Interviewing as a PM vs. as a SWE

I worked as a Software Engineer for 3 years, and am now transitioning into a Product Management role. Part of this role transfer (unsurprisingly) entails studying for PM interviews!

PM interview questions are quite different from technical interviews, and perhaps due to my engineering background I found them much harder. So I wanted to share some tips for anyone else going through the same struggle. For context, I am L4 as both SWE and PM, so I cannot speak very much to interviewing for higher level roles.

Note that this will be different at smaller companies, where PM interviews may be more behavioral and project-focused, rather than skill-based.

What a SWE interview is looking for

With engineering interviews, the interviewers are generally looking for two things:

70% the right answer / what you know
30% your communication skills

Studying to get the right answer

The trick to studying to get “the right answer” is -

Know what technology you’re going to be working with in the role and study up on how it works. So for example, if you’ll be working on full-stack, knowing how the internet works is a good start.
Practice general algorithmic questions.
1. I found interviewers will almost always ask something recursion-related, since it’s the hardest question to nail, and easily leads into discussion about performance, alternative solutions with for-loops and dynamic programming, etc.
Practice your general data structure and design questions.
1. In-depth knowledge of how data structures are built for a single language is usually enough.

But basically, the more you know, the more likely you’ll do well.

Practicing your communication skills

The candidates interviewers are trying to weed out are the ones who code by themselves and aren’t willing to explain how they got there. They are also trying to understand the way you think.

The best advice I got here was just to keep talking. And it totally works - for my entry-level eng interviews I made sure to smile a lot, start at the top-left of the white board, and more or less talked non-stop about exactly what was going through my head at the moment until the interviewer stopped me. I got high marks for communication and friendliness.

It’s not easy, but it is simple

There’s not a lot of tricks to a SWE interview. They’ll ask you a question, you know it or you don’t, and as long as you know it and communicate how you got to the answer in a friendly way, you’re golden.

At higher levels, interviewers will start to expect more thorough domain expertise in your answers, knowledge of the design/development/production process itself, and thoughts on resource management. But at the end of the day, the interviews boil down to the same thing - what you know, and how you communicate it.

What a PM interview is looking for

There are 2 types of PM interviews - structured and behavioral. Structured PM interviews, used mostly by large companies, try their best to put metrics on things that are inherently unmeasurable (ex. creativity and “product intuition”). Behavioral interviews, used by everyone else, asks about your previous employment experiences to see how you’ll behave in the future. For this post, we’ll focus on structured interviews.

A structured PM interview boils down to:

5% what you know (if you’re applying into a specialized field especially at a higher level, this would be weighted more)
10% friendliness and adaptability under pressure
75% presentation / communication skills
5% pure luck

Because of this weird breakdown, studying for a PM interview is a totally different beast.

Studying for what you should know

There are a few things that all PMs are expected to know and be able to pull out - in the US, that would be

the population of the United States (300 million)
the number households in the US (100 million)
the population of the world (8 billion)
the population of Asia (4 billion)
Bonus if you also know the number of hours in a year (9000!)

You should also know some basic tech numbers, like

Cost of storage ($0.20 / gb / month)
Est size of a text file (1kb), image file (1 mb), short video/audio file (3mb), full video file (100 mb)
Engagement rates of major products of your company (Google fields 2 trillion searches a year)

But otherwise, that’s all the knowledge you really “need to know” to do well in a PM interview. You’re allowed to ask for any other info that comes up - this was a total change in mentality for me.

Practicing adaptability under pressure

Part of what interviewers will do is purposefully challenge your answer, no matter if it is a good answer or not. They are trying to see if you stay calm and weigh their opinion, or get defensive about it. The only way to prep for this is to do loads of mock interviews.

One tip I heard was to approach the interviews with a “I’ve got nothing to lose” mentality. That removes your ego from the situation and helps you stay calm through provocation.

Practicing your presentation and communication skills

Most interviewers will say that there’s no “right answer” to their interview question, but that’s not true. The right answer is one that checks all their boxes of being:

User-focused, but also strategic for the business
Thorough and specific, but not exhaustive
Creative, but not crazy (unless they want you to think crazy)
A result of a back-and-forth with the interviewer, but still clearly and linearly communicated, with you driving the discussion the entire way.

The key to good communication here is figuring out what the interviewer is trying to get you to say, and giving them that answer. If this sounds like a mind game, well…it might just be.

Studying takes the form of:

looking at all questions that might be asked, and categorizing them,
developing play-by-play frameworks to answer each category of question,
stress-testing these frameworks in mock interviews to make sure they are addressing what the interviewers are looking for
- even if you think you’ve addressed something, the interviewer may not have understood it. It’s not just about what you say, it’s also about how you say it.
hoping that the interviewer will ask you a category of question you’ve already prepared for.

Books like Cracking the PM Interview are helpful in breaking down question types. However, know that question types change over time as interviewers try to come up with things that surprise interviewees, so it’s up to you to stay savvy on the “latest and greatest” of PM interviewing trends. This is also why mock interviews are KING when it comes to studying for PM interviews. I did about 20 of them before my actual interviews.

But also note that matter how much you prepare or mock interview an interviewer can still catch you off-guard with a question you haven’t seen - which is why the last 5% of PM interview preparation is pure luck. Go harvest some good karma! ;)

It’s not you, it’s them

The entire process is super vague, confusing, and subjective by the interviewer! I have been told many times not to take the results of the interviews to heart - it’s less of a referendum on your ability as a PM, and more pure luck on your compatibility with the interviewer and question. So hang in there, you’ll get through it!