so in this video we're going to talk about the interview structure for some of the product manager roles at some of these fan companies so that you can learn how to best prepare for interviews hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a large tech company based in silicon valley california if you're looking to apply for product manager roles you're probably considering the fang companies that stands for facebook apple amazon netflix and google why well these are some of the most competitive companies to get to and no surprise because they're also some
of the most well paid and some of these companies are known to be fun work cultures with a lot of perks well that's right it's a nap pod so we're gonna go through number one the interview structure for three companies specifically amazon facebook and google two i'm going to share some example questions three we're going to talk about how to best prepare to answer these questions and four we're going to compare amongst these three which are the easiest interviews that you can prepare for and the hardest to prepare for so what's the structure for the
amazon interview so it's two to three rounds a recruiter conversation a phone screen and then on site so the recruiter conversation which might be optional is to assess why you're interested in the role and whether you understand what the role entails the phone screen is an hour conversation with an existing product manager or your hiring manager to assess and whether you understand what this role entails and the space that you're applying for but they're also going to be testing you on a minimum of two of the leadership principles of amazon so you might be asking
what the heck are leadership principles well amazon is famous for their 14 leadership principles shown here so some of those are around customer obsession bias towards action simplicity frugality and the list goes on but they're basically gonna be asking you about examples where you've displayed those leadership principles your on-site round the third round encompasses of five interviews one hour each and each of them with different functions across the product team so a technical program manager a software developer maybe a product designer might interview you again to assess the leadership principles and look for examples where
you've exhibited it or did not and in these interviews it's not just you telling the story but prepared to be bombarded with follow-up questions that might assess how you make trade-offs between different leadership principles so basically the amazon interview is mostly behavioral interviews not very much focused on case questions like some of the other ones we'll talk about later in the video so some example questions so if they're testing the customer obsession leadership principle they might say tell me about a time where you stood up for the voice of the user if they're testing frugality
they might ask a question like tell me about a time where you turn down resources to complete a project so how might you best prepare for these interviews well first go understand amazon's 14 leadership principles second brainstorm a couple of stories two examples at least for each leadership principle third put your stories in the star framework so it's organized and digestible fourth go practice with someone and have a mock interview to share your responses and ask your mock interviewer whether your example is a good example in displaying the leadership principle and ask them to ask
you a bunch of follow-up questions and you also want to make sure that you understand the role that you're applying to and the space for example if you're applying for a role in amazon's web services so aws you'll probably want to understand how infrastructure and cloud computing works so some other stuff despite hearing from most people that the amazon interview is mostly behavioral i've heard from certain candidates that they did receive product design type of questions and some even received a take-home assignment to assess their writing style and if you're applying for a technical product
manager role then you most likely want to prepare for the technical component of it is this helpful so far if so make sure to like the video so more people can find it and comment below to let me know which other companies are you interested in applying to that i could be creating these type of videos for you to help you understand what to expect in the interview all right let's talk about the facebook or meta interview so the structure it'll encompass of three rounds first round with the recruiter second is a phone screen and
third is the onsite so the first round with the recruiter is basically to get to know your previous experience and whether you've displayed some of the core product management skills and asking you questions like why do you want to work for facebook as a product manager the second round is a phone screen two interviews 45 minutes each testing product design skills and execution skills which is basically using data to help you make decisions to help you define success and to help you decide what's going on when metrics go down so the product sense slash product
design part is to test your ability to come up with products for very open-ended topics so an example would be what product would you build for the travel space and then you have execution questions like what success metrics would you set for facebook events how would you decide between launching x versus why what would you do if facebook events went down by 10 and lastly the on-site round is at least three interviews so two of those interviews again 45 minutes each are going to be product sense slash product design second another execution question and thirdly
the leadership and drive interview which is a behavioral interview asking you questions like tell me about a time when you had a conflict on your team and these are to assess how you as a product manager functions on a team so how do you best prepare for the facebook interview well first you want to develop a framework for these type of questions and here you might develop your own unique framework you might look at some videos check out my previous videos where we talk about frameworks that can help you think through the answer and then
do a bunch of practice questions to help you go deep in user empathy for the product sense question and for the execution question you'll want to prepare by playing around with the top 10 or 20 of facebook products you can practice the trade-off question by asking yourself what data might i use in order to just make this decision and for the leadership and drive question your best way to prepare is to look for existing questions that were asked and then think of examples and stories that you can tell using the tsar framework in order to
communicate some of the key principles that they're looking for so facebook doesn't necessarily have 14 leadership principles but your recruiter will tell you these are the traits that we're looking for in testing the leadership and drive interview now let's talk about google so what is the structure for the google interview also three rounds first conversation with a recruiter they'll be asking you well why do you want to work at google as a product manager and they're going to be testing you in parallel on your communication skills your motivation and that generally you'll be someone good
to work with on a team so your second round is going to be anywhere from 45 to 50 minutes with an existing google product manager and here they're going to be asking you questions along three categories so product design analytical or estimation and their questions could be a mix of the three so product design is really similar to what we talked about under facebook's interview where they're gonna ask you to build a product in a very open-ended space with certain constraints so a question might be design a phone for the blind or they might be
asking you to improve an existing product like how would you improve google maps the analytical portion is meant to test that you can use data to help you make decisions so it's also kind of similar to facebook's execution type interview for example a question would be what are youtube's key metrics and then the estimation question is meant to test that you can size a market for example a question that you could get is estimate the number of videos watched daily on youtube and the on-site interview is about five interviews which encompasses of the three things
we just talked about product sense analytical and estimation but adds two more other categories which is behavioral so that's the tester googliness and alignment with their culture fit so they might ask a question like tell me about a time when you failed and then there's the technical part which could be high-level system design questions about how products work or it could be questions around popular algorithms and data structures and trade-offs between them for example how does google docs work or design the algorithm for youtube's recommendation engine so how might you prepare for all different five
categories so for the product design question you'll want to again similar to the facebook interview come up with a structure that's going to help you answer the most commonly asked questions and practice that on a bunch of products but especially for google your solutions you want to come up with moonshot ideas moonshot is an idea so big so bold so these are really creative or innovative ideas because that's what they're going to look for for the analytical portion you'll want to come up with metrics for 5 to 10 most commonly used google products then you'll
want to do that for the most commonly used other apps like uber instacart you'll want to learn about how to set up a b tests and for the trade-off question you'll want to figure out what data should i use as my criteria to make decisions and for the estimation question you'll want to get certain numbers that are going to help you plug it into the equation that you develop to come up with your answer for example you'll want to know what the population of the u.s is or some of the larger countries in the world
you also want to know metrics for google products for example what are the number of monthly active users for youtube or google search these are going to be numbers that are going to be handy in plugging into your equation and then another part you want to practice for estimation is being able to break down what they ask you into an equation so think about an equation you'll have variables and then you'll have the thing that comes out after the equal sign and after you get good at that you'll then want to practice how to make
your answer even more accurate so maybe instead of using averages you then segment based on the different cases how do you prepare for the behavioral interview well look up a couple of questions that google usually asks in these interviews and think of stories plug them into the star framework and also understand what are the traits that google looks for to exhibit googliness and those are the things that you want to make sure to highlight in your action section of the star framework lastly for the technical part of the interview you'll want to familiarize yourself with
popular algorithms or popular data structures the trade-offs between them you'll want to practice some system design questions and figure out well what are components i can use to make these systems more scalable efficient and reliable research some more basic technical things like how does the internet work and maybe familiarize yourself with for the common google products how do they work and lastly consider researching some tech trends i'd love for you to comment below which of these interview portions seems the scariest now let's compare the interviews we're going to rank them from easiest to hardest and
we're going to talk about where there are similarities and differences so first all three interviews will have a behavioral section asking you questions like tell me about a time all three of them have about three rounds with the recruiter phone screen and on-site round now the difference is amazon is mostly behavioral focus so questions like tell me about a time aligned with their leadership principles versus google and facebook are going to be more case questions between google and facebook they both will be testing questions around product design and analytical questions like how you might use
data to help you make a decision or define success metrics but google's interviews have a bit more scope whether it be testing you estimation questions and technical questions which are not expected in the facebook interview so if i was to say the easiest interviews that you can prepare for i would say those are the amazon interviews where you can easily study the 14 leadership principles and prepare ahead of time the examples that you'll want to talk about and do a couple mock interviews with people asking you follow-up questions so you can watch out for the
different types of questions that the interviewer might actually ask as follow-ups your key framework here is to use the star framework and hence there's basically one frame rank that you'll have to remember of course there's so much room for ambiguity based on the follow-up questions they ask you but you can ahead of time prepare for about 80 90 of the interview so in second place from the easiest to the hardest spectrum i would say lives the facebook interviews here they're mostly testing just two components we talked about the product design and the product execution and
hence the frameworks that you'll have to use are around three frameworks at the least to answer their questions and the questions are kind of well scoped in that you could in that you're most likely to expect a question where they asked you to set goals for one of the facebook products so what are the hardest interviews well you might have guessed based on when i went through all three interviews google's interviews have a lot more scope they cover five different sections they also encompass of a technical portion so for product managers who don't have a
technical background you're going to have to do a lot of studying up on these more technical concepts that might be basic for an engineer and also it encompasses of the estimation questions which could be tricky for some first there's a shock of getting some like pretty insane questions for example question i've heard they've asked before is how many drivers are needed for a mid-sized city if google was to create a ride sharing application and even the breadth of what each of the sections covers in terms of questions vary pretty widely so you're gonna have to
use more than three separate frameworks in order to answer some of these questions and sometimes your frameworks are going to break entirely so you're going to have to come up with frameworks on the spot and we talked about the technical questions and i've seen like a lot of variability between what technical questions are asked so there was one question about how does the communication between mars and earth work like who thinks about that in their day-to-day that's hard that's super hard but there's also questions like how would you design youtube's recommendation engine or a question
like what happens when you navigate to a website so i don't see an obvious framework that can tackle all three of those questions and all that come under the technical section so if you're thinking about applying to all three of these companies and preparing for the interviews so you'll probably want to set your interview dates based on easiest to hardest meaning if you get an interview with amazon set that to be the earliest and if you get an interview with google set that out to a later date and i mentioned for both facebook and google
they'll be asking about product sense product design type of questions so take a look at this playlist where i talk about and go into details on how to set up a framework to answer those questions and for the facebook and google interview they're going to be asking questions to test how you use data to make decisions and come up with metrics so take a look at this playlist on how you can best answer those questions and i'll see you guys in the next video
