How to Crack the PM Interview in 2024 | Satish Mummareddy (Meta)

Job search is actually like a roller coaster ride. There are going to be lots of ups and downs. We have all been rejected by companies in the past. I've been rejected by Google, by YouTube, by LinkedIn. Like, you name it, I've been rejected. Mena, at some point did not even actually, like, want to interview me. All of us have faced rejection, so we carry the scars of it and we have a chip on our shoulder. But that actually brings negative energy into interviews. So what I want all of the people to do is process that baggage that they carry and actually like, let that go. Things will inevitably go wrong in interviews. You wanted to do some segmentation, you made a mistake, then you can focus on that mistake or you can actually correct it from there and then go on. So you want that resilience and positive mindset that you need to actually do. So you need to get your mental fitness up. The reason why I got a job at Meta was because I dealt with my baggage and I'd actually like, let all of the pass go. And I just like showed up as a happy person in the interview and then just did the interview as well.

All right, well, welcome everyone. My guest today is Satish. Satish spent six years at Meta working on AI products on Instagram. And during this time he's conducted hundreds of PM interviews at Meta and other companies. He's also coached many PMs to level up their product thinking skills. And since leaving Met Us, Satish has taught two or three very popular PM courses. So welcome Sahtish.

Thank you for having me, Peter. It's great to finally do a podcast together after having known each other for a few years.

Yeah, great. So why don't we start by talking about PM interviews, You know, like performing well in these interviews, like, you can literally like double your compensation or like you can find your dream job through these interviews. But you know, it's like, I think it's getting harder than ever to become to get a PM offer because, like, companies are downsizing, there's a lot of market forces. So. So why don't we start? I'd like to start with some of your hottest takes when it comes to PM. Yeah, do you have any?

I've done 200 plus interviews at Meta and one of the things that really shocked me about PM interviewing is that new college grads who were interviewing for RPM positions would crush the PM interview, while experienced PMs who had 10 plus years of experience would actually come in, then do extremely poorly in the interviews. And that was something that was extremely shocking. To me, okay, that's like one of the things that I find very surprising. Then the second thing that I actually like find very surprising is that when people come and ask me for help with interview preparation, the first thing that they ask is, hey, can you do some mock interviews with me? And every time I hear that, I throw up a little bit. And then the third thing that I've realized about this whole interview preparation process and doing interviews is that most PMs have worked on only one to three products in their entire PM careers. But then when they go into PM interviews, they could be asked about any product on the Internet. And that is something that's an extremely difficult job to do as a PM in interviews. And then finally, like most people come to me and then ask me about, hey, I want to show that I'm a much more senior pm. How do I show that I'm operating at a much higher level? And then the thing that people don't realize about it is, can you show that you can handle problems at much higher altitude that are actually like at the company level, at the industry level? And that's how you demonstrate that you're operating, you can operate at a much higher senior level as a pm. So those are actually my hot takes on actually on PM interviews.

Yeah, those are some pretty hot takes. So why don't we talk about them? So let's start with the first one. The first one is like the people who are fresh out of college or junior PMs actually do better on interviews than the senior PMs. Is it because they just memorize all the frameworks or why do they do better?

So the fundamental thing about PM interviewing is that there are two types of ways to interview PMs. One is retrospective interviewing, which was what happened before Google made PMs famous. Before that, whenever you went into an interview, people would try to evaluate your skills by asking questions about your past experience. They would ask you questions like, hey, tell me about a zero to one product that you built. And they would out of the answers for that. They would try to evaluate what your product thinking skills were, like what your analytics analytical skills were and what your leadership skills were. And that is the retrospective interviewing. So at that point, people could just dip into their past experiences and tell the stories that they wanted to. But then after Google, Google started to do prospective interviewing where they realized that it's hard to evaluate candidates based on the stories that they were telling. So they would just give you a new product scenario and ask you to tell what would you build for this particular space. And that is prospective interviewing. So PMs now have to, on their feet, do the thinking to figure out what products they would build, how they would actually evaluate them, how they would make decisions against those. And that is extremely challenging because you have to be able to take any product in the industry and then be able to answer product thinking questions, analytical thinking questions. And that requires a lot of preparation because none of your past work is actually going to help you enough with actually doing this. You might have some skills, but you still need to be able to apply them across a wide spectrum of products. That's what makes PM interviewing really hard. So if PM interviewing is that way and it's hard, then you need to actually put in time to prepare for interviews. The new college grads have actually spent six months in groups of people doing practice together to actually prepare for these few interviews. Whereas senior PMs think like, hey, I've just built successful products so I can just like walk into interviews and then crack interviews at these top companies. But that just does not work. So you need to actually like put in the work. And then the other part of it that happens is that interviewing by itself is a stochastic process. There's a lot of noise in it. It depends on how you are feeling on that particular day, what questions you get, how the interviewer is actually feeling on that day, what's going on in all of these things. If they ask you a follow up question, how are you reacting, working well, and you continue to work on those and then at some point it's hit a plateau and then you want to do something different. And when you want to do something different, your past skills may not actually like be enough. You need to one, have a bunch of additional contacts about new products that are happening, new changes that are happening, and you want to be able to apply frameworks and the learnings quickly to a new product space because you don't have a lot of time as a pm once you get into a role to establish yourself. And the first 90 days really matter. So if you're not able to show that you're competent in a new space in 90 days, you lose the trust of your team. And that's the reason why I think it's really important for PMs to actually build a wide base of product thinking skills that help them move between projects inside a particular company, move across companies, and then drive new waves that are happening at that point in time. So I feel like this is something that is essential for people. For example, when I was at Meta, I worked on six different product spaces and I had fairly good amount of success because of my ability to switch between spaces, ramp up quickly and then actually do that. And right now the trend Is for senior PMs, senior ICPMs. And the key skill that the senior ICPMs have is that you can take them from one space, put them in a new space and they ramp up extremely fast in 90 days and can start producing results. And that's the reason why I think that this is such a critical skill to have. And interviews are actually like a good way that you measure whether people have those skills or not.

Okay, so you're saying like doing this stuff can actually help you with your job. Obviously, like it's not just like just for the interview. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

The fundamentally what I realize is that PM interviewing is exactly how I operated Meta on a day to day basis. There is all. If you're working on high stakes projects that are high visibility, there is always a new problem that is coming in every few days and you are figuring out what is the solution to that set of problems in a couple of days, getting exact reviews done, alignment on those things and then actually executing against that. So you are really doing product thinking on new problems every few days if you're working on high profile projects at a company like Meta.

So let's get like a pretty tactical here, right? So let's say I'm working at like a, you know, quote unquote second tier company and I'm a PM and I want to get into like top tier, I want to get into Meta, I want to get into, I don't know, open eye, if they're still stable. I want to get into all the good companies. So how do I prepare? Let's say I have like, you know, three months. How do I prepare for this stuff?

Yeah, yeah. So I think overall I strongly believe that people need to give themselves enough lead time because you get like one shot at any of these companies in like 12 months or 18 months. So you want to take your best swing. So give yourself enough lead time to prepare well. And then the thing that I want people to actually like do is say that, hey, there are three areas that you are preparing for. Product thinking, analytical thinking and leadership skills. Companies may call them different things, but they're fundamentally evaluating for those three things. And the core thing is that you need to up level your product thinking first and that actually takes the longest amount of time. So what I ask people to do is prepare a plan for up Leveling their product thinking skills. And the way that people can do it is they can actually like take 15 different products from different product themes, like one from media, one from marketplaces, one from e commerce, one from productivity search. Like, just take 15 different products and then do writing exercises on them. Spend four to six hours thinking about, I'm a PM at Google, working on search, what would I build? I'm working at OpenAI, what would I build? I'm working at Reddit, what would I build? So writing responses to those helps people develop a mental model for the particular market. And then given that market, what are, where is the current product and where should they be taking that product? And it helps people develop that clarity of thought. So I would ask people to take 15 different products and then do writing exercises on top of that helps and then get feedback from other people, like have a couple of friends look at them and then give feedback on that helps improve their quality of product thinking. And then once you actually start doing that, now we can start doing analytical thinking on top of those same products. You can say, hey, how am I going to measure the success of Reddit? How am I going to measure the success of Google Search? And then you can start doing different types of analytical thinking questions, which is, how do you make decisions using data in some form? You can say, hey, if this metric is going down, what am I going to do if I'm launching this feature and here are three options, what should I be doing about them? So there are a bunch of different types of analytical thinking questions. I would actually ask people to write written responses for that. Stop focusing on the verbal parts of it, but actually do the thinking and then writing part of it. And that helps you up level your product thinking and your analytical thinking. And then once you actually are doing that, the next thing to start doing is plugging in interview communication skills. The fundamental thing that happens is that when you are doing work, you get a lot of time to write down a document, iterate on the document, get feedback from it, edited multiple times, and then share that with people. But when you are operating an interview, you have one shot of 30 minutes and you have to do the thinking and the communicating with the people and then you don't write the notes. The interviewer is writing the notes. Whatever the interviewer is capturing is your real answer in their perspective. So that's what really happens in an interview. So if that's what's happening, you need to get better at a certain style of communication. And that communication style involves a few things. It's about separating out thinking time from speaking time. And you have to interlace both of them. And what I mean by that is that you have to take a couple of minutes to first think about, hey, what is the target audience for this product? And then speak only after you have clarity of yourself. And then communicate for four minutes and then come back and say, hey, I'm going to now think about the problems that this segment has. And then in silence, think about it. And then once you have clarity, communicate that. And that is interlacing. Speaking, thinking and speaking. And you have to practice that skill. Otherwise what happens is that people think out loud. And when people think out loud, it's extremely noisy for the interviewer and they don't know what to capture. So you need to practice that skill. And I ask people to practice that. And once you have practiced that, then you can put it all together and then do a mock interview. Okay, so if you are just focusing on product thinking and analytical thinking, do four hour writing exercises first. Then try to shrink that writing time into 30 minute exercises. Because you want to do speed thinking, because an interview you only have 30 minutes instead of 4 hours. Then practice thinking and speaking and interlacing it together so that the interviewer can take very clear notes. And then build the stamina to do 30 minutes of thinking and speaking interlace. And that's a full mock interview. And then you want to introduce some antagonistic behavior and ask people to ask some follow up questions that push you in different ways and then how do you react to that? So that's the type of preparation that I ask people to do.

Okay, so because you and I are kind of, at least I'm very allergic to frameworks, but there's kind of like a general approach, right? Like you got to understand, like you said, you got to understand who is the user, what are their needs or problems, do they have? Maybe you got to like think about like what's the vision of your product like and try to bring some solutions. There's a kind of general approach for some of this product sense in interviews. But I guess what you're saying is that if you actually do the homework to look at 15 different industries and then in the interview you get like a random question about like, you know, Facebook marketplace or something that you didn't work on, then you have more memory to actually get to a good answer quickly because you already did a four hour exercise on some other marketplace.

Exactly. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Because there's like common structures for each of these things. Media products. You worked on Reddit, you worked on Instagram, you know that there's actually some structure and some sort of problems that are common, even though there's slightly different flavors of that.

Yeah.

And then similarly, marketplaces, if you take uber and then DoorDash and they have like similar structures and then actually different, similar problems, but different flavors of those problems.

Got it. But how do I know? Like, let's say I never work on Marketplace before, right? And I'm, I'm doing like, I'm doing a four hour exercise on what's a good marketplace like Airbnb. So like, how do I know? Like, how do I know if I even doing it right or not? Like, you know, cause I don't have, I don't have any internal data or anything. Like how should I go talk to customers? Or how do I know? Yeah.

So I think there's like two parts to this. One part of it is that this is exactly like the problem that I'm trying to solve with my upload your product thinking course, where I'm taking 12 different themes that capture about 40 different market product types. And then I'm trying to give people background information about the structure of those products and actually what are the common problems that they have, what are the common solution patterns and actually like showing them how to do one or two examples of high quality product thinking in each of these. So I'm actually trying to create, I've created that base material for people so they have common context and an example of what great looks like in each of these. That's like one part of it that I'm trying to do. But then let's say that you didn't have that. What you can actually like start doing is you can. You need to start by reading the S1 of some companies. Okay. So for example, Reddit has a fantastic S1 when they went IPO. If you read Reddit S1, you can truly understand the.