hi everyone kevin here today i want to walk through how you can nail a product manager interview i’ve interviewed at many different companies including amazon microsoft accenture and i’ve gotten offers from all of them i’ve also been on the other side of the interview as an interviewer i worked at microsoft for 14 years and i interviewed hundreds of different candidates some of them got offers and some of them did not get offers i’ll walk through the tips and the strategies and techniques to make it as likely as possible that you’ll get an offer i figured the best way to demonstrate some of these techniques is to conduct a mock interview so i found a candidate and i brought him in today i’ll let him introduce himself oh hi yeah no kevin here as well i guess we both have the same name i have my interview outfit on today and i’ve been preparing quite a bit i hear this guy kevin’s kind of a tough interviewer though hopefully i can land the job great thanks for introducing yourself before we jump into it as a quick note in the description of this video you’ll find a whole bunch of sample interview questions this is a fantastic resource to practice coming up with examples and answers to those questions and today we’ll pick one of those and we’ll walk through it to kick off first we’re going to start with how you can prepare for an interview and i’ll let interviewee kevin talk about how he’s been preparing for this interview preparation that is perhaps the most important step you can take to nail your product manager interview and i recommend three different items to prepare for your interview the first one and this is really a state of mind when you go in for an interview not only is the company interviewing you to see if you’re a good match for the company but you’re also interviewing the company to see if that’s even a place you want to work so keep that in mind when you go in for an interview number two you want to make sure that your resume is in a very good state why is that well every single person who you interview with chances are they’ve looked at your resume shortly before you come in for your interview so in a sense it’s your first impression to the interviewer you want to make sure that it’s brief that it’s concise and that it really simply shows the highlights of you you want it to be like a movie trailer not the movie and step number three the most important item i mentioned earlier that i have sample questions in the description of this video look at those think of examples that you can share with the interviewer when you go into an interview when you get a question if you’ve already heard that question before and you already have a response prepared for that question you’re going to do really well so that’s one of the most important steps that you can take so hopefully i could use this preparation today and i’ll do well in my interview now let’s talk about the interviewer a little bit and some of the preparation that they do the first thing to know about the interviewer is first off i’m probably a really respected person within the organization and people trust my judgment and my decisions ultimately i’m on point to bring new people into the organization that’s why i’m in this position now it’s not just me interviewing usually when you go in for a day of interviews you interview with maybe four to five different people and so i’m interviewing as part of a team and i’m one member of that team usually what happens at least this is what we did at microsoft each person on that team of interviewers would take a different competency so once again i have all these sample questions in the description each one of those falls under a different competency for example you have things like customer empathy design technical ability all of these are different competencies and an interviewer will focus on one of those different areas so when you interview four or five different people it paints an overall picture of who you are as a candidate another thing to keep in mind is me as an interviewer i also have my full-time job i’m just doing this interviewing stuff on the side i’m basically volunteering to do this to bring in new people into the organization so i’m pretty busy and interviewing is one more thing that i need to get done that’s why once again with the resume make sure that it’s brief concise and just shows the highlights because i don’t have time to go through a two three four page resume also when you’re describing your different bullet points on the resume make sure they’re understandable i don’t have time to research different buzzwords or different jargon i just want you to tell it to me straight lastly as an interviewer chances are i’m not just interviewing you i’m also interviewing many other people ultimately when you’re interviewing you’re not just trying to impress the interviewers you’re also competing against other interview candidates and as an interviewer i usually interview many different people and so i can calibrate how you performed compared to all these other people i interviewed so keep that in mind as well now we’ve been talking about the importance of resumes and i want to take a moment to talk about how i structured my resume for my interview today because i know that kevin’s probably going to look at my resume and he’ll make a judgment that’s his first impression of me as a candidate coming in so the way i structured my resume i wanted to show highlights about me the best way to think of it is it’s a movie trailer and the actual movie itself well i’ll share that when i go in for the interview and i have a lot more time to share some of those details so some of the key things to remember you want to be brief you want to be concise with your resume so how do you actually structure it well i personally use the a c r q format what does that mean well first you have your action then you have a little bit of context followed by the results and then you quantify the result so why don’t we take an example from my youtube channel so let’s start with the action i launched a youtube channel that was the action i took a little bit of context on that well i launched a youtube channel providing high quality tutorial videos and hopefully all of you think that they’re high quality tutorial videos but that’s the context next we need some type of results and so the result of all that is well i generate views and i generate watch time so i launched a youtube channel providing high quality tutorials and it generates views and watch time but that doesn’t mean that much because i need to quantify that result so to quantify the result i’ll throw in well how many views do i get and how much watch time i get so now to see the final bullet point i’ll say something like launched a youtube channel featuring high quality tutorial videos that generates over 200 000 views a day and over 12 000 watch hours now that’s a pretty powerful bullet point and trust me i think interviewers will appreciate it when you write your bullet points that way next i want to spend a few moments talking about what the structure of an interview is like and now you’re going to interview with probably four to five different people and i’m just one person during the interview day now once again i have a certain competency that i want to evaluate just like everyone else who’s part of the interview team now usually each interview will be about an hour and so when you come in for the interview usually the first five or six minutes are simply to establish rapport and to have some small talk and the main reason for that and the objective of that is to help lessen anxiety and nervousness when someone comes in for an interview you tend to be nervous and rightfully so it’s a big day and so this is meant to lessen that the last thing you want to do as an interviewer is start firing off questions right when your candidate walks in and maybe they won’t perform their best because they’re so nervous so this is meant to just lessen some of that as an interviewer the next thing i’ll do then is say okay now we’re going to launch into the core of the interview and i’ll ask you three to four questions and this will take about 45 minutes and then we launch into the questions as the interviewer of course i want to do less of the talking i want to learn from the candidate so i’ll end up maybe talking let’s say 10 to 20 of the time and the candidate will speak for about 80 of the time once we run through the core questions at that point i’ll leave about 10 minutes at the end to say hey do you have any questions for me and once again an interview goes both ways i want to see if they’re a good fit for the company and the candidate should see if the company is a good fit for them once the interview wraps up well at that point i type up my notes of how the interview went against the competencies that i was on point to evaluate i also say whether i think the candidate is a higher or a no hire one thing to keep in mind is when you’re going through an interview day we don’t share whether it’s a higher or no higher until the very end the last thing you want to do is be the first person in the interview and say no higher and then bias everyone else who comes after you so each interviewer is basically kind of an independent perspective of how you performed at the very end of the day all the interviewers will share the results if everyone says hire well it’s an easy decision and then you’re brought on board if everyone says no that’s also an easy decision if it’s mixed this is the more interesting case where all of the interviewers then come together and they discuss how you performed sometimes it’ll fall in the direction of getting an offer and sometimes it’ll fall in the direction of not getting an offer but ideally you’re in the position where everyone says higher okay enough talk why don’t we jump into this mock interview i have a candidate waiting and i want to see how this candidate performs so let’s get started first off kevin thank you so much for joining today it’s it’s really great to have you here yeah no thank you so much really excited to be here you know this is really a beautiful studio that you have i’m really impressed by all the lights and the cameras this is it’s all pretty cool i really heard a lot about this organization as well oh yeah no absolutely this is really a beautiful place to work remember the first few minutes this is where we’re reducing anxiety we’re establishing some rapport once we wrap that up then we’ll shift into the main portion of the interview all right shifting gears now i want to ask you a few questions and we’ll run through the standard portion of the interview then at the end i’ll give you a little bit of time to ask me any questions that you might have the first question is can you tell me about the strategies that you’ve used to increase your understanding of current and also future customer needs at this point as an interviewer i’ve asked my question i might jump in to probe or to dig a little bit deeper but otherwise the ball is now in kevin’s court and it’s his opportunity to answer my question and to demonstrate his customer empathy competency let’s see how he does okay so i got the question and this is basically a customer connection question how have i worked with customers in the past so i know the question and luckily this is very similar to some of the sample questions i looked at so i already have a response that i can provide now of course if you don’t understand the question or you didn’t think something was clear ask the interviewer to give more details or maybe explain it again by the way that also gives you a little bit more time to pull together your thoughts and start preparing your answer now one thing i recommend doing when you’re going to provide your response to a question is to use what’s called the stars format this is a very good framework for responding to a question so what is the stars format well first we start with the s which means situation now when you’re responding to a question keep in mind that the interviewer knows nothing about the example that you’re going to share so you have to give a little bit of background first so i’m going to give an example of how i’ve worked with customers on my youtube channel basically a customer is kind of like a viewer basically i’m serving customer or viewer needs so i’m going to use this as one of my examples so i’ll say something like yeah i want to share an example from my youtube channel and i founded my youtube channel it’s actually something i set up back in 2017 and i started this when i worked at microsoft and it’s a tech focused channel i pulled together a whole bunch of tutorials and how to videos and it’s grown quite a bit it now gets over 200 000 views a day and over 12 000 watch hours so that’s a little bit of background of the story or example that i’m going to share once you talk about the situation next we want to talk about what you are actually responsible for or what i like to call the task this is the second part of stars the t and so when you’re in a job well you have some type of responsibility so back to my youtube example i might say along with founding this channel well i was really on point for doing everything related to this channel so coming up with video ideas writing the script for the video filming the video editing the video creating the thumbnail writing the description all the tags basically the end to end flow of creating a video was all on me along with that i also researched additional video ideas so once again this is just getting a little bit of information on what my task or my job was the next item of stars is a or the action that you took and this is really the core of the response we’ve already given the background or the situation the s we’ve talked about what you were responsible for or the t or the task that you were on point for and now for the action i need to talk about what i actually did to understand customer needs and so i might structure my answer and say well i there were both qualitative and quantitative things i did to understand my viewers or my customers i’ll start with the qualitative ones first now one of the main ways of getting feedback is through comments so frequently people will share what they like what they dislike also i shared a survey and i solicited responses from people as another mechanism to get feedback now as kevin’s going through his response as the interviewer of course i’ll take notes and all listen intently on what he’s saying now my role as an interviewer is to make sure i really understand the scenario and if it demonstrates him connecting well with customers so i’ll be listening for that now what i might do is i might ask him to go deeper i’ll probe i’ll say hey can you tell me more about that you said that you read comments and there were things people liked or disliked can you tell me more about that what’s something you learned and maybe something you changed based on what you heard in the comments so my goal as an interviewer is to see if this interviewee meets the competency and i want to help the interviewer along by probing and asking additional questions yeah i know that’s a really good question in terms of what i heard from what people like i got a lot of feedback from my viewers saying that my thumbnails they couldn’t really differentiate them now a little bit of background on that when you look at my thumbnails they tended to have a white background some text and they all kind of look the same and i got a lot of viewer feedback telling me that so i took that feedback then i said well we need to improve our thumbnails so i started coming up with better thumbnails and then i asked people hey what do you think of these new thumbnails and i got more positive feedback so this is where i took some viewer feedback listened to what they were saying and then made a change based on what i was hearing so i would use that to answer that probe question and then i’d continue with my response now along with qualitative ways of understanding the customer i also use quantitative ways of understanding the customer for example youtube offers a very rich dashboard with analytics where you could look at things like what is the retention look like what does the watch time look like what do views look like and this is another way to establish whether a video is resonating with viewers so for instance i did a video recently where i talked about my interview at amazon and retention was over 50 so i could tell that the video resonated with viewers so i should probably make more videos like that in the future versus there are some other videos i’ve done where they just haven’t resonated as much and so that’s another form or signal from viewers that that’s maybe not the type of video that i should continue producing now along with just qualitative and quantitative there’s also competitive so as i’m pulling together a video this is another way of understanding customer needs i could look up what videos maybe competitors or other channels on youtube have done let’s say i’m thinking about doing a video and it turns out other people have already done a video on the topic but it hasn’t gotten any views well maybe it’s not really a video that people are going to find interesting so those are three different ways that i’ve used to understand customer needs now that i’ve walked through the actions that i took we move on to the next step of stars and this is the result of your action so you did all this work but what came of it so that’s the result portion so i might say something for this you know i listened to customers i improved my thumbnails i made all these changes and as a result of that views have grown quite a bit and the videos are performing better in fact if we look back a year ago i was getting about 20 000 views a day and i started listening to customers i made improvements based on what i was hearing and now today i’m getting over 200 000 views a day so it’s about 10x growth compared to where i was and all of that is primarily due to listening and responding to feedback yeah okay now that sounds that sounds great thanks for walking through that example when you think back to all of this work you’ve done is there anything you would have done differently or in retrospect would you have changed anything uh for even more growth or even or being even more responsive to your viewers and your customers alright well he just asked me the self-reflect step and so as part of stars this is now the s at the end or basically self-reflect so think back to what you did and what you would have done differently so when i think back there’s a lot i would have changed for example none of my videos have captions on them i’ve heard a bunch of feedback from viewers telling me that maybe i should cover more non-tech topics so there’s all sorts of feedback that i’m hearing from my viewers that i haven’t been able to implement yet and i just need to get to them and i need to work my way through them and see how people respond to them so there’s always more and more things i’m trying to improve and i’ve gotten a lot of feedback i’m simply working my way through the list of all the things i’ve heard now this is one of the most important steps you want to demonstrate that you’re willing to admit where maybe something could have gone better where maybe you had another idea that could have improved the results it’s extremely important to demonstrate that you’re willing to have a growth mindset at this point we’ve wrapped up on the first question and then i would jump on to the next question and typically during an interview you might have let’s say three four questions depending on how deep uh the candidate goes into the response or how many probing questions you have but it’s very easy to spend about 40-45 minutes just on two to three or even four questions once all of the core questions wrap up this is when i would hand it over to the candidate and say hey what questions do you have for me now it’s my opportunity to ask questions and pretty much in any interview that you participate in you’ll always have some time at the end to ask questions so there’s really no reason you shouldn’t have some questions prepared ahead of time some of my favorite questions to ask what do you like and dislike about the role what do you think about the culture of the team and what does management in the team value those are a few good questions that you could ask and it’ll probably spur an interesting conversation with the interviewer alright well thanks so much for coming in for the interview today and that wraps up the video if you enjoyed this please give it a thumbs up to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a comment down below alright well that’s all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you