Last Minute Interview Prep Guide for Entry-Level Product Management Roles – HelloPM

If you have a Product Management Interview in the next 2 days, and you are puzzled and overwhelmed by the thought of how to prepare and crack it, then this guide is made for you.

Before you can appear for the interview, you need to:

1. Understand the PM role and given Job description
2. Research about the company and its products
3. Prepare for common interview questions
4. Practice

Let’s start with Understanding the PM role and given JD

As a PM you need to:

1. Understand business goals
2. Discover users’ problems and desires
3. Find solutions to these problems
4. Articulate solutions clearly into features
5. Align/Work with teams (developers, designers, testers, legal) to create features
6. Align/Work with marketing and sales teams to take the product to the market and achieve business goals
7. Measure the right metrics and do data analytics to keep track of the product

Now, every product manager might have more of one responsibility and less of the other.

At an entry-level role, you need to be good at research skills, curiosity (asking questions), a bit of stakeholder management, problem-solving, and execution skills.

Go through the following resources to understand the essential skills:

1. Product thinking 101
2. How to do competitive analysis
3. How to create a PRD
4. How to choose the right metrics
5. How to do Prioritization
6. Working with engineers
7. Tech for PMs playlist

Now go through the JD carefully, and understand all the skills you need for the job.

Try to find stories in your experience/past work to which you can connect these skills.
For example: You can talk about the fest you’ve managed to showcase your collaboration skills or the recent case study or internship you have done to showcase your interest in a particular industry or problem.

Research about the company

You need to be informed about what the company does, their products, target users, competition and how they are doing. To find these, you can check:

1. Company’s website
2. Competitor’s website
3. Use the product or at least look at the demo/feature list
4. Read job descriptions for other roles at the company to find tech stacks, current business priorities, etc.
5. Read reports around the same industry

Be ready with some positives about the product, and some improvements you might suggest (should be backed by strong thesis like user needs, market opportunities or business goals)

Prepare for common interview questions

1. List of curated PM interview questions from popular companies.
2. How to do an RCA
3. How to solve guesstimates
4. How to answer product design questions

Practice:

1. Find buddies who have read this guide, choose a question from above, and start practicing.
2. Pick a couple of questions from the list, open your Zoom, start the camera, and record yourself answering. Rewatch and improve.
3. Practice on paper.