Notes from my Product Management Interviews Part 7: Competency Assessment
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 , Part 5 here and Part 6 here.
While I had better pen-n-paper notes for all the other parts of the series, that wasn’t the case for this final part. Therefore, I decided to do some research, ask around, and then write this part down — which is why, it took me longer to publish this.
Needless to say, it feels wonderful to finish writing a series of blog-posts that I had planned to write for a long time, and was nudged enough by my friends to put my plan to action. The feedback that I have received over email, in comments, or sometimes, in direct messages, have been truly helpful and encouraging. It’s great to see that people are finding this series practical and helpful.
A minor self-plug: Part 4 of this series has been featured in Product School communities (Yay!)
In this post, I will lay out what it means when you think of competency assessment in a PM interview, and what the key areas are that could make up for such an assessment. Let’s get started!
What does Competency Assessment mean?
There are many sources on the internet that talk in detail about this topic. A favourite one of mine, that I saw on the Association for Talent Development website (td.org), is:
A competency assessment is the assessment of someone’s capabilities against the requirements of their job.
The assessment is performed on those identified tasks and skills for which a rating is selected based upon how they do that task, which defines their proficiency level. In other words, a competency assessment measures how (behaviours) someone does the what (task or skill). The individual’s selected proficiency level is then compared with the target level, defining proficiency or skill gaps for each task and skill.
You can read the full article published on their website on this topic, here: https://www.td.org/insights/what-is-a-competency-assessment
While Competency Assessment could be seen primarily as a tool that’s used to evaluate an on-the-job personnel, its fundamental concept is used by a hiring team to assess whether or not a candidate fits the required proficiency level.
From the quoted text above, the ‘how’ is measured by how a candidate approaches or discusses a problem given to them, so that the interviewer can understand how proficient and skilful the candidate is or can get, to complete the ‘what’, which in this case, is to solve the given problem.
From my interview experience, here are the three key areas in which the interviewer truly and objectively (through scores/ratings) looks to assess your competency as a Product Manager who’d fit the job description that they’ve posted:
- Take-home Assignments/Cases for submission
- Understanding of Customer Psychology
- Talking about Relevant Experience
Take-home Assignments/Cases for submission: Many of the companies which are in early-stage of their journey, or have leaders who are looking to build a brand new product team, will give you an assignment/case study to work on, which you would be required to submit to them after spending a few hours working through the assignment. Depending on your experience, you would find it easy or difficult to work on these assignments and send your submission in time. Most of the times, the submission-window would be of two days (weekends could be considered for the window).
I have realised that this is one area where having an MBA directly makes a great impact on how you succeed in this assessment, because good MBA courses are heavily loaded with case-based assignment submissions (disclaimer: I am an alum of Indian School of Business’ 1-year PGP program). Students thus get to: 1. understand how to interpret and scope the case, so that they can make the submission useful and a job very well done, and 2. understand how much time should be allocated to work on such an assignment (thus avoiding analysis-paralysis in the process).
So, if you don’t come from a business degree background, I’d strongly recommend that you talk to your peers with this background, who can give you pro-tips to save time and understand what an interviewer is really looking for, in your submission.
Understanding of Customer Psychology: While this area is near-impossible to be covered in a 1-hour interview (this is a vast topic, and a lot of research is going on in this), your interviewer would surely try to see how properly you can understand what a customer wants, or, how they’d think when they make a usage/purchase decision, or, how they will behave when they use a product, and what their post-usage behavioural actions would entail.
The questions they’d give you to work on during, say, a product design interview, understand that these would ultimately be about providing value to a customer, solving their problems, making their lives easier, discovering something new and useful, and so on.
In short, always genuinely think about the customer when you work on a PM interview question — it helps you win points because your discussion will then become customer-centric, and your interviewer will assess you as a good fit for the role (as I believe, Product Management starts and ultimately ends with customer-centricity).
Talking about Relevant Experience: Unless you are a fresher, you’ll have many stories from your prior work experience that you’d want to talk about during the interview. Sometimes, the interviewer might ask you a question (eg — What was the biggest challenge that you faced when you introduced a new feature in the last product that you worked on?) which would allow you to recall stories from your prior work-experience.
The key to nail such questions is to ensure you answer them in a way as if you are ‘narrating’ a story to a super-attentive listener. Narration, means, that you not only control the flow of your story (apart from ensuring you hit hard on the impact and outcome points) but also control the tone that sets up the stage for the story to flow. If you talk like a robot, you lose your listener. If you lose your listener, your impact points fall flat. Take your time, do not oversell, and be very genuine — don’t make up stories for sure!
In the end, I’d like to summarise that, while you cannot always 100% ensure your competency matches the hiring team’s requirements, but by thinking through the text that I have added above, you can certainly ensure that you are able to give enough clarity about your profile, so that when the hiring team sits down to review your profile and their evaluation of your interviews, they are able to file your candidature for the next steps with maximum accuracy and, perhaps, with minimal uncertainty (remember, you are aiming for the shortlist, and not for the waitlist!)
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. ;)
Also, I have back-linked all the parts within the series so that you can navigate freely between the parts (hopefully with the least number of clicks!)
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: credits to all images used in this post are attributed to the original source in the captions. The author takes no credit for the awesomeness of these images and consequently all copyright claims should stay within the original source’s boundaries
