Congrats! You got that PM interview invite. All those resume iterations paid off. Or maybe you have just submitted your resume and want to get a head start on your prep.
Here are some of the resources I used to do interview / casing prep. I will also mention how to efficiently leverage each of these - since these can get overwhelming.
Some background
- At the moment I am writing this, I am currently doing an MBA (+ MS, go MMM!! ) from Kellogg.
- Pre-Kellogg, I have done a CS degree undergrad and spent 4 years doing Product Management at Rakuten (an Amazon equivalent in Japan)
- Following the MBA crowd, I recruited for big tech PM in Winter 24’
- I interviewed with TikTok, Adobe, Amazon, Intuit and Google. I cleared the Amazon interviews and was put on the infamous waitlist. But I was grateful to get offers from Adobe, Intuit and Google.
- I finally accepted Google, and spent Summer 24’ at Google (specifically YouTube Music) as an MBA PM intern in New York.
- Among the whole chaos of this process, the one thing I enjoyed was doing PM casing, and leveraged a bunch of different resources to improve my interviewing skills.
In order to pay it forward, I thought I should write down what worked for me and point everyone to the direction of the resources that actually work - or how to make them work for you.
Good luck!
Understanding Product Management
If you are pivoting or an undergrad, it is essential to understand what a PM truly does. This can be done by talking to people who have done PM before, reading books or taking a course. If you are someone who has already has PM experience, feel free to skip this section.
Some books I would recommend
- Cracking the PM Career - A comprehensive primer for anyone who wants to understand what being a PM entails or wants to level up their skills as someone who is new to PM
- Swipe to Unlock - Lots of case studies around how to think about certain technological decisions
- Inspired - The philosophy of product management and what the ideal version of PM should look like
Other Resources
Preparing for the Interview
Company Research
Extremely important. Do a deep dive on the company you are interviewing for.
- Watch their most recent conference or CEO keynotes
- Read their product blogs
- Read their 10-K, Annual Reports
- Know their mission and vision
- Play around with their products and know their entire product suite
- Do an industry, landscape and competitor analysis
- Speak to people who work there (this will be helpful later)
This will not only help you learn and pick up bits you can sprinkle in your interview to show your research, but may also help you understand whether this is the company you even want to work for or not.
Behavioral Interviews
STAR framework. After trying everything else, I kept coming back to this. It works.
Interviewers even expect and suggest it. Amazon is purely behavioral - even for PM.
So make sure you lock these down. This is the easy part. These are your own stories. Practice storytelling. Make your stories engaging and provocative. Be proud of your achievements. Use ‘I’ more than ‘We’.
Make sure you practice well, time it to 2-3 minutes and leave enough room for follow ups.
How to do Product Casing
Now lets come to the fun part. Product Casing.
To be honest, even though I have had PM experience, it’s not the same as being a good PM interviewee. I had to start from scratch.
Here are the resources I used and their purpose.
Decode and Conquer - Lewis Lin
Everyone and their respected mothers will recommend you this book and so will I. Fun Fact, Lewis is actually an alum of my exact program.
But will this book singlehandedly make you great at interviews? No. However it will start you off!
Use this book to get a ground-level understanding of the types of questions asked, and the frameworks used. But remember as you start memorizing CIRCLES, everyone else is doing that too. That’s why it’s very important to take CIRCLES, but build on it. Remove/merge the parts that you think are necessary. Add something that you think is missing. And cook your own framework.
I’ll put mine in a later section.
Exponent
Check if your school has a membership. If not, buy it. It’s worth the investment, even if to make you more committed. Split it with your friends if that makes it easier.
Read up on their frameworks too, and start merging it with CIRCLES. Then watch the videos. The videos are really really valuable. Understand how actual PMs solve these questions without sticking to a certain format.
Supplements
The Product Manager Interview by Lewis Lin
Treat this like a workbook. It has hundreds of case questions. Use it to sharpen your skill.
Swipe to Unlock
Read it to improve your technical knowledge and understand why certain product decisions are made the way they do
Mock Interview Practice
If I have to attribute my success to one thing. It will be mock interviews. It is the easiest way to get over the fear and start creating mental models and confidence of solving these interviews. During my interview season I was doing atleast 2 mock interviews a day.
Find people who can mock you through these sources
- Your school seniors - bonus if they interned in the same company
- Alumni/network of people who work in the same company
- Exponent’s mock interview platform
And once you have exhausted those sources, there is the the best source for finding unlimited mock interviews -
Lewis Lin’s Slack Community
This has hundreds of strangers who you can practice with, without the fear of judgement if you mess up. And it also requires you to mock them back, and that is also a great way to find best and worst practices.
It’s very well structured and easy to set up. Line them up and practice away!
My Interview Philosophy and Frameworks
Think about this, for a company that is interviewing hundreds of candidates on a daily basis, how would you be able to stand out? I think in the end it boils down to whether you are genuinely a passionate technologist or not. Are you able to provide meaningful analysis and bring in a centered approach to your thinking? Are you confident in your suggestions, but also open to feedback. Will you add value to their team and product?
That is what they are looking for.
Here are some extra tips and thoughts for the different product case questions that helped guide my thinking
Favorite Product Question
- Think - what attributes makes a product amazing for you or for the world?
- Build a list of 3-5 digital products that you love, and find similarities between them and why you like them - this is your favorite product framework
- For me, some of the things are - solves a key user problem, is well designed, better than it’s competitors, company’s mission is aligned with product (that means it will stay relevant in the future)
- Build a list of products for any situation, here are some of mine
- Your favorite digital products/apps
- Notion
- YouTube
- Some hardware products
- Kindle
- Apple Airpods Pro
- Amazon Alexa
- Some non-digital products
- Guitar
- Air Fryer
- Vinyl Player
- Something that you like from the company you are interviewing for
- Build a list of badly designed products/experiences and how you might improve them
- Paywall news
- Airport baggage collection
- Government websites
Product Design
My theory - it’s hard and impossible to come up with an amazing answer to the product design question before you start answering it. It can go so many ways, and the interviewer may want to steer you into a specific direction that may derail your thought process.
The goal should be to build a framework, that helps you unlock the answer one step at a time.
Let’s take an example of a question asked at Google recently. (Sourced from Exponent)
I am going to solve this as I write this, so it may not be polished, but I hope it helps to help bring the framework to life.
Here is how I would go about it, I don’t have a fancy acronym for it, but maybe thats a good thing! Seems more natural
Context, Goals → Purpose, Problems → Users, Needs, Prioritize → Solutions, Prioritize → Metrics, Prioritize → Summarize
Context, Goals
Always start by asking questions, and the most important should be Why?
Why does Google want to build a birthday app? This may be something they might ask you to decide too.
You must also ask in terms of metrics, what metric is Google hoping to achieve by building this
- Revenue
- User acquisition
- User retention
- Market share
- Customer satisfaction
- Conversion rate
This question will set up your entire thesis and will be your number one prioritization razor. For the purpose of this question, let our goal be revenue. Google wants to earn money through this.
Then see if there are constraints - any certain geographies, or OS that you need to build this on? How much time or resources do you have?
If I was to think about this, my immediate thought would be, this could be a great integration within their Calendar app.
Purpose, Problems
Here you should know two things
- A basic list of the fundamental needs of a human being - they boil down to things like, community, wellness, convenience, utility, efficiency, security, education etc.
- What is the company’s mission and vision, and how can you link it to the current space
Now this is where you can differentiate yourselves from the rest. Spend some time thinking about
- Why are birthday’s important? What human need do they solve, and why should we work in this space?
- Why is it important for Google to be in this space? And is Google well positioned to do something about it?
- Who else is in this space and how are they succeeding / failing
My analysis would be - birthdays are important and a great way to celebrate someone and their community. It’s the one day everyone gathers together to celebrate a person’s existence. It’s very special. Happens only once a year. Even your ex will text you on your birthday, that’s how powerful it is.
Birthday’s are also a great event where money is spent more liberally → On gifts, on events, and f&b etc.
Google want’s to organize the world’s information, and most people probably use Google, YouTube to find gifts, locations to host, trips to plan, or services to leverage. Additionally most people may also put the birthdays onto their calendar to remember. Google probably has all this information already because you gave it to them when you created an account. Additionally, let’s not forget that Google’s top business is ads. It is very well placed to enter this industry and solve a need.
Users, Needs, Prioritize
Spend some time brainstorming users for this. Remember the rule of 3. Things sound better in groups of three. Additionally make sure you talk about what their pain points and needs might be.
You can go two ways about it, either divide based on demographic, or based on behavior.
For example
Demographic
- Gen Z - Love finding unique ways to celebrate birthdays + Share events on social media
- Millennials - Really busy, and can’t remember their friend’s and families birthdays, don’t have time to think about gifts
- Elderly - May not remember birthdays easily, want to be part of celebrations in the families
Behavior
- Executive Assistants - Need to remember important dates for their boss and accordingly act accordingly. May want to automate some of those processes or find unique gifts for them.
- Small Business Owners - Need to remember birthdays of their customers
- Students/Working Professionals - Busy, but need to maintain relationships
Now prioritize. And how do you prioritize?
Remember the goal. Revenue.
Which segment here would be willing to pay for this?
I would pick Executive Assistants. They have a need for this kind of service and usually have a budget for special occasions.
Solutions, Prioritize
Come up with a basic feature set for this app
- Should be able to store and sync birthdays with your google calendar and send reminders
- Should store some context and relationship of the birthday person
- Should be able to To pre-draft birthday emails/texts from the user
And now come up with three out-of-the-box ideas!
Think of categories of solutions. Automation, Personalization, Gamification, Gen AI, Loyalty, Social, Notifications, VR, AR → Most of your solutions can come from these categories.
For that extra spice, read up on some moonshot technologies. And come up with one moonshot idea.
- Helps you organize unique parties based on the profile and context of the birthday person and connects you to trusted vendors in your area
- Serve unique and in-context ads or affiliated gifts for the birthday person - Google Ads
- Create have a library of digital birthday cards / videos to send to the birthday person - use Google Photos to pull up images
But your true creativity will shine if you think of the 10-star experience. Watch this video to understand what I’m talking about
Here is my crazy idea - What if we created personalized birthday wishes using deepfakes. The likeness and voice of the wisher. Think this is creepy? Well it’s already happening. It might be useful for a CEO to send wishes to each of their employee or customers.
Now the interviewer may ask you to prioritize, which feature should we build and why? Simple, think of the goal. Which one will give us revenue? I think realistically ads and gifts. It’s an easy lift for Google, they already have the system in place. And this way we can keep this app free for users.
Note: If our goal was different, a different solution could be chosen. That’s why the goal makes it so easy to keep going. It easily helps you choose the next path.
Metrics, Prioritize
Come up with three metrics to track your solution. For Metrics, I like the AARM framework. You could pick one metric from each. You should also suggest an A/B test and check the comparison of metrics with the control group.
Acquisition - # of app/plugin downloads
Activation - Ads CTR
Retention - MAU
Monetization - Ad Revenue
You could also be creative and do something like Monthly Ads CTR, or Number of successful birthday wishes.
In the end the north star should be meaningful. If you had to prioritize, I would create something like Revenue/Birthday. Each birthday represents an opportunity to buy a gift. And this metric captures that.
Finally, Summarize!
Your entire solution is elegantly laid out, just repeat it and open it up for discussion.
Note: Make sure to check in with your interviewer after every segment to see if you both are on the same page. Sometimes they may decide your next path for you, or have you choose with justification. Either way, you are ready for whatever comes your way.
Do this process a few times, be comfortable with thinking out loud and you should be able to really do well here. And if you do well here, you are a sure shot for the role.
Root Cause Analysis
Along with your analysis, you need to be systematic about this one, here is the framework.
Start internal or external or mix it up. Ask questions and try to explain why you are asking for this piece of data.
Company Specific Interview Guide
This guide is specific for MBA internships only
Amazon
Resume → Online Assessment → 2 b2b interviews focusing on behavioral, testing the leadership principles
(PM-T, may have a small case)
Adobe
Resume → Hiring Manager Screening → 3 b2b with adjacent leaders (Project Manager, PM Director, Eng Lead) - behavioral but focusing on PM skillset
Intuit
Resume → 1 hour interview (behavioral + product design case)
Resume → Preference Form → 3 b2b interview with host, co-host and director (purely product design)
A Note on Maintaining Sanity
I wanted to add this section, because this is a tough and draining process. We tend to attach our self esteem to the results of these interviews. My advice here would be to make sure you keep yourself in good spirits and having faith in yourself. Make sure you are taking care of yourself and spending quality time with those that make you happy.
If things don’t work out, there will be more opportunities, and they will happen when it’s time.
A Note on Rejections
Apple, Nvidia, Nike, Meta, LinkedIn, Spotify so many awesome companies, what do they have in common? They all rejected me. 😂
Keep in mind that for every interview I got, I was rejected by 5 companies. And that’s just how it goes. You could be extremely talented, and still face rejections. In most cases, it’s a fit issue, not a skill issue.
Remember,
Rejection is redirection.
Keep working hard and maximize the opportunities in your control, and let what is yours come to you!
Keep in touch!
If you found this helpful, please feel free to reach out to me on any of these platforms 😇
✉️ : tanmaygoel3@gmail.com or LinkedIn
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