immediately we don't want that now let's talk about tradeoffs this happens all the time as a PM basically

if you're a PM finding another PM this is a trade-off question for example let's just say you are the PM for Facebook groups and you want new group posts to show in the newsfeed but there are only so many slots every other team at the company are competing for these what do you do the interviewer here is looking for whether you can identify your options talk through your pros and cons and see how they impact your business goal this is the framework I would use let's begin with the trade-off agreement shall we this is where

you outline the actual trade-offs you're going to take like a very common example of trade-offs is product growth versus product safety in the case of Facebook groups the tradeoff here is that you gain engagement because like your post is literally in the newsfeed and everyone's there but another team loses engagement because their slots are now lower then you talk about the goal of each product that is impacted and how both of them tie into the mission of the company and then we talk about the key users and customers or stakeholders that are affected and then

we go through the pros and cons of each option and after that we talk through a potential experiment design like how would you design experiments in a way that help the teams aside and oftentimes it's really hard to come to a consensus without actually testing things out in the world so this leads to designing an experiment how would you design an experiment to help both teams decide which path is the best moving forward it's possible that you might run an experiment on one surface and they run an experiment on another surface and then the results

will speak for themselves and that's where we lead to the decision framework figure out what the decision tree is like if we show impact here this is a decision are we aligned yes that's essentially how you talk through this type of question let's talk through the last type of question which is a root cause analysis SL debugging question these are questions like a metric for a video streaming service dropped by 80% what do you do LinkedIn signups are down 5% this month what data do you need to understand what happened this definitely happens a lot

on the the job so being Savvy about troubleshooting why metrics change and figuring out what to do to resolve it if it's an issue is very key to the role so how do you answer this two steps the first is clarify the product users and value what's the product value how does this changed metric impact the value it's supposed to provide who are the users involved which segments for example is it the craters or the pinners on Pinterest try to Benchmark it is it a big drop what's the average the next step is to diagnose

your problems you can break these down into internal causes or external causes internal causes is this a logging bug is it a data issue is there another team launching a conflicting experiment that impacts us is it product canalization for example let's just say like Facebook Messenger messages went down by 10% and it could be that Facebook Messenger just rolled out a new game and that showed a decrease in messages sent but increase in time spent together on messenger then you go through a series of potential external causes like it could be current events like the

Super Bowl or policy changes or other big changes from other companies like one time Instagram crash because Taylor Swift literally went live for 3 minutes another example is Google could have changed their search algorithm and Pinterest results were no longer being surfaced in images which cuts off a huge portion of the traffic there could also be new competitors that launch like threads Twitter X you know your interviewer might give you more information to help guide you to An Answer after you identify the problems your interviewer might also ask you how would you take your next

steps and at this point you can suggest running an experiment conducting user research or connecting with stakeholders yeah lots of options here so yes that is the crash course we did it that was a lot remember what makes a good interview is not just that you answer the question in a structured manner but also it's for the interviewer to get a sense of how you think communicate assumptions how you handle curveballs how you bounce ideas off each other weigh tradeoffs and explain why you think something is worth pursuing or not it should be very conversational

very back and forth very collaborative and all of these show your experience and thoughtfulness but un friendly reminder this barely scratches the surface of PM interviews if you do want to master the art of breaking into product or just building your product skills you're going to love today's sponsor me all right y'all I feel like I should change this is so stuffy remember how I left for Taiwan for 3 weeks survived that 7.2 earthquake got laryngitis and came back well I was working on a secret project and it is launching today actually it just launched

so I'm going to just back it up a bit last December a Taiwanese Ed tech company called sat knowledge which is like the master class of Taiwan reached out to offer me a role as an instructor for product management to elevate the next generation of tech for Taiwan and Asia there's a few pillars to this the first is teaching the most premier comprehensive and practical product course in the market the second is kind of being a media personality or host for Tech in Asia like I interviewed sting TAA the previous general manager of line Taiwan

and founder of line pay and the third is representing women in Tech in general like I collaborated with lots of tech business and productivity figures doing interviews and features with them which will be posted in waves and you know how like two videos ago I showed you the behind the scenes of us shooting at this big house with a film director we were shooting the marketing video for this project and this is the premiere for it and just to set expectations it's very Tai when eese okay so just bear that in mind let's roll the

tape do you know what Steve Jobs Sun Pai and Mark Zuckerberg have in common they all were once product leaders and product thinking has been essential to their success hi I'm Khloe she I was a product lead at Discord and Tik Tok from user research to business strategy product thinking helps you solve problems with first principles and build Innovative products that people actually love in this course you'll get a comprehensive overview of fundamentals Frameworks and business case studies to build a product from start to finish whether you're new to product management or you're already a

product manager I'll talk you step byep through the core competencies best practices and Industry standard tools to lead your product teams we'll Deep dive into real case studies on how Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Netflix have had explosive success using product Le growth Frameworks you'll learn exactly how product leaders position their products to power your own business strategies to help you land your dream product role we'll guide you through our top of Industry resume templates interview Frameworks and salary reveals from abroad and we'll simulate mock interviews to redefine the way you communicate and solve

problems like the way great product leaders [Music] do see what I mean it is very Taiwanese look I can already hear your voices a course this better not be I know I know just hear me out you know your girls been doing education Tech content for 4 years now ever since my first year I have been getting non-stop hit up by course companies and I've said no to every single one of them because I'm just like but last year I went to Taiwan had my first ticketed career talk and meet up at the cake resume

headquarters which is like the LinkedIn of Taiwan and we sold out in less than a day after the event people were lining asking all kinds of questions for over an hour and that was eye opening for me like wow I just felt there's a lot I can do for this community right after that satge reached out for this opportunity and at first I was very dubious cuz I know what it's like here in the US but then I learned that courses in education are taken very seriously in Asia or at least in Taiwan like you

can't just be anyone to teach a course like my other fellow instructor is Sting TAA who's also an adun professor at NTU which is taiwan's number one University and he was also an executive at easy card which does Yo-Yo which if you're taian e you know that that's a pretty big deal so there's a whole vetting process extensive research a whole content and production team and a film director that goes behind it all but at the core of it every time I went back to Taiwan I do my little networking thing I go meet people

in business and Tech let me just say they never look like me and I know in my heart of hearts that there are so many other people that don't look like these people that want to do something cool badass and impactful in the world of tech and business I just know it but the problem is they don't know how to break in so I want to be that bridge for them so my mission which I've shared before is to elevate tech for Taiwan and hopefully for Asia alt together I actually didn't think I had time

to do this but then January happened and before I head back into the corporate world this was perfect for me to dedicate all my time and energy too so Chloe can you tell me what is in this course there are two main parts the first is breaking into product we talk about salary resumes interviews there's a humongous question Bank all the Frameworks and a bunch of mock interviews the second is mastering your product career we're teaching design thinking product sense user research techniques prds strategy experimentation we even deep dive into more advanced topics like product

L growth product Market fit with case studies on all of these companies you see right here and I haven't really seen courses do this but we are rolling out bonus chapters of interesting exclusive content like our full interview with sting Tow and how he ran the largest tech Media blog in Taiwan how he joined line failed startups and became an extremely successful chairman for many companies I'll also be posting ad hoc special videos based on the student feedback and Hot Topics that they want to to hear more about it's a dynamic process but Chloe how

much does the course cost that's a really good question so the course is not out out yet but today you can pre-order it it is an 8 to 10 hour course and it starts at 3500 NT which is about $18 let me pause right there that's basically $100 which is like $10 per hour and if you know PM courses you should know that they're typically around $1,000 to $2,000 so is this a money play Chloe unfortunately for me it is not but we decided that accessibility is the most important the price will increase every few

days or week or so and the max course price will go up to $1,000 NT which is $340 which is still only a small fraction of what's currently out there by I don't know whoever the heck these people are the caveat is that this is targeted for the Asia Market uh so if you can read Chinese you're in the clear if you can't the course is still fully filmed in English but the website is for Asia users so if you know how to navigate it then go for it for my English speaking viewers I do

plan on figuring out how to make Tech Career and product management way more accessible for you but that will come farther down the line like maybe next year I don't know for now I hope that this is enough information for you to make a decision feel free to ask me any questions down below and I will help answer them so you know that this is right for you thank you so much for watching and back to existential life Vlogs next I forgot to mention that the sa knowledge team and I were not the only ones

who worked on this course I brought in my professor Professional Network to weigh in and give their stamp of approval we've got people from SoundCloud twitch Spotify figma Instagram Discord Riot headspace and a couple more I really hope you enjoyed today's career video and I will see you next time