PM Interview Experience 2021

Hey Blind Community! Thanks to all the posts here I was able to prep better for my pm interviews and negotiate my TC higher. Here's paying forward and documenting my experiencing to help folks who're prepping for PM interviews. I started looking for jobs towards the second half of the year. 1. Startups/Midsize companies: I was talking to a lot of recruiters/sources when I was testing waters. About a month in, I realized this was becoming a big time drain and leading to nothing substantial. No recruiter would give me salary range since they cannot disclose the stock/RSU part. Blind/Glassdoor were helpful in filtering out startups that seemed toxic or ones without much traction/success. 2. Amazon Experience: Applied to an online posting on LinkedIn. 2 phone screens with L7 peer PMs and then 5 onsite virtual interviews with L7/L8 PMs and engineering leads. Standard written assignment of past project for PMs before the virtual onsite. The process was very smooth and recruiter was very helpful with prep. Unfortunately, I gave this as a test interview without any prep and got an L6 offer (role was L7). TC (verbal only): $403k (15% increment to their band max of $351k). They also told me I can expect L7 after 2 years but after reading all the Blind post, I decided it was not worth it. The entire process took 1.5 months, Amazon was pretty good about scheduling interviews as soon as I was available. The recruiter scheduled a prep call with me before the onsite which was very helpful. 3. Coinbase/Google: Didn't prep for product sense and execution type interviews which was a mistake. Coinbase initial screen is exactly the same as meta and if you're prepping for meta, then this should cover Coinbase. For Google phone screen, I was asked to solve a problem in my domain with existing or new google products (similar to favorite product Qs). The interviewer was late 10 mins and my lack of framework didn't help make a strong case. My bad here for not prepping enough, I thought phone screen would be easy since I passed it last time without too much effort. Didn't pass both of these initial screens. 4. Plaid: Applied via referral. The hiring manager round went well but they wanted me to do a take home assignment before virtual onsite. They couldn’t disclose the TC and I gave a number that was maybe too high for them ($450k). Post this we didn’t move forward. 5. Twilio: Recruiter reached out for a staff pm position. Their band at the time (~10/2021) was fixed ($340k = $240k base + $400k/4 RSU + room for sign on bonus). They had a weird process where the first screen was with skip level manager who did a product sense style interview based on an existing Twilio problem. Then hiring manager did a product execution style interview which I didn’t pass. 6. Meta: Recruiter reached out. I tried preparing by looking at Youtube videos but that didn't help as I froze during the initial screen. Although meta provides a really good guide to prep, much better than the email sent by Google. There is a rich question bank on Lewis Lin, exponent and glassdoor. The questions are repeated. Didn't pass the initial screen but could have done better if I had practiced mocks. Post this experience, I decided to look around what I was doing wrong cause I thought I was decent with interviews. Found a lot of helpful posts on blind, this is when I learned about exponent and product alliance. PM interviews have pretty much become consultant style case interviews so despite not being a fan of these I started preparing and doing mocks. I signed up for exponent and their peer pm interview tool was very helpful. I initially tried to do self mock interviews via YouTube videos but that didn’t help much and the big difference was doing mocks. After about a month of preparing (~30 mocks), I had following companies 1. Instacart: Applied online and heard back within in a week. One HM screen and then virtual onsite. For virtual onsite, they do standard product sense and execution for Instacart products. Found a really helpful posts on blind that helped me with these. Their product sense interview is very simple and questions are repeated so check glassdoor/Lewis Lin bank but for product execution, understand their business and how the 4 sided market works. The remaining 3 interviews were behavioral - one HM screen (working style and career goals), one cross functional (engineering lead) and one product leader (VP). The process was fairly straightforward and efficient (no assignment!), but not much help from recruiter for prep. Didn't pass their onsite (likely messed HM final round). 2. Stripe: I didn’t apply but had the hiring manager reach out to me with a role. After an exploratory call, I decided to move forward. Initial phone screen included 2 product sense interviews, one with favorite product and other generic. It helped that I had prepared for all questions on Lewis Lin question bank, Glassdoor and the pm interview. Post that I was moved to onsite and given a take home assignment (had to submit this 24 hours before onsite). For onsite, I had 4 rounds with 1 standard product execution, 1 cross-functional (pm peer to walk through past experience), 1 Hiring manager (talked mostly about the role and expectations) and 1 tech round (expected to walk through a high level system of past product and then very high level systems design of a hypothetical product). Got a reject after 10 days and feedback was that I was not their first choice. Eligible after 6 months and I won’t need to go through the entire process again. 3. RobinHood: Recruiter reached out. All the interviewers are very early in their pm journey so very heavy emphasis on structure/framework. The initial round was favorite product and past product launch walkthrough. Then they have second round where they do a product sense (zero to one) interview along with cross functional interview. Didn't pass the second round. 4. Zoom: Applied online but was considered for a different role. I was skeptical but after speaking with the HM I decided to proceed. They had 3 interviews, two product peer interviews to talk about past product experience and one interview with the designer. Never heard back about the decision. 5. Square: This was probably my longest interview experience. I applied online and had an initial recruiter call. Post that I did 2 phone screens - Hiring manager and peer PM interview. These are standard questions to gauge how you launched past products and relevance to the role. Moved to onsite interviews which consists of 6 interviews - 1 cross functional with tech, 1 tech round to gauge technical knowledge (basics of API, system design), 1 product sense type interview, 1 product execution (repeat question from glassdoor), 1 hiring manager (talked about the role mostly) and 1 peer pm (past project). After that there is a panel round for 45 mins where you talk about a product you launched, this was fairly simple and straightforward. Square was probably my longest interview (both time and number of interviews). Got L6 offer and was able to negotiate higher thanks to a recent post here about L6 pm offer. They're starting to match meta and google. This is the offer I accepted. YOE PM/Total: 7/8 Location: Bay Area Old TC: 230 New TC: 410 (210 Base + RSUs) +15k sign on bonus #pm #product #productmanager #interview p.s. this is my first post and hopefully helpful (sorry for typos). I won't be able to answer dms but if helpful I can create another post later if folks are interested in anything specific