As most others have noted, the interview process is a 30-minute phone screener with a recruiter, then two back-to-back 45-minute video interviews with lead product managers, one on Product Sense and another on Execution, and then onsite interviews. I did not make it past the video interviews.
For the phone screener, the recruiter is just looking to make sure you've done relevant product management-type work:
- Tell me about yourself
- Have you ever worked on a product/feature you worked on from idea to launch?
- How did you measure success of that product/feature? (provide examples of metrics you looked at)
My Product Sense interview was with a product lead on Facebook Messenger. He quickly told me that he had already read through my resume and asked if there was anything else unique about me that wasn't on my resume. He then asked me about two of my favorite consumer products to try and suss out any commonalities across the two to determine what characteristics I value in a good product. We then moved onto the meat of the interview, the product sense hypothetical. He presented the following hypothetical: "Design a way for people with similar interests/hobbies to connect".
I had prepped a structure of walking through the problem, the user, potential solutions, etc, but I struggled with this particular use case. His feedback was that I jumped too quickly into the solution, and that I needed to back up and talk about "pain points" in a bit more depth. Then, he provided feedback that I was getting stuck on pain points and needed to move onto the solution, as we were running out of time. I had 5 minutes at the end to ask him questions.
My Execution interview was with a product lead on Instagram, working on safety/community. He briefly introduced himself and his role, and asked me to quickly do the same. He the presented the following hypothetical: "Tell me what metrics you would look at as a product manager for Instagram ads".
We went through multiple follow-ups, asking me to prioritize which of those metrics would be most important, what to consider about how that metric might not tell the whole story, what I would do if I saw a sharp decrease in that metric from one day to the next, how I would rally the team around addressing that problem vs moving on, etc. I had a lot of fun here and thought I did fairly well with this interview, as it more closely reflected what I do in my current role day to day.
My advice for the Product Sense and Execution video interviews:
- Figure out how well you're balanced between these two skill sets.
- If you're unbalanced, like I was, focus on the area where you are weaker
- Identify a structure to use for either interview. For Product Sense, I would recommend: 1) Clarify the problem, 2) Understand/make assumptions about the user, 3) Identify pain points, 4) Brainstorm solutions, 5) Explain rationale/tradeoffs. For Execution, I would recommend: 1) Identify the proxy metric that most closely reflects the real-world change, 2) Identify related metrics, 3) Refine to reduce chance of "gaming" the metric, 4) Identify what questions you would ask if those metric(s) fell (external factors, internal to Facebook factors, internal to product/feature factors), 5) Explain how you would make tradeoffs to prioritize addressing the issue. There are various books and websites that can lead you through other ways of structuring your answers to these two types of questions. I'd highly recommend writing out a flow chart of your structure that you can refer to during the interview.
- Practice hypotheticals out loud with a friend. It was extremely helpful to also refine any problems you might have with communicating your ideas. Take the flow chart you created above and refine it by practicing out loud with a friend. I found it helpful to create a sort of mix-and-match flashcards by printing out 6 starts to a question and combining them with ends of a question. I put all of the starts in one bowl and all the ends in another bowl, and had my friend pick from the two bowls at random. Examples:
Starts:
1. Tell me your favorite thing about...
2. Design/re-design...
3. How would you measure success of...
4. How would you fix a problem with...
Ends:
1. ...a way for people to find apartments/meet people with similar interests/find something to do this weekend
2. ...X feature of Facebook/Instagram (i.e. Birthdays, Messenger, Saved, Ads, News Feed, Trending, etc)
3. ...your favorite product
Ultimately, this interview process does a really good job at sussing out the skills that you've already developed. Prep can take you the last 10%, but if you don't have a firm foundation, it will be fairly difficult to succeed (at least in my experience). Trust your strengths and shore up your weaknesses.