Product

Execution

Strategy

PM Interview

Strategy Guide
HOW TO CRACK ANY PM

INTERVIEW QUESTION

Behavioral

Technical
 Behavioral Questions
Tell Me About a Time​ ​ ⏰
These questions are the classic behavioral questions: asking you for a story about when you
showed leadership, drive, teamwork, communication skills, and so on. You’ll often get these in
earlier interview rounds, especially with recruiters.

Sample questions​ 🤔
● Tell me about a time when you motivated a teammate that wasn’t getting their work done.
● Have you ever convinced an executive to change their mind? How did you do it?
● Tell me about a time you failed.

Strategy​ ♟

The hardest part of these questions is knowing a good story off the top of your head. To do this,
it helps to create a ​scenario matrix i​ n your notebook that lists all your past experiences on one
side and various kinds of situations on the other:

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In each cell, think of a story from the appropriate experience that shows an instance when you
faced the given scenario. Be sure to give it a catchy name, like “The Hail-Mary Pass” or “The
Dropbox Incident.” Think of them as titles of Netflix episodes or action-packed short stories
— by giving them catchy names, you’ll ensure that you remember them, make them dramatic
and interesting, and make them stick in interviewers’ minds.

Fill out this matrix over the course of a few days as ideas come to you and keep adding to it as
you think of new scenarios you may have to speak about. You don’t need to fill in every cell
— you probably only need a few stories for each scenario, and you want to spread out your
stories across multiple experiences — but thinking about each cell can help jog your memory.
(One story can fit in multiple cells, of course.)

1. Telling the story ​ 🗣

On interview day, you’ll hopefully remember at least one story for each incident. When the
interviewer asks you a Tell Me About a Time question, bring the relevant story to mind. Start
your answer with something like, “Yeah, let me tell you about [catchy story name] when I worked
at [organization].” By having a catchy story name up front, you’re hooking the interviewer’s
interest.

When telling the story, you don’t need to follow a particular structure, but make sure your story
has a clear beginning (where you establish the conflict and introduce the characters, including
yourself), middle (where the problem came to a head and you took some action), and end
(where you resolve the situation and show a result).

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When telling the story, make it dramatic and people-focused. Use people’s names if you can and
highlight people’s emotions (if your team was stressed, perhaps highlight how one member was
pacing the floor nervously one day). Vary the tone and pitch of your voice. Be sure to focus on
stories rather than numbers; numbers read well on a resume but don’t have the same heft in a
verbal story. For instance, if your company missed a business opportunity, explain all the cool
products that you missed out on rather than throwing out a large dollar figure. Check out the
Product Management’s Sacred Seven​ chapter on Data Science for more details on telling
convincing stories, winning people over, and rallying people to act.

2. Personality traits ​ 🙇
Make sure you emphasize different personality traits and frame your answers differently
depending on the scenario. For instance:

● If the scenario involves interpersonal conflict, emphasize how you were open-minded,
empathetic, and understanding, and how you assumed best intentions and didn’t cast
blame.
● If the scenario involved being decisive, emphasize how you got others’ input but made
the call yourself (without meekly asking for consensus), moved quickly, and rallied the
team to your side.
● If the scenario involves you or your team failing, be frank and avoid deflecting or being
defensive. Take ownership of the failure; don’t pin the blame on anyone on the team.
Pivot the question toward what you learned and how the team improved.
● If the scenario involves success, dole out the credit and praise to others, without taking
credit for yourself. Always say “we,” not “I.”
● If the scenario involves leading the team, emphasize how you were scrappy (could do a
lot with few resources) and energetic, and how you could build team culture and motivate
people when they were down.

Put all of our guidance together and you might get something like:

A time I had to help the team overcome an unexpected obstacle? Sure, let me tell you
about The Dropbox Incident. I was working at Startup.io, where we stored key documents
on a shared Dropbox folder. Through some configuration mistake, someone accidentally
deleted all the files on the folder, and there was no way to get them back. People were
almost crying at their desks because of how many documents we lost. I realized that one
of our database engineers, Felix, always kept backups on his external hard drive. Felix
could be grumpy and didn’t like people poking around his messy desk, but when we
asked him to search his hard drive, he was able to find the documents, and we quickly
restored them to the Dropbox. From this I learned that everyone on the team can play an
important role, and we instituted a more robust file storage system to ensure it didn’t
happen again.

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This example answer includes several key elements: a dramatic story name, a
beginning/middle/end, something you learned at the end, people’s names, emotional incidents,
and spreading the praise.

Rubric​ 📄
Score yourself from 1-5 on the following criteria:

● Relevance: ​Did your chosen story show the scenario the interviewer asked for?
● Learning: ​Did your story show that you’ve learned and grown from adversity?
● Humility: D​ id you come across as a humble team player?
● Delivery: W
​ ere your stories engaging, memorable, and filled with emotion?

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Culture Fit​ ​ 🤗
These questions usually happen very early or very late in the interview process. They’re
relatively easy, but being able to give an inspiring and exciting answer can really set you apart
from the dozens of other candidates who gave generic, inoffensive answers.

Sample questions​ 🤔
Most culture fit questions are the same:

● Tell me about yourself.

● Why do you want to work here?
● Why do you want to leave your current job / why did you leave your last job?
● How does this role relate to your past experiences?

Strategy​ ♟

The key to this question is to make it seem like your entire life has prepared you for this job; you
have to find a thread through all your past experiences that connects them to this gig.

One part of this is explaining your past experiences in the right light. When talking about your
past experiences, choose aspects of them that are relevant to the company. You’d be surprised
how malleable some of your experiences are. For instance, running a club in college could be
used to explain why you love team collaboration tools if you’re interviewing at Slack or Trello, or
it could be used to explain why managing finances is so important to you if you’re interviewing at
a FinTech startup. The experiences you reference here don’t have to be professional, either; you
could explain how getting your first bike gave you a sense of freedom that really makes you
want to work at a micromobility or ridesharing company.

It’s also valuable to find an emotional connection to the company’s products. Explain how the
products have personally benefited you or touched your life. Maybe Facebook helped you
connect with your long-lost cousin, eBay helped your mom fill in her stamp collection, or
Evernote helped you survive four years of college. Keep these stories short and simple;
interviewers don’t like hearing cheesy or melodramatic stories.

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Finally, read up on the values that the company prides themselves on. You can often glean these
from the company’s mission statement, wording on their website, or news articles. Facebook’s
“Move Fast” motto suggests that they value scrappiness and curiosity, Microsoft is famous for
promoting growth mindset amongst its employees (it’s especially emphasized in Satya Nadella’s
writings!), and so on. Find examples in your life where you’ve had to apply those values or
people in your life who taught you those values.

You can also just show how your personal values line up with the product. If you love adventure
or travel, you can explain how Airbnb has opened new doors for you; if you’re inspired by art,
you can talk about how Pinterest has helped you discover new truths about the world; and so
on. Again, don’t make these too cheesy. Just show that the company and product appeal to you
and move on.

Ultimately, you want your answer to say something unique about you. Don’t give answers that
anyone else could have given. This means to not gush about how great the product is — talk
about how the product and company are good for you and vice versa. Your answers should
subtly showcase your passion, strengths, and relevant experience.

Rubric​ 📄
Score yourself from 1-5 on the following criteria:

● Purpose: ​Did you show that your personal story lines up with the company’s?
● Communication: D ​ id you tell your story eloquently and briefly?
● Knowing the company: D ​ id your story show that you know and appreciate the company’s
values?

Please do not share this document with anyone as it is proprietary content with a unique
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 Thank you for reading!
Visit www.productalliance.com for more
helpful resources.

Please do not share this document with anyone as it is proprietary content with a unique
serial code in the bottom left to track piracy. The sharing, reproduction, resale or distribution
of this copyrighted work is strictly illegal and punishable by fines up to $250,000.
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