Notes from my Product Management Interviews Part 6: Tackling Curveballs/Addressing Miscellaneous Problems
This story is written as part of a seven-part series: ‘Notes from my Product Management Interviews’. Read Part 1 here , Part 2 here , Part 3 here , Part 4 here , and Part 5 here.
In the previous parts of this series, I touched upon a wide range of popular topics that define your journey through a Product Management interview process. In this part, however, I’d like to talk about a certain type of interviews which made me truly feel that, a Product Management role, simply put, could sometimes include many other aspects than what one would typically anticipate, based on their research. Therefore, my best recommendation is: before any interview, chuck the anticipation!
Because, in an interview which is about curveball questions or miscellaneous problems, you might be starting off with a Problem Solving question, but in 20 mins, you might be driven towards a Product Design question, then quickly be landed a Leadership question, then experience a smooth dollop of a Behavioural question, after which you’d realise that an hour has already passed, and you have no idea how the interview really went or what it was all about!
My understanding, based on my post-interview discussions with many of my friends and peers, is this: such interviews test, among other things, your ability to navigate through a day that’s busy, and feels like a mixed-bag of responsibilities and challenges!
And that’s typically how a PM’s work-day could look like: you talk to your customers, get pulled into some design discussions, get multiple pings from your sales/customer support teams to answer queries around product behaviour/technicalities, get a request from the HR to show direction around how to generate ideas for activities for the next team-outing, help onboard a new hire, do functional testing of a feature in a pre-production environment, quickly read & internalise the API documentation of a tech-partner to make a recommendation— the list could be endless.
Now, I won’t talk about the difficulties that come through, when you face such an interview, but I would like to share an approach that I felt would help you ready yourself up for such an interview. Because let’s face it, you cannot prepare for all the questions in the world, but you sure can refine your thought process, your way of communication, and your ability to capture what the interviewer is really looking for.
This apart, the previous parts of this series do cover a lot of specific PM topics that get interviewed in a themed interview (such as a Product Design interview).
Product Manager: The Expert Navigator
You can navigate easily when you have a prepared checklist of tasks to work on, but when you are given a bunch of things and are shuffled around, keep a mindset that you will pace yourself well, no matter what — this should be all about the strategy & planning aspect that gets you to that prepared checklist of tasks.
This means, if you think your previous question’s response went well, don’t get too quick or jumpy to answer the next one — this is a red flag for the interviewer that you enjoy acting according to your previous wins — something that can bring unexpected results in their business.
You might disagree with this point, but if you think about it, over-excitement might mean that you end-up answering the next question based on the very first idea that comes to your mind — and the first idea is usually not the best idea to work with.
For this, I have seen that mindfulness truly helps in discovering your optimum response speed and then maintaining the same, during the interview.
Being great with navigation during a typical curveball interview (you can also call this a ‘rapid-fire interview’ — do remember, labelling is great as long as it doesn’t take up unnecessary headspace!) would mean that your interviewer truly and appropriately manages to capture your strengths and your weaknesses, and also understand how to fit you and your skills in the existing team and consequently the organisation. If you are their first PM hire, they might want to go with a trust-first approach before they look for a ‘fitment’.
Lastly, do try to read where the interviewer is trying to take you but always ensure you keep a healthy distance — you are not sitting with them to read their minds!
Product Manager: A Nimble Leader
As a Product Manager, your efficiency on the job will be evaluated based on the success of the product you own, but it is not so straightforward to simply take a product/feature from conception to launch/roll-out. There would be multiple things happening down the road, before you see your idea out in the market and begin to act on the data/the reaction that it generates. This is when, you need to be nimble, and show your leadership skills.
You are nimble if you can quickly pivot, empathise, be unafraid to start over, trash things that you have been working on for weeks or months, and overall, are genuinely unafraid to fail.
Leadership is a trait that would require an entire ecosystem of blogposts, but just to give a summary — a good Product Leader could defend ideas, take constructive feedback well, have tricky conversations with teams who don’t understand, say, technicalities, or give an honest timeline to the customers regarding the product roadmap, and such similar activities where you don’t just deliver, but give directions as well.
You need to be the voice of almost everyone you interface with, in a company. The nuances might vary a bit between B2B vs B2C or other company types, so I’d say it is a good idea to read up on the company and be prepared accordingly.
I don’t have questions to share in this part, but consider this and the next, the final part, to be more like posts that give you a quick heads-up.
Feel free to reach me at contactsoumyam@gmail.com for feedback, questions and ideas. If you liked this post, do add claps below — it is a nice ‘vanity metric’ for me that I am doing things right with this series. ;)
Thanks for reading!
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