product manager interview

How to Break Into Product Management: How a Reader Used My Books to Land his Expedia PM Role /  by Lewis Lin

It is always rewarding to hear that your work has made a significant impact on someone's life. And this testimonial does exactly that.

A reader recently reached out to me and shared how my books and articles helped him land his first product manager role at Expedia. It was a proud moment for me to hear about his success, and I am excited to share his story with you.

If you are looking to break into the product management industry or want to improve your skills, I encourage you to check out my books and articles. I strive to provide valuable insights and practical advice that can help you succeed in your career.

Thank you to the reader who shared this testimonial with me. May his success inspire others, and I wish him all the best in your new role at Expedia.

How I Got My First Product Role with Decode & Conquer /  by Lewis Lin

If you're looking for your first role as a product manager, Decode and Conquer is the first book you should look at.

I'm absolutely honored that Decode and Conquer has been at the beginning of many people's product journey.

And as many of you've noticed, the principles taught in D&C aren't just for interviewing. The principles apply on the job as well.

Moms and Dads Can Great Outcomes with Decode & Conquer and TPMI /  by Lewis Lin

PM prep inspiration going into the weekend. You can land FAANG offers, even as a busy parent!

👶 🍼 👩 👨 👪

I’ve included the text here:

Wanted to reach out and say thanks for all your help in providing these awesome resources preparing for the PM interview.

I interviewed with Google two years ago and with Facebook 6 months ago. I didn't pass those interviews, and up until very recently was complaining that 'nobody can prep for this stuff', 'it's all luck', etc.

Well. It isn't. I've learned that you CAN prep and practice. Having these frameworks was super helpful in crystallizing my experience into actionable answers. I worked my way through Decode and Conquer + The Product Manager Interview, and spent quite some time doing mock interviews on the Slack channel. It wasn't easy - I'm currently on maternity leave - so it's do all that, and throw a baby into the mix :)

I have now received top of the line offers from Google, Facebook and Walmart Labs. I was able to leverage these offers to get a much more attractive offer than the initial numbers…

Right now I'm 'giving back' to to the community by doing resume critiques on the Slack channel :) It's fun, and I like helping other candidates.

But I thought I'd reach out as well and tell you how helpful your books have been.

12 Week PM Interview Prep Plan (Featured on Blind) /  by Lewis Lin

Here’s a post from Tannishk from our Slack interview community that I thought all of you would appreciate. It features a 12-week product management interview prep plan that he found on Blind.

I’ve reprinted it here:

Five months ago I got fed-up with the crap culture at Amazon (needs a separate post) and decided to start working on my game plan for interviews at tech companies. Now, I have three offers from the tech companies - Expedia is travel not in the same league I know. No trolls please.

Profile: CS Engineer and Ivy MBA

8YOE

L6 PMT

TC 240K (Luckily with stock appreciation. Original grant was just 115K over four years)

Expedia: 220 TC all cash - M5

Google: 380 TC (MV) - L5

Microsoft: 250 TC (Fucking lowball) - 64

Facebook: 380 TC

My goal was to land a PM role at Google. This post is about how I prepared.

Technical

At Google PM interviews, you may have some coding or algorithmic questions, but likely not a lot and possibly none. My friends who recently interviewed got system design Qs and basic data structures like what data structures for implementing load balancer etc. Since, I have CS engg I prepared extra hard to feel super confident going into tech interviews.

1) Week 1: Basic technical prep:

Wanted to get my technical basics refreshed on programming to make sure I can answer questions on recursion, encapsulation, pointers, object oriented programming etc. Read: Let Us C++, a basic undergrad book used in India - free PDF copies circulating online. Took extensive notes on each topic for easy refresher.

2) Week 2: Data Structures deep-dive

Learnt four things: 1.Insertion, 2.Deletion, 3.Search, 4.Sort for these data structures and their time complexities: Queues, Linked list, Stack, Hash Table, Array etc. I watched this YouTube channel https://bit.ly/1ElhMUl and read this http://bigocheatsheet.com

3) Week 3/4: System Design

There are two types of system design Qs

1) Design problems related to real life websites. These problems apply scalability theory, load-balancing, redundancy etc. For example Design Facebook, Design bitly, Design Quora, Design Uber etc.

2)Design Elevator system, design valet parking, design restaurant system etc.

Read about Pub-Sub architecture, Producer Consumer architecture and what AWS services can be used to build them.

This is gold mine to learn about system design.

https://bit.ly/2u72rH7

Practice these problems after you have learned the concepts. https://bit.ly/2hgv0KW

Master scalability concepts such as these

https://bit.ly/1Vc3KNj

My interview Q was design an architecture for video sharing website. It is similar to Netflix that I practiced.

Week 5: Machine Learning concepts

I prepared for it because it is a hot topic. I was lucky that I did because one of my technical interview Q was - If you have records of all tennis matches in the history how will you build a ranking algorithm. I was able to leverage this knowledge.

Read:

1)https://bit.ly/2M3tOso

2)https://bit.ly/2vLrNMU

Week 6: Digest

I took Week 6 just to recompile everything I read so far.

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Week 7-9: Product Design

Read 1) Decode and Conquer and another book from Lewis C Lin's website on Google PM interview - this book is good.

Practice with people I used this Slack channel to find partners https://bit.ly/2OuQnI8

I found a friend who was also interviewing with Facebook/Google and instead of interviewing each other we collaborated and solved every product sense question that existed on Glassdoor for FB and Google. This gave us two advantages we were using two smart people's brain to solve problems and learn from each other. Irony to say he got FB offer but not Google and I got Google but not FB.

Product Strategy: Just read some blogs online and revised my Strategy frameworks from Bschool class 3Cs, 4Ps, Porter etc. The Lewis Lin book helped me provide structure to some of these questions.

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Week 10: Behavioral

All standard Amazon Behavioral STAR. Having that internal Qbank (perks of Amazon) helped me. At least prepare 1) a failure story 2) disagreement story with manager or team member 3)disagreement with Dev team 4)short time prioritization framework 5)not meeting deadline 6)what makes a team successful 7)what are your design principles. I was able to handle all of my behavioral questions from these 7 stories.

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Week 11: Estimation

I was really good at this but I still ended up spending this week focusing on it. My friend had this book Interview Math by Lewis Lin it helped me give structure to my thought process.

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Week 12: Revise everything

Week 14-16 I did all of my interviews

This is no way an ideal plan but what I did to prepare. By sharing this I wanted to help fellow Blinders.

Product Manager Mock Interview: Find Free Practice Partners /  by Lewis Lin

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Looking to practice PM interview questions? Join my community of 24,000+ individuals who are looking to practice:

  • Product design / product sense

  • Metrics / analytics / execution

  • Strategy

  • Technical

  • Behavioral / Leadership Principles / Leadership & Drive

To get started

  1. Sign up for my interview practice community for free.

  2. Join the #system-design channel.

  3. Send your practice request to the channel.

Our wins

Our interview practice community works hard to get the jobs of their dreams. Check out some of their wins below:

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CIRCLES™ Framework: When To Incorporate Metrics /  by Lewis Lin

Earlier today, a reader asked:

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My answer: I’d specify it at the "C"IRCLES part.

I’ve included an example below.

Conquer those interviews,

Lewis C. Lin

CANDIDATE: When improving Facebook for teenagers, I'd like to focus on improving engagement.For engagement metrics, I can think of three:

  1. DAU

  2. Time spent on site

  3. # Posts Per Day

I'd like to use option __ as my north star metric, and here's why...

Lewis C. Lin's Slack Community /  by Lewis Lin

It's been almost three years since we launched the Slack community. 

I'm very proud to see all the mock interviews completed, connections made, and most importantly, offers won!

Here's what some participants have said about the interview community:

  • This community and Lewis Lin is the best. Just heard back from Uber, it’s a yes! 🙏  I had interviewed there twice before over the years, but it wasn’t until I encountered Lewis, his materials, and this community that I was finally able to crack it.

  • Hi Lewis, I wanted to say thanks for putting together the books and community for interview prep. It’s been extremely helpful to me and many others.

  • You’ve created a super awesome community, especially the Slack channel. It is the best Slack channel out there! Thanks for all your contributions to the community!

  • Thanks a lot @lewislin for publishing the books and creating this community. This helped me get an offer.

  • Your book, Decode & Conquer, has been immensely helpful for me understanding "product speak", since my professional background is actually in Sales & Marketing. I hope you're having a great Labor Day weekend! I'm spending most of my time off practicing for my Facebook RPM interview in about two weeks. Thank you for creating an amazing community on Slack as well to practice mock interviewing!

  • Hi Lewis. Firstly I want to thank you for creating such an awesome platform for learning for product manager community. While browsing the content of your books on Amazon i was really amazed and really became your die heart fan. It is such awesome content. For people like me who were struggling to find the right content and direction in this domain you have given us a clear direction. Thanks a lot!

If you're not part of the interview community already, sign up following the instructions here.

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What's the difference between Decode and Conquer vs. The Product Manager Interview? /  by Lewis Lin

Here’s the most commonly asked question since I released The Product Manager Interview:

Could you please tell me what the difference is between the two and if you had to pick one, what would it be?

I'm currently looking for switching my focus from product marketing to product management, and my friend recommended me to read Decode and Conquer written by you. When I searched this book, I found that you also published The Product Manager Interview recently. It says it's an ideal complement to Decode and Conquer. Could you please tell the differences between these two books? And which would be more suitable for me as a newbie?

Difference between Decode and Conquer and The Product Manager Interview

Here's my answer:

Which One Should I Get

I'd get both, because familiarity and mastery, are important objectives.

If you'd want to tip-toe your way into PM interviews, then I'd get D&C first.

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