What Are the Basics of Product Manager
Interviews by Google PM
www.productschool.com
FREE INVITE
Join 17,000+ Product Managers on
productschool.com/slack-community
2-month part-time
Courses
Product
Management
2-month part-time
Courses
Coding
for Managers
2-month part-time
Courses
Data Analytics
for Managers
Tweet to get a free ticket
for our next Event!
Include @productschool and #prodmgmt at the
end of your tweet
Tonight’s Speaker
Ankit Prasad
The Product
Manager Role
Ankit Prasad
[email protected]
@_ankitprasad (Medium//Twitter)
TOC
My Background
What does a PM do
The project roadmap
Executing
Analyzing and iterating
Getting a PM Role
Skills of a PM
The interview process
My background
What does a PM
actually do?
A popular explanation...
What, exactly, is a Product Manager? Mind the Product
But if someone asked you, “What is the Statue of Liberty?” would you
answer, “It’s between Manhattan, Jersey City, and Governor’s Island?”
3 Types of PM, @danieldemetri
Owns the WHAT What problems are worth solving?
and the WHY What features or products should we build to
solve those problems?
Design & Eng. own the HOW*
*All boundaries are soft
But really… which PM owns what?
What market has a Student loan process is broken. Let
VP / Founder problem worth solving? me recruit a team to solve it.
I’m told we want to solve student
Director / Head of What should the overall
loan process. We will build an online
Product approach be?
website to make applying easy.
I’m working on this online
What features should
Senior PM we build?
application. Let’s build a feature to
let customers refer their friends.
I’m working on this referral feature.
What should this
Junior PM specific feature do?
Let’s make sure inviting friends is
easy.
Mission: ship great features
Launch, analyze,
Pre-building Execution
iterate
Roadmap
Product Analysis +
requirements Eng. design Decisions
document Launch
UX
Pre-building
INPUTS: OUTPUT:
● Vision/strategy from the top ● ROADMAP
● Market research (what are competitors ○ i.e. a prioritized list of features
doing?) ○ Big companies: Annual and Quarterly
● Customer/user research (soft-stuff) OKRs
● Analytics (the hard data) ○ Start-ups: Backlog
● XFN asks - BD, Marketing, Sales, Legal
● Your/team’s understanding *must be
validated
Example of a roadmap
Example of a roadmap
Ideas based on:
1. Company vision/strategy
2. XFN input
3. Your understanding of the
space
Example of a roadmap
Want a combination of
small (but high ROI) wins
and mountain-movers
Example of a roadmap
Impact backed by
user research and
analytics
Example of a roadmap
Here’s where a basic
understanding of the tech-
infrastructure helps. Talk
to your eng. lead!
Example of a roadmap
Goal: prioritize!
Small Company (eg. Earnest)
● Pop the next highest priority project into the hopper/sprint
when previous one rolls off
○ Esp. for agile teams
○ Show of hands: who’s familiar with agile?
● Urgency from
○ Aggressive growth targets need to be met
○ Launch dates for big projects
Big company (eg. Google):
Quarterly OKRs*/Goals
Ads (owner: xyz VP in Ads team)
● Grow ads revenue by $XX; with YY% growth in Video Ads and XX% growth in user quality
Company Payments (owner: VP of product for payments)
● $YY gross value of txns; Launch in-store payments in XX markets
...
● Launch Android Pay in XX markets (owner: director of product)
Product ● Launch Android Pay online on YY websites
Area ● Ensure ZZ% of people are in a “ready to pay” state with Google
● Improve conversion with push provisioning (owner: PM; eng lead)
○ Launch one-click card save flow
○ Design server-to-server callback
Team ● Take advantage of cards on file to acquire users (owner: PM; eng lead)
○ Launch token upgrade notifications in XYZ market
○ ...
● Launch 3 campaigns with merchants (owner: PM, eng lead, BD)
* OKRs are measurable goals. At Google, we shoot for 60-70% success rate.
Execution
● Write the Product Requirements Doc SECTIONS OF A PRD
○ What is the feature trying to achieve? ● Vision
● Background research
○ Details of how the feature should work.
● Goals & Non-goals
● Work with UX to get mocks ● Metrics
● High-level use cases
● Get involved with eng. to understand (and optionally ● Detailed design
inform) high-level design ● Launch plan
● Risks
● Collaborative process: you’ll give design input and
● Privacy
UX/eng. will have PRD input
● Legal
○ Should feel like a team. Remember, you’re all on the
same side!
Task Planning
❖ Often driven by TPM or Eng. Lead. In that case, attend stand-ups so you know what progress is
being made, where engineers are getting blocked, and with micro-prioritizations
Launching
Team Status
● What bugs are left? Which are launch-blocking?
VP (Product Area) Pending
○ Prioritize!
PM ✅
● Are the cross-functional teams ready?
Eng ✅
Test ✅
● LAUNCH
BD ✅
Marketing FYI
● Analyze experiment results Security Pending
● Decide what to do Legal ✅
... ...
Analyzing Experiment Results
Start: 10/20/2014 n=2,040,049
● Some stuff went up End: 11/7/2014
● Others went down Metric Enabled - Lift (p-
value)
● What do you do?
Client retention (1- 1.5% (0.03)
day)
Example on right: Days engaged 0.4% (0.12)
Likes -1.2% (0.09)
● Launched a feature on Yammer* that let users
search for a message within a group Messages 2.3% (0.15)
● What should we do?
Posting binary 0.4% (0.59)
* An enterprise communication tool. Think Slack or
Thread starters 0.8% (0.77)
Facebook for Work for the purpose of this exercise.
Analyzing Experiment Results
Wrong answer: more things are green then red, so success!
Correct answer:
Global metric: what metric most closely represents the top-level goal of the company? What
happened to it?
Local metric: How do you explain what happened to the local metrics?
Cheat sheet when defining the global metric: companies are either
● Transactional - key metric is # of funnel completions.
○ Loans and loan applications on Earnest, orders on Amazon, etc.
● Engagement - key metric is long-term usage, retention
○ Days engaged and retention (1, 7, 30 -day) for Facebook
■ So if # of posts read go down, but days engaged goes up…
Let’s look at those metrics again...
A single project may follow this nice schedule...
Launch, analyze,
Pre-building Execution
iterate
...but your time doesn’t
Time distributed amongst (changes week
to week):
● Product strategy & planning (20%)
● User & partner research + meetings
(20%)
● Design sessions with UX team (10%)
● Working with engineering (20%)
● Metrics/analysis (20%)
● General coordination (10%)
Since you have projects in every stage of the
funnel.
So how do I interview for
a PM role?
What do companies look for?
GOOGLE (and EARNEST) YAMMER
● Hard skills ● Needs
○ Analytical ability ○ Product intuition
○ Technical ○ Strategy
○ Product & strategic insight ○ Product Passion
○ Critical thinking
● Soft skills
○ Communication ● Wants
○ Creativity ○ User empathy
○ Culture-fit ○ Communication
○ Math
○ Design sense
○ Technical competence
Interview Questions
● Product
○ Design X for Y (design an alarm clock for a blind person)? 1
○ How would you improve product X (or pick a product and how would
2 What about the
you improve it)?
soft skills:
● Analytical
Creativity
○ Metrics focused: We ran an experiment that increased the font-size 3
Communication
on Google search. # of searches went up. What do you do?
Culture Fit
○ Math focused: How many people fly out of SFO every day? 4
● Technical
○ What factors would you consider when deciding which videos to
show in the “suggested” column on YouTube?
○ SQL Basics: Given the following {SQL} tables, how would you produce
this other output?
Design X for Y (“the blue sky”) 1
Ask clarifying questions If I ask you to design a
○ What are the 5 questions you’re going to ask first? toothbrush, I haven’t
Start with the user really told you much.
○ Who is the user? What are their needs?
○ If you’re not given a user, list some options, then
prioritize (quickly).
■ Eg. for each user base, think through needs
(unmet), ease of meeting those needs, etc.
List ideas/features
○ Have at least 4-5.
A.B.S. :
○ Try to have at least 1-2 “out-there”, more creative
Always Be Structuring
options
Prioritize and pick
Example: Design a Music System for a Car 1
Ask clarifying questions: Feature Ideas/Options: Pick/prioritize between options
- Who is the user? - What features does it have? and why:
- Where do they live? - Where does it get music
- What type of car? from? Pros Cons
- .... - Phone
Phone ... ...
- Local Storage
Start with the user: - Sync with home wifi? Local ... ...
- Pick a user base: - How do you control it?
Sync ... ...
- Mom driving SUV, - Voice?
lives in appt. - Bluetooth/phone?
- Student in college - Touch?
- Working dad in - ...
house
- What are their needs?
How would you improve X? 2
Pick your favorite app? How would you improve
it? (“the improvement question”)
Have some “favorite”
Similar to previous, with the added complexity of: apps and 3 ideas to
improve each in advance
● What is the current vision of the product?
● Who are the users, and what are some unmet
needs?
However, do NOT dive
● What is the top-level goal/metric of the product? straight into the ideas.
● How would you structure an experiment to test Laundry lists != good
movement in those metrics?
Go through the process!
Example: Favorite app//improve it 2
Recently been using UberEats Improvement ideas:
- Single working men/women:
Start with the user: - Pre-selected menu of “top nearby items”
- App designed to help you get food you want that are quick to make and deliver.
quickly - One click order that lets you order these
- User bases: popular items.
- Single working men/women - …
- Office workers during lunch
- …
- Pick one Rank/prioritize
- Single working men/women: - Estimated impact of each feature?
- Care about time - How hard will it be to build?
- Convenience
Analytics: Metrics focused 3
Often follow-on of improve X question:
How would you test the one-click order of popular items on UberEats idea? (contd.
from last Q)
Think: MVP experiment
Maybe start with a one-click “repeat last order” button?
Who would you test on?
What metric are you trying to move? (Think: engagement or transactional?)
Analytics: Math focused 4
How many planes fly out of SFO every month?
Lay out complete formula first:
# flights = # of days/month * minutes/day * take-offs/runway each min * # runways
Then calculate
Then gut-check
Then stress-test
Always surprised how few do this. Formula first is key for this.
Some resources I’ve found useful...
Cracking the PM Interview (Gayle McDowell)
Good for understanding the role
Good for technical parts
Decode & Conquer (Lewis Lin)
Good for practice to product
questions
Good, short, behavioral section
Quora/Medium/Google search
More prep on specific company
Questions?
Ankit Prasad
[email protected]
@_ankitprasad (Medium//Twitter)
Part-time Product Management Courses in
San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles,
New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago,
Denver, London, Toronto
www.productschool.com
