By: Gayle Laakmann McDowell & Jackie Bavaro

Context: Describes the roll & success patterns of a PM and how it works at different companies. Then walks through interview sections: define yourself & behavioral, estimation, product, case, & coding questions. 🤓

Table of Contents

• The PM Role
• PM-ing per Company & Their Interviews
• Getting Experience & Advancing Your Career
• Company Research
• Pitch Yourself
• Behavioral Questions

The PM Role

PM's are ultimately responsible for product outcomes, which they create by leading cross-functional teams with influence to ship products that delight users and achieve business goals

• PMs do not have direct authority over teammates; must lead with influence, vision & research
• Product life cycle: Research & Planning → Design → Implement & Test → Release
  • Research & Planning: What to build next? Create & propose a roadmap. List all potential features/dev work, and then prioritize. Define success, choose metrics, and create OKRs
  • Design: varies widely between companies: writing specs/PRDs vs. wireframing
  • Implement & Test: unblock engineers, gather early feedback & bugs, usability testing & dogfooding. Can be A/B testing on small experiment group, focusing on metrics.
  • Release: Run thru launch checklist for final approvals, prep team who will support product post-launch, fight fires and prepare for the things that will go wrong
• Type of product affects the job:
  • shipped software has longer dev; web software has more testing ; must be data-driven in consumer products to gain influence; focused on revenue in B2B products and have more influence as customer expert
• Clarifying myths
  • PMs identify opportunities/problems, choose which to tackle, create & implement solutions. Project managers just do timeline mgmt & coordination.
  • Marketing focuses on getting user into the product. PMs define what happens once there.
  • PMs don't set dates; engineers set dates. PMs have make trade-offs and create more time to hit external deadlines as needed (such as cancelling meetings)
  • Only authority comes from: building credibility, communicating clearly, gathering data/research, and being persuasive. Leave engineers & designers to do what they do best.