12 Week PM Interview Prep Plan (Featured on Blind)

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.

Top 10 Resources for Product Manager Interview Preparation

There's a lot of product management (PM) interview advice on the Internet.

To help you save time, I've created a map of the most important resources for PM candidates below.

Read on, good luck, and crush those interviews,

Lewis C. Lin 🦊
--

Facebook PM or RPM

Whether you're an RPM candidate or an experienced PM candidate, start with Facebook's official guide to product management candidates*. It'll provide an introduction to the 3 areas of a Facebook PM interview:

• Product Sense

• Execution

• Leadership & Drive

Then, check out the 30-day Facebook PM interview prep plan included in The Product Manager Interview (TPMI). It'll prescribe a step-by-step prep plan, including specific exercises and recommendations.

You'll also want to download my teaching note on Facebook execution questions. Execution questions are a mysterious question type that's gaining popularity, not just at Facebook, but at other companies as well.

* For an alternate description of the Facebook PM interview process, refer my blog post: Facebook Product Manager Interview: What to Expect and How to Prepare.
 

Google APM, PM or Senior PM

Google APM, PM, and senior PM candidates will benefit from reading this Business Insider article.

Next, check out my 30-day Google PM interview study guide, excerpted from TPMI. Don't miss out on my Google PM interview cheat sheet, displayed here:

For those Google PM candidates who make it to the on-site interviews, Google will ask technical questions focused on either system design, algorithms, or technical trivia.

Google recruiters have hinted to candidates that they should expect non-coding technical questions. That usually means system design questions. If you’ve received that hint, then you should check out The System Design Interview and the PEDALS method.

For those of you who are expecting other types of technical questions like tech trivia or algorithms, refer to the technical topics recommended in my 2-week Product Management Interview Plan.

For those of you who aren't interviewing at Google, Facebook, or Amazon -- you'll also find the 2-week PM interview plan helpful in providing a comprehensive list of study topics and keeping your preparation on track.

Amazon PM

Familiarize yourself with Amazon's leadership principles and read about how they'll come into play at not just the Amazon PM interview but any Amazon interview.

Amazon takes its leadership principles very seriously; it's one of the main reasons why they have the strongest tech culture today**. 

**Let's forget, for a moment, about those free Googley snacks and ☀️ rooftop yoga at Facebook.

Use my Amazon interview spreadsheet to organize your responses using my DIGS Method™.

Lastly, jump into the 36-day Amazon interview study guide. There's no shortage of case interview questions including:

• Product design

• Pricing

• Go-to-market.

The good news is, unlike Google PM interviews, you won't have to worry about technical interview prep. Jeff Bezos, after all, came from Wall Street. The only exception is Amazon’s PM-T (PM Technical) roles; you will very likely get technical questions for PM-T, typically around system design.

Do Mock Interviews

It's easy to get familiar with the question types, frameworks, and examples from my books.

But nobody ever won a boxing match by preparing with books only. 🥊

Mock interviews are the only way to master those frameworks and provide perfect responses to questions you've never heard before.

Easily find mock interview PM partners on my Slack channel. Serious candidates will do at least 30 mock interviews before a Google, Facebook, or Amazon interview.

There's one individual who did 100+ mock interviews; he landed a PM offer at Google.

Who to Practice With

Does it matter if you pair up with experienced or inexperienced PM candidates?

According to one community member, who landed a PM job at Facebook, she learned something from everyone she practiced with: young and old.

So don't waste time trying to find the perfect partner.

Just do it.

New to the PM Interview?

If you're new, you might feel more comfortable shadowing someone who's doing a mock interview. The PM interview community is very friendly, so ask if you can listen and observe.

Some folks want privacy, so that's okay too. In that case, simply get a copy of Decode & Conquer. It'll introduce you to question types & provide frameworks on how to answer each one. And reading the sample answers will give you the over-the-shoulder glance of how an interview response might unfold. You can read those sample answers anywhere, anytime. No permission necessary.

Be Courageous

You may feel awkward about doing mock interviews.

You might also find it impossible to conjure interview answers that are on par with the sample answers in Decode and Conquer or The Product Manager Interview.

You wouldn't be the first the feel that way.

So muster that courage 🏋️. Be comfortable with learning & failure.

Who knows? After your 50th or 75th mock interview session, your answers may consistently be on par or even surpass the sample answers in my books. If so, email me. You might be someone I'd like to partner with on my next venture.

Two More Things

If you’ve gotten a PM job offer, congratulations! Don’t miss your opportunity to get more by using my email negotiation examples from my book, 71 Brilliant Salary Negotiation Email Samples.

And once you’ve started your PM job, learn how you can move up from PM to manager of PMs to VP of Product and possibly even CEO with my book, Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever.