CRUSH Your Senior PM Behavioral Interviews Like This! (Mock Interview w/ a Senior Product Manager)

so Sonia I'm curious can you tell me about a product you've launched that was a zero to one and what was that process like hey everyone as you know this is Diana the channel to best help you guys with your upcoming product interview and I've been getting a ton of questions for people going through behavioral interviews asking how do i ace those senior level interviews and this is where we have Sonia here today giving some expertise on that so Sonia do you want to introduce yourself yeah thank you so much Diana hi everyone I'm Sonia

I'm a senior pm at chime but I recently came from a smaller about 400 personized um startup in fintech and I had a coaching session with Diana which was super helpful that helped me land this job as a senior PM nice today we're going to go through a couple questions to show you guys how to Ace those particular senior level PM questions that help you get that higher offer we're going to be doing four questions today so let's get started awesome so Sonia I'm curious can you tell me about a product you've launched that was

a zero to one and what was that process like yeah can I just take a few minutes to jot down some notes and gather my thoughts sounds good go for it so um Diana I'm I'm going to tell you about the time that I took this product from Zer to one addressing one of the largest pain points in the returning customer experience and also one of the number one largest contact drivers that we were getting from customers calling into CS um so in this story I'm going to first start with what the goal of the

business is and then walk you through the whole problem uh Discovery process all the way to solution delivery awesome so first things first is um the Northstar metric for the company which I worked at is an investment company a personal finance company our Northstar metric is activation which is getting a customer to their first investment within 7 days of signing up to the platform and as the PM of the new customer onboarding experience one of the largest points of friction that I saw in our funnel was actually on this SSN screen and we had existing

research um from the uxr team that pointed to this theme of like customers just don't feel comfortable with us that's why they're not giving us their sensitive information like pii such as like SSN but you know while this is like be totally true and and valid um this didn't really match my mental model and understanding of the problem because of the degree of drop off we were seeing seemed way larger than to be attributed by just like not feeling comfortable of entering your SSN information there must be other things here at play which is why

um I decided to dig into it with my team so the first thing we did was we did problem Discovery and in that um the first thing we did was I partnered with a sister team of mine engineering and data science to really just like add logging onto the SSN screen and understand what is going on what are what is the experience of customers after they enter their SSN information and hit the enter button and what we found was pretty surprising most of that drop off that was happening on the SSN screen was actually from

customers that were returning customers so they already had an SSN in the system and they were signing up again you know maybe after years of not using the product signing up for a new account and then the experience that they were getting was they were getting a modal where uh it detected they had another account and they were just getting blocked it just said contact CX and there's like no recourse for them and it's a super frustrating experience as a as a returning customer so based on that the next thing that we did was we

I worked with um design and Engineering to understand okay let's document everything happening on the SSN screen what all the backend logic is is what the experience is to really understand what is going on um in in finer detail and with that we came up with an opportunity size of customers that we could actually help unblock on SSN screen if we were to tweak the rules a bit on the back end so now that we did some pretty good problem Discovery to understand okay like who's being impacted what is going on what is the size

of this population being impacted that's when I moved to like solution Discovery with my team and um this is when you know I started the PRD and it was so important for me to co-create this PRD with my partners and with my team so for example with fraud I partnered with fraud in writing this PRD really closely because we wanted to make sure that we were maintaining that block for Bad actors but removing the friction for good actors and I partnered with CX account services and legal in compliance really closely because we wanted to understand

okay what is the end to-end journey of when a customer calls in saying hey I'm blocked to actually getting a resolution and can we build any tooling that will help CX agents unblock these customers and can we consolidate the process so that we reduce that time to resolution that we saw that was a big contact driver of this problem in the first place so after doing a bunch of that um solution Discovery with my partners and with my team we then moved on to um actually answering a bunch of these open questions and and actually

flushing out the implementation together so I partnered super closely with engineering and QA to make sure we're identifying all of the different scenarios and downstream impacts that could happen if for example a customer were charged on this new account that they just created but were blocked from or you know what happens if a customer is you know their account is locked or in a different state so that we're surfacing those conversations with these dependency teams really early and we're making sure we're building a robust comprehensive solution up front before we even write a single line

of code so that um you know things don't go arai when we actually start executing and the last thing we did was we executed and the execution phase was actually like really smooth and fast and that's because we had done a lot of this upfront work in the solution and problem Discovery in order to arrive at a really clean solution that we had full confidence in and as a result we saw one of the largest lifts to activation of any project at that time which was 2,000 more first-time investors per month which was huge but

one of the biggest takeaways for me and uh a huge learning here was that it's really important to include your partners throughout the entire process all the way from Discovery moving into delivery and by doing that by including engineering fraud CX Etc in the whole process not only was it easier to actually get people bought in because we were co-creating the solution together and everyone understood the origins of where this problem came from and we were building the solution together but engineering was in the loop the entire time and had the full concrete context so

that when we went to actually executing and building it made it really fast and quick and seamless when we actually had to like write the code um and yeah that's just like you know a big learning that that helped influence My Philosophy on how I like to manage my products and and it really shapes My Philosophy as a product manager to this day amazing so Sonia can you share a time when you actually face resistance from another team or another organization in achieving a large goal that you had yeah I I'm going to tell you

at the time that I faced a ton of resistance from this new and second engineering team that I was working with um and how we were able to overcome that together in order to get us to a place where we're smooth sailing on a really high visibility project so for some background context um this project I was working on was to simplify the onboarding experience super high visibility updates about this project and this work stream were being given at board meetings and one of our largest investors in the startup had been um had been like

voicing their feedback and concerns about this topic for years and so they had a major stake at play here in this project and in order to help um move this project along much faster I was given the support of a second engineering team um that I hadn't worked with before and so by you know having this additional Staffing the idea is okay we could like move a little bit quicker here on this really high visibility project and for first thing I did right out of the gate which at the time I didn't think that much

of it was okay like now we have two engineering teams becoming one we're going to work on the same thing so let's combine ceremonies Sprint ceremonies and two reasons for this one is just like efficiency reason that's a ton of meetings when you think about standup and retro and two we really need that cultural diffusion because in order to actually like work as a team and like make sure we're in lock step we want more touch points where we can see and talk to uh one another so that we can like work more efficiently together

and immediately I got a ton of push back from the second engineering team they were not happy at all um they were really resistant to the idea of like having inperson standups because they had like remote standups and they just were resistant to the idea of like change overall so the first thing I did um was okay I'm thinking oh I I hear you like you know this is a big change but I wonder what else is going on underneath the surface so the first thing I did was I formed a really strong relationship with

engineering manager who had been with this team and had been the EM of this team for a few years now and I I didn't know this team at all so I wanted to understand okay what other issues at play um that are here like what's the background and context so that I can empathize with the team and what I learned was that this team had actually been through the ringer you know just in one year they um you know mission statement of the team had been reordered two to three times they had like two to

three PMS in the past year so a lot of change and a lot of movement led to this environment of like low psychological safety and um resistance to change and at the end of it like you know the team felt demotivated they felt like the work that they were doing wasn't that impactful and didn't really matter and that's why they were getting reordered continuously and so now like with that context I understood where they're coming from with this push back of like just what I thought was just a simple change to like our Sprint Ceremonies

for a little bit um so with that um the second thing I did with my em now as a partner where okay like I don't have regular touch points with Engineers but I'm going to make sure that I partner with this em so that she's bought into what we're doing and can communicate what we're doing with conviction and certainty to give confidence to the team and her one-on ones the second thing we did together was to like make sure we're listening to the feedback of the team so really like making sure that there's a lot

of touch points asking for feedback continuously they're free to give feedback publicly in standup or privately whatever Channel really opening the channels for them to give feedback and then listening and then changing really fast so as soon as we got that feedback of like you know stand up is a little bit too long immediately next day we changed it we like added more structure right we created this back alley section where you know if you want to talk about topics outside of standup you know you're free to in this this separate session but really making

sure that we're reinforcing like hey we see you we hear you and we're changing and then the third thing that I did was addressing that point of the team not feeling like the work they did mattered um from the beginning of the project all the way to the end of the project um from the very beginning even in disc y I made sure to really communicate to the team like hey this is what we're doing this is why we're doing it this is the impact that it's going to have on customers so that they're bought

in early and then even as we started to like trickle out these updates and push out these first few AB tasks as data would come in on these AB tasks I'd be sure to in standup like share my screen and be like hey look here's the last AB Tas we ran here's that lift it's because of you guys like this is because of you guys to really rein force that feedback cycle of the work you're doing is important it's high visibility it's impactful it matters and here's the results so that they can like get bought

in and see that hey actually like I am making a difference and what I'm doing does matter um and then in the end it was really awesome because you know what was super Rocky and rough at first after three weeks two 3 weeks we ended up like really working as a well-oiled machine and like the collabor ation was super tight and in the end we were able to um reduce the length of the new customer onboarding experience by 43% on iOS Android and web in just a little over a quarter which was awesome but uh

one of the biggest like points of feedback um or like Reflections I guess is that like product is an innately human um job people are producing product and so when someone comes to you with push back or conflict like sure yes that in itself is valid but also dig deeper and understand like what else is at play what does this person care about what is on their mind what are their struggles like really trying to understand their perspective and empathize with them to get at the the root of the issue or the heart at the

issue and that is what helped build uh collaboration and trust and rebuild this like um High psychological safety environment that the team hadn't been operating in for like the better half of a year can you tell me about a time you've actually work to influence the strategy or the direction of the business let me let me take a second to just jop down my thoughts let me tell you about the time that I changed my company's entire monetization strategy uh which then led to the single largest lift in activation to date so a framework that

I like to use when I think through product problems is this what why and how framework so I'll use that to frame my answer today okay so what well when we look at the first Topline goal of the business our Northstar metric is activation like I mentioned in my previous answer so when I was looking for opportunities in um in the space of activation what would be the biggest lift or what is the biggest area of friction when I looked at the activation funnel the biggest area of friction is actually the checkout screen which happens

very very early in the new customer wording experience so I know what is happening right this this this drop off on the checkout screen is leading to 30 percentage points of drop off in the activation funnel which is the single largest point of drop off but I don't know why and um you know something you might be thinking is like no like of course like the checkout screen has a bunch of drop off but was really puzzling was that you know if you assume that people are dropping off on the checkout screen because they don't

want to pay that's completely hypothesis but in the flow and in the actual experience on the screen before the checkout you actually see the subscription Blends you see the price you see one month free free trial so if they were to drop off because of the price you would pause it that they would drop off on the previous screen not this screen which again solidifies the what but really underscores we need to dig into the why a bit more so in order to dig into the why of this problem I did two things the first

thing I did was I brought together my cross functional stakeholders across the entire business to launch this one week long Discovery Sprint bringing together a bunch of different perspectives from design research engineering fraud like everyone um data science to understand all of the qual and Quant information that we have about this part particular drop off in the funnel and our biggest learning there was uh from the discovery Sprint was that customers weren't dropping off because of technical reasons not because they entered in their card and it just didn't go through they were dropping off because

of Behavioral reasons so now we have a little bit more texture and Clarity on the why piece but we don't know exactly why so off of the back of that Discovery Sprint that I led the second thing I did to dig into this why was I launched a survey that we sent out to customers um and I partnered with uxr marketing and design to do that and we specific asked you know if you people who dropped off on the screen why did you drop off and our number one response was customers told us they wanted

to try the product before they bought the product and of course this made intuitive sense to me but now I have the qualitative data because you know for a customer at that point in their Journey they get this hard pay wall and they don't even get to experience the app they're not let into the app they don't see the benefits most importantly they don't get that aha moment at the end of onboarding where they realize wow it is that easy to invest because we asked them to invest right in the flow so all of these

things led me to this this ultimate hypothesis which is this now this third part how what why how now we're in how is um let's launch a super low lift AB test to understand with the hypothesis that if we were to just completely remove this hard pay wall in the early customer journey in the early onboarding experience then more customers will go on to invest then they will retain because we already have data showing that if you invest you have better retention outcomes so my hypothesis here is that if we remove this pay wall it's

not only going to lead to better customer outcomes but Better Business outcomes because now more people are staying with us and we're collecting that recurring Revenue through our subscription fees so just pausing here we went through the what the why and the how and what are the results so super candidly in the short term the results were not great actually we were losing Revenue compared to the control um but we were seeing really promising lift in activation and firsttime investments in the variant and I knew that you know all all of these points of data

in the qual and the Quant and the discovery work that I had done led me to believe that this is still a viable Direction but I need to hold that product in conviction and we need to look at the data long term so I waited and waited and waited and 7 months after we launched that initial AB test I went and reanalyzed those results and the results were phenomenal we saw a 40% lift in activation in the variant a 44% lift in retention and an equal average revenue per user So Not only was this better

business outcomes but it was also better customer outcomes we got both and I had to take a really long long lensed Approach at this problem and wait like a better half of a year in order to see that those fruits of our labor really manifest and so like in the end what I did was I um presented this data to senior leadership got buyin from uh the chief experience officer to actually go in this direction and remove the hard pay wall from The Experience permanently and you know like I was mentioning earlier like a big

takeaway here is that in in product management right you're continuously building that that conviction it might start as like you know an inkling or an idea and for me it was like you know this really sucks you know when you get a pay wall in any app or any experience and you can't actually play with it but actually layering on and finding those pieces the qual and the Quant to actually like give validation and fuel that conviction and being able to like see that through in the long term and reanalyze that data had I just

given up you know one month two months after my test we wouldn't be here and so you really have to make sure you're you know not only placing short-term bets but also thinking long-term as a product manager as [Music] well this question gets to a big part of what they want to understand in senior PMS especially attaching on what s just said they want to see Senior leaders who can drive vision and I loved what Sonia mentioned how she drove that home was waiting seven months when she said that I was like how did you

convince people to stay on war for that long so highlighting times when you're bringing a team together under a really ambiguous problem to drive a Topline metric like retention acquisition and revenue like Sonia mentioned is a huge way to show that Sonia any thoughts on that um yeah I I I totally agree and I think one one more thought I want to add is you know similar to the question I answered last is really painting the story and bringing people along in that Journey um this was like widely publicized right like I went up on

all hands I spoke about this project a lot of people knew about this project and they were involved from Discovery all the way to that breakthrough AB test that had super promising results so I in in building you know involving everyone and and and building that confidence and painting that story from the beginning I it helped people follow all the way through to make that buyin much easier at the end supported with that 7 eight months worth of data to go in this direction and I love the emphasis on the framework you had around the

it was what why and then how so that really helped make it easier to follow along but again this emphasis on this session is really on the senior pm and there were so many things about this story you started off with saying let me tell you a story about how a change of monetization strategy of this company that is huge in itself to be able to do that and then we follow you along to hear how that happened starting with the problem so you were very clear about that but not knowing what the why was

bringing the team together to discover what that was and bring cross functional team members together and then doubling down on then going with a hypothesis that you knew in the short term was not going to initially Drive revenues but waiting that length of time to see that was again I think the Excellence of showing the prominence of a senior leader so can't get enough of that story but let's go on to our last story son can you tell me about a time where you had to Champion the growth of your team and what did you

do yeah let me just take a second so um I I'm going to talk a little bit about my philosophy on teams and team growth but I'll I'll share with you a very concrete example of how I helped a specific person on my team get a promotion and how we were able to do that together awes were you their manager I'm just curious no no no no no it was my product designer prodct design partner yeah okay so just to set the stage a little bit on My Philosophy towards team team growth like why that

matters um I really believe in empowered teams I think that they it it is not only more fun to be on an empowered team but it drives better outcomes and um something that's important when I go into any relationship with you know a team is I really care about the people on that team and forming relationships with the individual people that last outside of the confines of this job that we just tend to be at at this point in time in our careers together and so um when I you know when I think about one

story of you know a team member my product design partner so one day you know we have these um weekly weekly check-ins where we we talk and one day she told me like look Sonia you know I I'm really happy with the work that we're doing I feel like I'm making an impact but I I feel like we're doing so much optimization work and and we work in the growth space right so when you think about the new customer onboarding Journey there's a lot of different small AB tests she felt like we were doing a

lot of that stuff and as a designer she didn't have space to actually grow and build you know a vision for a larger project um and I was like okay this is completely valid I I completely understand and that's something that you and I both want we we've been doing a lot of work to you know get impact very quickly but it's also important for us to not only carve out space for a larger vision of how we want to see the space change but also support you and your career together so um so we

talked about it and then the first thing we did was in our in our working sessions together we really aligned on this theme of like how how might we demonstrate value early in the onboarding uh onboarding experience which is the space that we owned so after like aligning on that theme of demonstrating value early the second thing that we did together was we hosted this discovery Workshop which was a cross functional workshop with my team that my product design partner LED and I helped support them in and from there we gathered a bunch of great

um pieces of feedback from the team a bunch of ideas you know ranging from low lift to super high lift on areas that we could improve the new customer onboarding experience now with that uh all of those ideas and inputs from the team in hand what we did was I sat down with my product design partner and my engineering managing partner to really like look at everything uh all of all of these different solutions look at the problems SP under this theme of demonstrating value early and breaking it down into a work stream that made

sense and the thing that I uh we did together was this workstream had two pieces the first piece was shipping winds shipping those really fast low hanging fruit winds that we had identified together early that had lighter design lit so that my designer could be involved really quickly in that first half of the project but that second half of the project is like green new space so the first half we're removing and you know cutting out all of the unnecessary things in the onboarding flow that don't need to be there the second half of the

project that uh which was demonstrating value early were rebuilding the flow and that's where I gave my product design partner a lot of room to like play and explore of what that Vision might look like what that end state for customer experience could look like and with that we then created these two work streams and then we told told the story of how we're going to change the experience we presented together in all hands and my product design partner then became the face of this project and as a result we were not only able to

shift that ship that first half of the project super quickly and get a bunch of wins on the board but that second project became then the number one priority of the company as the political climate of the company shifted um new Executives joined and there was bigger um there was appetite for bigger Bolder bets um and bigger winds and Activation so capitalizing on those shifts in the political climate and now with this workstream my product designer then was able to leverage that into a promotion um by being the face of the project and driving this

Vision that she had wanted to drive in the first place um and just like a reflection here you know like this really speaks to I guess like my philosophy on how I like to approach work like with au authenticity with relationship building and to this day that product designer is still a really good friend of mine and I think by incorporating her ideas as well as you know the folks on my team's ideas we were able to not only design something that was great for customers but also um met the needs that we each individually

have in our careers and what growth that we want to see um and and how we shape our careers that s was immensely inspiring and that was another great senior story because as you go higher up your career even if you're an IC but managers are expected to be growing their team which includes individual members which in this case Sonia wasn't directly responsible for this product designer but she went out of her way to exhibit skills that a manager would have in growing specific individuals when their team in this case it was identifying scope that

was going to be required for the next level it was then helping her get to do that work and helping her serve as the Bas of this project that you mentioned became the second priority so all of those things are going to be what senior leaders even most of like directors are doing so Sonia setting herself up to show the company she's interviewing with she has the potential to be at that level even if they were hiring her in as an IC so watch out within a couple years I see it definitely become manager is

that something you're interested in doing oh yes absolutely absolutely well for those hiring managers that are watching this consider son amazing so any other thoughts you want to add to that one that was our last question um I think Here's a thought not about growing um growing other folks on the team but like self and personal growth um you know when I was earlier on my career when I had first transitioned to product management I was like super obsessed of like how can I like hit these skills in this checkbox to like climb to pm

and then climb to senior PM super fast and what I learned along that Journey was um actually something my mentor said to me which is it's similar to the mirror of irid in in Harry Potter where you're looking at this the Harry there you're like looking at this mirror and it it reflects all of your desires but but like when you actually stop fixating on what you're trying to achieve and your outcome and you instead shift your focus to uh like what can I do how can I improve and and just being very self-reflective instead

of trying to hit those check boxes of what someone else arbitrarily deems as a senior product manager that's when I started to see a ton of growth I started to level up in terms of like my mentality in terms of how I see the team in terms of like extreme ownership all those areas that are expected and rewarded at higher levels uh I started to see a lot of traction and get to those levels and move really quickly when I stopped fixating on the end goal and just started um enjoying that path of growth and

like retraining myself to see growth as a beneficial thing and not a painful experience like it can be fun it can be really satisfying and I think that that that's what helped me in my career so far this is someone who's going to become a natural leader it's ingrained in her I so love that and that really resonates because there was a time where I had a tendency to want to solve orc problems instead of just everyday sort of tactical product problems and it didn't come out of oh I want to go to the next

level but after talking it through with my manager that then we realize oh this is actually what directors is doing so if you want to work on that you actually have to collaborate with this director so that is such such a great call out with that I wanted to give thanks to this again was a great demonstration of what a behavioral IM should look like for senior PM's directors and even VP roles and we highlighted what are the things you should be emphasizing in your work experience to demonstrate that to be able to do what

Sonia did and use that to leverage her negotiations to go into the next level and keep growing yeah and last thing I wanted to ask you Sonia so yeah you made this transition recently and was it easy going through the interview process I know there's been you know crazy macroeconomic downturn in the tech industry uh no it is super super super hard um I think the industry and just the market is really really rough right now because a lot of folks are being laid off and there's not that many roles opening up and just from

my personal experience um you know like I applied to maybe 50 to 75 uh applications and that's you know on the lower side but those were really really like intentional applications where you know I didn't just cold apply my my method was very like more calculated and attune to okay what job would I be happy in what I what I could I see myself thriving in and are a great fit for my personal brand and the story that I've crafted with my resume and I I got about like 10 first round interviews and then from

there four ons sites and two off offers and this is over the course of s months of being unemployed so it it is really really difficult and I I I'd say that one of the biggest tips that I have for anyone watching is to really um you're going to have a lot more success if you craft a really clear narrative and story of The Arc of your career and you target jobs that fit in that narrative so all of my experience has been in fintech and surprise surprise a lot of the callbacks that I got

are in fintech or in other startups OR tech companies that have a finance component to them and so that's where your bet best bet is going to be because folks that are hiring are you know they have the luxury of being picky and so they're going to hire people that have X amount of years of experience in this area already and so that's where you really want to stand out um is where what you've already done before so helpful and I hope you guys use that as inspiration six months is not a short amount of

time but she was able to kind of go through that journey and still win you only need one job is what I remind you guys of so awesome job and again if you guys want to see another great example similar to this one of an excellent behavioral interview you'll want to watch this upcoming video with Arya who was a product manager at stripe and also a Sev interviews so thanks again and thanks to Sonia for demonstrating what a great senior PM behavioral interview should look like bye guys