I came back from last week’s CPG/tech/marketing/product workshop with UCLA Anderson MBAs. Fantastic turnout! And a group of very talented marketers!
The staff and students also snapped some incredible photos, which I’ve shared here.
I’ll be back in Southern California this week for two more workshops. I’m excited to be back in the ☀️.
🏖️🕶️👣
Ravi Sapata from Yours Productly interviewed me last summer on my lessons learned from building PeopleMaven. I focused on how I apply what I teach my product management students at PeopleMaven itself. I hope you enjoy it!
Jacky Liang put together a fantastic TLDR guide on how to transition from software engineer to product manager.
Read on for his helpful tips.
Today's marketing candidates have to be prepared for a range of questions from traditional, behavioral, case, analytics, and digital marketing interview questions.
In this blog post, I'll discuss each marketing interview question category and offer tips on how to prepare.
Lastly, I'll include instructions on how you can download my special marketing interview cheat sheet at the end of this post, based on my book, The Marketing Interview.
Traditional interview questions are used to learn more about your marketing experience or to test your marketing knowledge. Here are some examples:
What is digital marketing?
What is SEO?
What is PPC?
What is on-page and off-page optimization?
How does a "link building" campaign work?
Describe a marketing strategy that failed.
Use the Five Ws and / or the Rule of Three. It'll help structure your response so it's easy to follow. At the same time, it'll help ensure your answer is complete. Your answer should be as credible but as concise as the first paragraph explanation of a Wikipedia article.
See Chapter 9 of The Marketing Interview and refer to the sample answer for "Tell me about a terrible product that’s marketed well.”
Also refer to Wikipedia definitions for likely marketing trivia questions like:
SEO
PPC, including PPC, CTR, PPC
Page optimization
Call-to-action
Behavioral interview questions center around a candidate's past experience. They usually start with "Tell me a time...":
Tell me about a piece of content you edited and how you strengthened that piece of content?
Describe the most difficult scheduling problem you have faced at work.
Tell me about how you worked effectively under pressure.
Describe a time you were faced with stress that tested your coping skills.
While the STAR method may work for behavioral interview questions, I've found that in practice the STAR method leads to answers that are dull and uninspiring, I'd recommend the DIGS method™ instead. DIGS will lead to stories that are impactful and entertaining.
Chapter 18 - Answering Behavioral Questions
Hypothetical interview questions asks candidates to speculate how they would handle a theoretical situation. They typically start with "How...?" Here are some examples:
How do you use social media as a tool for customer service?
How could you leverage YouTube in order to promote our brand and increase engagement?
How and when do you evaluate your marketing campaigns?
How do you measure ROI for a social media campaign?
How would you pitch innovative and new approaches to both paid and natural search campaigns?
Answer this question in two parts. Part I, spend the first 30 to 40 seconds to present your approach to the hypothetical scenario, using the Rule of Three to structure your response.
Part II, spend the remaining 90 seconds explaining how you've actually used your approach to generate marketing results.
Part I explains a theoretical approach that not only answers the question but is easy-to-remember and easy-to-understand.
Part II eliminates the interviewer's concerns that you simply memorized a textbook approach. Instead, it demonstrates that you not only had relevant experience, but also garnered results.
Chapter 2 - Creating a Positioning Statement
Chapter 9 - Critiquing a Marketing Effort
Chapter 16 - Strategy Questions
Case interview questions tests the candidate's ability to solve a real-life marketing problem. During a case interview question, a candidate may be asked to:
Build or fix a marketing campaign
Calculate marketing ROI
Critique a marketing campaign initiative
Here are some recent examples:
You are working at an independent search marketing consultancy and begin working with a client who believes they have been penalized. How would you diagnose the problem and what corrective action might you reasonably expect to take?
You are working for a major hotel chain as a PPC manager and you’ve been asked to explore expanding your campaign to target American customers looking to book hotels in the UK. What would you need to know to forecast whether this campaign would be profitable?
Take a look at these 2 different designs for our new website, which one is better? Why?
Create a 1 month content calendar that includes different types of content ranging from videos, ebooks, blog posts to podcasts and social media.
You’ve been put in charge of planning the company’s nationwide conference. Where do you begin?
A customer has just posted a negative review to the company’s Facebook page and you’re in charge of responding. How do you handle it?
What do you think about our blog?
For case questions, you want to apply the appropriate framework from The Marketing Interview. For example:
Marketing plan questions: Use the Big Picture Framework from the book.
PR disasters: Use the PR disaster framework from the book.
Critiquing a blog: Use the MOB Framework from the book.
Evaluating marketing campaign performance: Use the before-and-after analysis framework from the book.
Chapter 3 - Developing Marketing Campaigns
Chapter 6 - Launching a New Product
Chapter 9 - Critiquing a Marketing Effort
Chapter 10 - Critiquing Advertising
Chapter 11 - Dealing with PR Disasters
Chapter 14 - Getting Analytical: ROI Calculations
One more thing, if you're interested in getting my special one-page marketing interview cheat sheet featured at the top of the blog, you can download the PDF version here.
Whatsapp Groups is likely to have duplicated photos.
Calculate the wasted storage space from those duplicated photos.
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
I've made many of my product manager interview resources available for free on the web.
There's one item that's coveted more than anything else: my Google Spreadsheet that recommends topics to study and exercises to do for:
It also includes links to my two company specific guides: a 30-day study guide for Google PM interviews and a 30-day study guide for Amazon PM interviews. (I do have a 30-day study guide for Facebook PM interviews, in my book The Product Manager interview.)
Best of luck with your PM interviews,
Lewis C. Lin
Let's say you're PM for the Google consumer hardware team. They're thinking about opportunities in the kitchen appliance space. How would you think about it?
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
Photo credit: Wang Xi
Google Home is Google's brand of smart speakers that competes with Amazon's Echo.
What's the power necessary to handle Google Home's compute requirements?
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
Let's say you're the product manager for Chromecast. How would you go about to creating a 3 year roadmap for Chromecast?
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
Photo credit: Mike Mozart
One of the most common questions I get is, "Where I can find your interview preparation spreadsheets?"
So without further ado, here are links to both of my highly coveted spreadsheets:
Best of luck with your interviews,
Lewis C. Lin
Is The Marketing Interview available in electronic book (eBook) format?
The answer is absolutely! You can get the eBook for The Marketing Interview here.
While we're at it, here are the links to eBook versions of my other books, not available on Kindle:
For aspiring marketers, Lewis Lin's The Marketing Interview provides a solid grounding, with concrete examples and exercises, on how to stand out during a marketing interview and land that job of your dreams. — Luanne Calvert, Former Chief Marketing Officer, VIRGIN AMERICA
There’s so much confusion on how to succeed at the marketing interview, especially tough case questions. The Marketing Interview examines the most common and challenging interview questions including developing marketing plans, launching new products and dealing with private label competition. — Philipp von Holtzendorff-Fehling, Former Vice President Marketing, T-MOBILE USA
Lewis Lin presents both classic and new marketing cases, along with right and wrong approaches, to sharpen your interview impact. Useful for new graduates and mid-career professionals, The Marketing Interview contains marketing analogs and role plays to help you elevate yourself above other candidates. —Dan Frechtling, Former Vice President, MATTEL
I have interviewed countless candidates for marketing roles, and I wish more of them could attack problems this smartly. Follow the step-by-step guidance in this book, and you will set yourself apart from other candidates and succeed in your marketing interviews. — Scott Shrum, Former Brand Manager, S.C. JOHNSON & SON
There are several reasons for the poor product names.
Uninspired marketers
There are simply some marketers who didn't care enough about their product to put proper effort into coming up with a good name. I would put Microsoft Family Safety in this category. And it looks like the executive in charge didn't care either.
Opinionated bureaucrats
Sometimes, the influential executives care too much. Decision makers with limited marketing experience start throwing ideas out. And unfortunately they're influential enough to have these bad names stick. That's why you get products with "RT" appended to it. Apparently RT doesn't mean real-time; instead it's much, much geekier. Yes, some engineering VP cried and moaned enough to get their way. Good luck explaining that one to a 55 year old small business owner. (Details: What Does the ‘RT’ In Windows RT Stand For?)
Indecisive and weak marketing leaders
The role of a strong marketing leader is to clarify the brand strategy & hierarchy. For example, P&G's leadership team made a conscious decision to have strong product names (e.g. Tide, Swiffer, Pampers). They opted out of using the corporate brand as an umbrella brand. In other words, it's not "P&G Tide" or "Procter and Gamble's Pampers." At Microsoft, there's no clarity around the brand strategy. Sometimes Microsoft is the umbrella brand e.g. "Microsoft Office." Other times, the umbrella brand is left out such as "Xbox" or "Bing." At other times, Microsoft uses multiple umbrella brands such as "Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail Premium." Microsoft has no shortage of run-on product names -- and it's largely because of indecision.
Last night, I came across Robert Kaplan's seven questions that senior leaders should ask themselves periodically. I thought it was too good not to share, so I've included it here.
Here's how I evaluate initiative in an interview:
I'd ask, "Tell me a time when you took initiative." or "Tell me a time you volunteered for a project that everyone else thought was dull or boring."
Most candidates would give an example of a task their boss or some other person asked them to do. This is not initiative. It requires some careful listening and follow-up questions to determine whether or not the candidate was truly proactive.
I would also ask, "Tell me a time when you were given a project without guidance. How did you figure out what to do?"
Here I would evaluate how thorough they assessed different options before deciding on a course of action. If there was only 1-2 options that may not indicative of a truly independent individual.
Before the interview, I'd tell the candidate to do some pre-interview homework. For instance, "Re-design our website and bring mock-ups to the interview." or "Take a look at the Google Maps API, and hack together a mobile app."
Based on their effort, you can evaluate their initiative.
The truly proactive ones would likely do this anyway without prompting. ;)
Estimate the number of daily emails sent in the US.
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
Estimate the market size for your newly proposed Chromecast feature.
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
Estimate storage for Google Maps.
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
I was flipping through HBR's On Communication book last night, and I found this great summary on the unintended consequences (from the listener end) when:
You are going to make a Wi-Fi connected speaker with voice capabilities. How do you make that?
Submit your answers in the comments and receive feedback.
I'm happy to announce more kudos for my latest book, The Product Manager Interview.
This time, a reader used it to get a job offer at Microsoft as a Program Manager. Woo hoo!
Conquer those interviews,
Lewis C. Lin
