Introduction


These materials are designed to help you get an overview of product management principles and prepare for your interviews. To get started, check out the New PM FAQ to learn what product management is, who makes a good PM, why you should consider getting into it, etc.



After that you can go through the interview prep materials, which also will give you a high level overview of how to be a good Product leader. The TLDR is that to be a good PM, you must understand how to design a product, determine objectives for that product, identify metrics to measure success of those different objectives, and then work with cross functional partners to gain alignment and execute on your product vision. PM interviews generally try to test your ability to do each of those. As a result, as you go through the PM interview prep, you will also get a high level sense of how to become a good PM.



Aside from the high level understanding, every product, job, and company are pretty different so it is hard to give much useful advice that is translatable across many different products. Instead, use the high level overview as your starting point and then talk with people in the product areas that you want to work in to get a better sense of the specifics of that industry and product.



The interview prep covers the three fundamental product interview types as well as mindsights to being a good PM when on the job:


Product Design: This bucket is about whether or not you can understand the competitive dynamics of the industry, develop a clear product strategy and vision, identify and prioritize the most important user segments and user problems, and ideate on realistic ways to solve those problems.

Product Execution: In addition to understanding the product landscape, strategy, and vision, you need to be able to identify clear objectives for your product and craft metrics to measure the success and health of your product. When your metrics fall, you need to understand how to diagnose the root cause of the problem and ideate on potential fixes.

Behavioral: Good PM’s are great leaders and communicators and work well with others to get stuff done. Each company has a different culture and set of values. How you get stuff done at each company can be very different. As a result, these questions can be the most wide ranging. Their purpose, however, is to determine whether or not you will be a good culture fit in the role and company and whether or not you will be able to get stuff done. These questions often focus most on your past experiences and how they resemble the company culture and values. However, they sometimes involve hypothetical questions as well.


Big companies tend to have the most structured interview process and start-ups tend to be the most wide ranging. Regardless of the interview format, these materials should help prepare you for whatever comes your way and ultimately try to test your ability to do the day to day PM job. Even outside of interviews, the structure of these product design and execution interview answers can help you avoid common mistakes as a PM. The biggest and most common mistake of course is to focus on building a tech solution that doesn't actually solve a real problem, instead of first identifying painful customer problems and then coming up with a solution to solve them.



One last note, it is important to network and to do mock interviews. One easy way to do this is to sign up for the Lewis Lin slack group: https://www.lewis-lin.com/posts/lewis-lin-interview-community-join/. Depending on whether you are new to Product or not you may have to screen people to mock with to get the most out of it. However, with tens of thousands of members, this can be a very helpful way to refresh your interview skills as well as to meet fellow PM’s. You can also check out the Lewis Lin Interview question bank for lists of actual interview questions - updated regularly.



Table of contents


1. New PM FAQ

2. PM Interview Overview

3. PM Interviews - Product Design Mock Examples

4. PM Interviews - Product Execution & Analytical Examples

5. PM Reading list