Interview Question Prep for PM Interviews

By: Rafi Lurie | rafilurie@gmail.com

Current APM at Uber

I have been asked a ton about how to prepare for Product Management interviews out of
college, so I wanted to compile the advice I have so that it can be useful to any future PMs out
there. This document outlines and attempts to organize PM interview questions Ive been asked
into six categories, with some guidelines about how to answer them. I have gathered these
questions from interviews with many major tech companies, including Uber, Google and
LinkedIn and have fine tuned it with feedback/additions from PM friends of mine (its a continual
work in progress). I hope it can will be information and give you a starting point to prepare for
interviews.

I only ask for three (thats a lot) things in return:

1. If you come across some information that you think would be useful to have here and is
missing, please add it. Change from Viewing Suggesting
in the upper right of Google Docs and add your suggestions.
2. If youd like to give feedback on the content, highlight the
content and leave a comment on the doc using Google Docs
comment feature.
3. If you know someone who might find this document useful, send it their way.

Thank you for passing it forward, and good luck!

Special thanks to Ben Dreier, Nikhil Goel, Dennis Zhao, and Nahom Workie for the help!

Send an email to rafilurie@gmail.com if you want to be added to a mailing list to receive more
tips.

Uber is hiring! If youre interested in joining, shoot me an email at rafi@uber.com :)

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Table of Contents
Product
Technical
Data
Design
Basic PM Skills
Basic Interview Questions

Related Documents
Technical Study Guide for PM Interviews
Product
Product questions are aimed at assessing your product thinking and skills.
Product Design
These questions are designed to assess your ability to identify a problem as it relates to a
specific market or context and solve those problems.

What theyre looking for:

Identify the core problem(s) that the product is going to address
Identify who you are trying to solve this problem for
Identify the needs of that market as it relates to the initial problem statement
Identify any other constraints that you must operate under and/or product must-dos
Design logical solutions to each identified problem, taking into account the things you
have identified, including talking through a brief assessment of options and picking the
best solution to each problem
From Nahom: An interesting way to look at this is to identify the tactics and
strategies that can be used -- an example by A16z --> For Google, Android is a
tactic and winning in the cloud is one of the overall strategies for the company's
success.

Examples:
Non-traditional user population
Design a washing machine for blind people.
As a next step, design a laundromat of those washing machines and
describe the experience from the moment you walk in until the moment
you leave.
Design a toothpaste tube.
As a next step, what would Apple do?
How would you design a specific part of the city if humans could climb things like
monkeys?
Design the Facebook newsfeed for someone who cannot read.
Non-traditional use case of an app
How would you design an app for pizza?
Design a mobile app to be used by parents at an amusement park.
Non-tech related
Design an alarm clock.
Design an elevator system.
Design to move a metric
How would you redesign the Youtube mobile app for increased ad traffic?
How would you improve the signup process of LinkedIn to increase conversion?
Take a feature X and make it easier to use.

Product Analysis
These questions are aimed at understanding your ability to determine the success or failure of a
product as it relates to usability, design, and value delivered.
What theyre looking for:
Identify the problem the product is trying to solve and the market they are trying to solve
it for
What are the goals of this product?
With equal importance, who are the target customer segment(s) for this
product - what does each look like (demographics, age, job) and what is
the #1 use case scenario for each?
What are the metrics that ultimately define success of the product? E.g.
for Facebook - $ in ad revenue, for a fridge - ability to consistently keep
products at the precisely cold temperature
WITH THAT IN MIND, what are the shortcomings of this product?
Not everything that seems like a product weakness is a big deal unless it impacts
the product's SUCCESS.
Based on the needs of this market, how does the product score in:
Intuitive UI design
Usability
Feature set (does this product fill all of my needs? If not, what needs are not
being met and how could this product fill them?)

Examples:
Pick your [favorite/least favorite] [technical/non-technical] product.
What do you like/dislike about it?
What are two features you would build?
Which would you prioritize and why?
How would you test that these features work? Using which metrics?
What does the ideal user journey with this feature look like?
What products do you feel missed the mark?
Why?
What changes would you make?
Talk about a product that is marketed well
How does the product differentiate itself from its competitor?
How does the product demonstrate that it is something you need, and more
importantly solves a problem that you have?
What product do you feel like has a lot of potential but hasn't achieved it yet?
Why?
What would you build to help this product become successful?

Product Vision
These questions are aimed at understanding how you can think about the evolution of a product
over short and long periods of time.

What theyre looking for:

In the short term, where should this company focus to maximize its value?
 In the long term, what new markets could this product move in to (solve the same
problem for new users) or new areas this company could move in to (solve a different,
related problem for the same users)?

Examples:
What is a product you like?
Describe its mission, core market, and value.
What metrics do you think we monitor to determine its success?
What do you think are its current key challenges for success?
Who are the products biggest competitors?
Why do you think the product is successful/unsuccessful today?
What is an area that you think this product could grow?
How will that area of your chosen product look in 2 years? 5? 10?
Say you are starting a startup that will address the needs of that areas in 5-10
years What would it look like? What would it do? Describe the startup.
What is a heavily underrated or overrated product?
What startups do you watch?
Conceptualizing, designing, and building a new feature is only half the battle. How do
you launch a new feature?
How does it get incorporated into the existing product?
Does that stay stable over time, or does this feature change throughout a users
lifetime?

Technical
Technical questions aimed at assessing your technical chops and basic engineering knowledge.
Technical expectations will vary across companies, but all product managers will be tasked with
communicating, understanding, and translating technical information to both very technical and
completely non technical team members. Here is a link to a technical thinking doc that I made to
practice for interviews.

Coding/High level algorithms

Some companies will require basic coding skills. This can be anything from describing an
implementation of an algorithm all the way to pseudo-coding or actually coding solutions.

What theyre looking for:

Do you understand what you can and cannot do in code?
Can you structure and organize code efficiently?
Do you know basic things like classes, methods, recursion, arrays, dictionaries, etc.?
How do you logically attack a tough question?

Examples:
Working on a music streaming service, describe an algorithm for determining a song to
play next
 Say you have a black box. You input a search query and output related searches. What
attributes do you want to consider on the backend to give you the best possible related
searches?
Given an array of unsorted ints and a target integer, how would you find if two numbers
in the array add up to the target integer? What is the runtime of your solution?
What is the difference between arrays and hashing and when would you use it?
When would you use server side caching?
Write a SQL query that returns the total number of products sold from the Products
table.
As a next step, write a SQL query that returns the total number of unique
products sold from the Products table.

Basic Engineering
Assessing your understanding of basic engineering concepts and systems.

What theyre looking for:

Do you actually know what this stuff is?
Can you understand technical information given to you by an engineer? Can you explain
it to a non technical person?
Do you understand this enough for it to inform your product decisions?

Examples:
Access times (memory vs. lock vs. reading from disc vs. over the internet)
Concurrency
Threads/locks
Divide and conquer
Stack vs. queue
B-Trees
Big-O
How webapps work
MVC
How does a message get sent from one computer to another?
When you type a URL into a web browser and press Enter, what happens?
What's the process that occurs from when you click enter to when the website
actually loads?
How does TCP work?

Data (Analytical)
One of the most important skills a product manager has is making data driven decisions. These
questions will help assess whether you know the right questions to ask and can define the
correct metrics with respect to evaluating the success of something you do.

What theyre looking for:

 Clearly identify success criteria and metrics that will measure if you have hit that criteria
Different types
% change (increase/decrease)
# active users over a period of time (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
Conversion rates
Clicks
Pageviews
Metrics related to the space the company operates in
Are you asking the right questions?
Identify trends in data -- cohort/segment analysis
Being able to separate different types of users and their individual needs from data

Examples:
If you were the chief marketing manager for a company and someone told you that $X in
spending on online ads led to $Y revenue from offline purchases, what questions would
you want answered to validate this?
What experiment would you create to learn how effective online advertising was relative
to advertising on other platforms in leading to offline purchases?
What metrics will you look at in order to evaluate the success of [companys] product
Ads have publishers (website where advertisements are shown) and advertisers
(companies who advertise products). I want to create a analytical dashboard for
advertisers. What would you put in there?

Design
Design questions assessing your ability to create, analyze, and give feedback on product
design.

Design Skills
Assessing your ability to create and/or iterate on a design that optimizes usability and
aesthetics.

What theyre looking for:

Understand the target market and any usability limitations they might have
Potential use of creative interaction design where appropriate (audio, vocal, movement,
etc)
Good eye for aesthetics, colors, button placement, use of images, simplicity, etc
UI best practices

Examples:
Design our product for [certain non-traditional market].
How would you redesign [product]?
Design the Facebook newsfeed for illiterate users.
Design Analysis
As a PM, you will work closely with designers, driving the direction of the design as well as
evaluating and giving feedback on design iterations.

What theyre looking for:

Understand the target market and any usability limitations they might have
Understand how and where design might create pain points for users
Give clear, constructive design critique
Understand User Stories -- show that you're user centric --> As a <product> user, I want
to be able to <action>, in order to <reason>.

Examples:
Which design is the best out of multiple options?
What is a product that is well designed?
What is a product that is poorly designed?

Basic PM Skills
These questions will aim at understanding your abilities in basic PM skills

Problem Solving

What theyre looking for:

Get clear on the problem definition and impact
Break the problem up into smaller, manageable subproblems
Find solutions to each subproblem
Regroup and summarize solution
Know what next steps to take (what data to find, who to reach out to, how to get the
process started). Ideas aren't enough as PMs, need to EXECUTE

Examples:
You discover the app is using too much data for users... How would you systematically
diagnose and fix this problem?
Youre launching a product in a new market/city and dont know what tactic to use.
Where do you start?

Leadership & Communication

What theyre looking for:

Can you clearly communicate tough/complex concepts to people that dont know
anything about them?
Can you convince people of your point of view when you need to?
Do you have empathy for people that you work with?
Can you manage conflict and drive the team to an agreeable solution?
 How do you balance compromising with driving the team in the direction you think it
should go?
How do you handle criticism/disagreement?

Examples:
How would you describe [product] to your grandma in 2-3 sentences?
Tell me about your role on your team and how you work with your partners?
Tell me about a time that you disagreed with a partner.
When was a time that you worked in a group and someone wasn't pulling their weight?
When was a time you worked with someone and you disagreed?
How would you get X & Y teams to buy into your proposed change

Business Acumen

What theyre looking for:

Knowledge of where business opportunities are, where the largest markets are, etc.
General concept of 'solving the problems that actually matter'
Knowing when to give up on something because it's not profitable and knowing when to
keep going managing tradeoffs!

Examples:
What product do you think LinkedIn should invest in going forward and which ones does
it not have to invest too much in?
Where do you see [market] in five years?
How will you monetize xyz?
Good to know different revenue models
What is the most disruptive product in Mobile right now?
How do you decide what to build?
What would be your the strategy for X?
How do you keep up with tech?
User growth strategies
How will you promote a new feature?
How do you launch product X in location Y?

Brain Teasers/Case Questions

**You probably wont get asked questions like this, but if you do, its the way you solve the
problem that matters, not the actual conclusion you come up with.**

What theyre looking for:

Break the problem up into smaller, manageable subproblems
Clearly identify and validate all assumptions that you make
If you are assuming something with a number (population, price, etc) make sure
to show all of the calculations how you got there
Get to a clear, explicit, logical solution
 Summarize your the major assumptions you made and the steps you took to solve the
problem at the end

Examples:
You have 3 jars of jelly beans that are all mislabeled. One jar contains Banana, another
contains Lemon and the third jar contains a mixture of both Lemon and Banana. You are
allowed to pick out as many jelly beans as you want from each jar in order to fix the
labels on the jars. What is the minimum number of jelly beans that you have to pick out
and from which jars to correctly label them?
You own a burrito shop and you want to advertise in a fleet of 200 cabs in San
Francisco. The ad will be seen only by the passenger(s) in that cab. How much are you
willing to pay per advertisement per month?
How many zagat reviews are written in a month?
How many toilets are flushing right now?

Basic Interview Questions

These are basic questions about yourself that you should be able to answer in an interview.
Companies will ask these to get you talking, to get a pulse on who you are, and to see if you are
prepared. These questions are easy to prepare for and to crush. Anything other than that will be
a negative indicator.

Tell me about yourself.

Should be able to do this in 30 seconds / 1 minute / 2 minutes / 5 minutes
Why do you want this job?
Whats your greatest strength?
What is your biggest weakness?
Tell us about a time you failed.
What is your greatest achievement to date?
Tell me about your current role?
Why [company]?
Why do you want to be a product manager?
Why do you think you will do a good job at product management?