2022 has been a great year so far: I just completed my first month as a Senior Product Manager at GitHub. DevOps became my new home base, and I got to know so many genuinely nice, supportive, smart and inspiring colleagues already!

Rewind to late 2021, when I decided to make a lateral move into a larger corporation that operates in a more technical industry. I went through a demanding phase of interviewing with two well-known and prestigeous tech companies. Luckily, both interview processes resulted in exciting job offers!

I understand that everyone has a different way to approach a job interview, but I want to share how I went ahead and prepared for my Senior PM interviews. One reason is that when I did my research, I found plenty of resources about breaking into product management, but very little about interviewing for more advanced career stages. My hope with this article is to provide useful resources to aspiring Senior PMs who are currently chasing their next opportunity.

General Tips & Tricks

Before going into the details, here’s a list of what generally helped me to stay on top of things during interviews:

• Know your counterpart. In most cases, you know who you are going to talk to in advance. Research them. Check their LinkedIn to know their background, level of experience, professional success and role in the company. Recorded conference talks on YouTube can give you a glimpse of their personality and which communication style they might be compatible with. I even found a blog post of a CPO who interviewed me, where she wrote about what really matters to her when making hiring decisions. Jackpot!
• Know what to expect. If you interview with larger companies, chances are that you find Glassdoor reviews about their interview style and what type of questions you can expect as a candidate.
• Leverage the advantages of remote interviews. Take notes, structure your thoughts before talking through them, have your cheat sheets in front of you.

The Interview Process

I experienced a Senior PM interview process to consist of a phone screen with the recruiter, a conversation with the hiring manager, one or multiple rounds of skill assessment, a skip-level or CPO interview, and finally meeting some of your future fellow team members aka. culture fit. Expect an average of ~5 to 7 rounds in total, per company.

The following sections of this blog post cover the key rounds of a typical Senior PM interview process, and how I went ahead and prepared for each of them.

Phone Screen

A phone screen is typically a short phone call with a recruiter, during which you will discuss basic information about the job and your qualifications. Expect very functional questions during this conversation. The recruiter’s goal is to create a shortlist of candidates who are qualified to move on to the actual interview process.

You will very likely be asked about why you are interested in the job, your salary requirements and availability. The interviewer might also double check on your background and your basic skills for the role.

The best way to prepare is to review the job description and your resume. You should be able to articulate precisely why you are a good match. Research the company and their salary ranges to make an informed statement on your expectations, but don‘t feel pressured to drop a number at this early stage.

Here are 2 videos about salary negotiation in the tech industry that I found helpful and inspiring:

• Tips for negotiating your salary from mayuko
• Everything I Learned to Negotiate Your Salary from Chloe Shih

Hiring Manager Interview

The hiring manager’s goal is to assess your will and skill to do the job. While some companies optimise towards the one or the other, it is highly likely that both aspects will be covered. Expect a conversation that lasts for about one hour, during which you will be asked mostly behavioral questions. The pattern that I noticed is that hiring managers usually ask about

• your interests and ambitions
• your past accomplishments and your reflections on them
• how you deal with conflict

Practice is key: I found it very useful to go through the questions on productmanagementexercises.com until I had the feeling that I keep circling around my default answers.

Interests and Ambitions

This is your chance to tell your story, to articulate what you expect from the job, and why it is a great fit for your career. Expect questions such as:

• Tell me about the job you’re applying for, and why it’s a great fit for your career
• Why product? Why at {company}?
• What is your ideal environment to thrive in and what do you need to succeed?

Make sure to always answer all parts of the question.

Accomplishments

Here, the interviewer evaluates your skills and experience based on a past project you share. They will guide the conversation to deep dive into all competencies that are essential to product management, such as communication, prioritisation, stakeholder management, detail orientation, collaboration, user research and measurement. Preparation is extremely valuable here. Take your time to do a written reflection on at least 3 noteable projects from your past roles and map out your takes on all aspects and competencies that come to your mind. Having this cheat sheet in front of you during the interview will help you to answer the questions in a structured fashion. It also prevents you from forgetting to mention key successes. For example, not mentioning how you ingested the users‘ voice into the project might have you being passed on as a candidate.

Examples for questions that can be expected, are:

• Tell me about a successful project you led, and your role throughout the project. In hindsight, would you have done something differently, and why?
• Tell me about a time where you figured out what to build. What was the process? What was the outcome?
• What is a professional accomplishment that you are proud of?

Conflict

Dealing with conflict is a key skill of a senior role in product. Be ready to share past examples of encountering conflict with peers or executives, and how you used data and insights to work through the situation.

Variations of the conflict question are:

• Tell me about a time when you had to influence others who disagreed with you
• Give me an example when you had to deal with conflict, and how you handled it
• How did you handle disagreements with key stakeholders or executives?

Case Study Interview

This part of the interview process is probably the hardest to prepare for, because it targets your hard skills and requires you to perform on point. You will be given a challenge and get the chance to present your approach to a single interviewer or a committee. I experienced 3 different assessment modes:

• Take-home exercise that is then handed in and presented
• Live whiteboard session during interview
• Leading a collaboration session with engineering and design

No matter how the interview is set up, the goal is to assess your product management craft. Your options to prepare differ depending on the type that you are confronted with.

I perceived the take home exercise as slightly more comfortable because I was able to take my time, think through all aspects of the challenge, and prepare a good presentation. I recycled my approach that has proven to be successful when I was about to defend my thesis at university: Inspired by the rubber duck debugging technique, I found it helpful to first give the presentation to a rubber duck in order to optimise the total duration, and make sure that I dedicate the right amount of time to all parts of the presentation. Don’t underestimate these meta aspects that your interviewers will keep an eye on. Then I presented it to my husband who is not in tech, to confirm that my content follows a thread, and that I can articulate my key ideas in a well-understandable fashion. Lastly, I presented to expert friends and collected their feedback on whether my proposed solution makes sense from a conceptual perspective. By this time, I had enough routine with talking through my slides, which perceivably increased my confidence level during the actual interview.

The whiteboard session is much tougher though, because you have limited time and you will feel watched and judged while trying to solve a complex problem. Mastering this situation is worth it’s own blog post (stay tuned), but here is a very high level take on how I tackled it:

In a whiteboard session, you will most likely be confronted with a more or less realistic challenge that your future team might be dealing with. You are not expected to come up with a perfect solution. Instead, the aim is to showcase your approach and thought process. The only way to master this is practice. I found the Exponent YouTube channel to be very helpful. It offers a collection of videos where experienced product managers talk the audience through mock assignments. First, I just consumed the videos in order to get a feeling of what is a good way to approch these questions. After a while, I stopped right after the task was given, assembled my own answer, and watched the rest of the video to evaluate my approach against theirs. I noticed that although every challenge seems to be difficult on its own, they usually target either prioritisation, product design, product launch or reacting to a competitor‘s move in the market. I ended up writing myself little frameworks for each of these categories. Using them during the whiteboard session made the problem solving actually pretty much straight forward and removed the initial overwhelming feeling of having no clue where to start.

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Good luck with your interviews - You got this!