how long is it going to take to become good at pm interviews i've seen people with 10 plus years of product experience fail at these interviews fam so it's not just about having the number of years of product experience i'm going to be sharing preparation strategies and mapping out a timeline for you so you know how long it's going to take to get good hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a big tech company in silicon valley california one of the most common questions i get from my clients that i coach
for pm interviews how long is it going to take to become good at pm interviews practicing for the product management interview is a marathon not a sprint which means it's important to give yourself sufficient time doing the right practice and not letting your ego get in the way so my thoughts on this having coached clients in big tech companies startups generally i've seen after about a month and a half to two months is the inflection point when people get really good after having developed their own frameworks having watched enough content and doing enough mocks of
course it's not just about how much time you use to practice for pm interviews i worked with a client who came to me after having done a hundred mocks and still i would not have passed them so it's not just a factor of time but getting the right practice i'm gonna break down the preparation process week by week week one is all about prepping and starting to learn what these interviews are like so the first thing you wanna do in week one is get a sense of the questions that are going to be asked during
the interview so check out sites like glassdoor to hear from people who have actually gone through the interviews and shared their questions if possible ask the recruiter directly what should i expect from this interview can you give me an example of some sample questions that i should be practicing off of and here you really want to get the questions that are being asked from the company that you're interviewing at i've seen a ton of sites giving generic pm interview questions and people waste a ton of time preparing for questions that are definitely not going to
be asked in that particular company's interview process the second step in week one of preparation is taking a shot at answering these questions yourself first don't go straight into frameworks how would you answer these questions naturally based on your pm experience this can be really helpful for you to develop an innate instinct to solving these questions first before you get bombarded by all the frameworks that might or might not work sometimes they go through this process especially for those who have way too many frameworks and are getting so confused by them i tell them you
have had 10 plus years of pm experience so let's put the frameworks aside and if this was a question you got in your work setting how would you solve this so this third step is starting to understand the frameworks out there and how people are answering these questions because most people are visual learners i actually recommend people to go through videos where they're watching either mock interviews or i have a ton of videos actually teaching frameworks and you see me go through examples of how to answer these questions that you can then critically assess for
those who prefer to learn over books there are books like lewis lynn's series of books on helping prepare for the product interview but what you're trying to get out of this part of the process is to understand the frameworks but also critically assess the frameworks to see what makes sense to you versus what doesn't make sense because what i see people do all the time is take frameworks word by word and they haven't internalized it people are just spitting out a script and doesn't feel good for us or the interviewee so do yourself a favor
and watch these videos read these books but critically analyze them to see which parts of the framework make sense to you now that we're done with week number one weeks two and three you can actually condense into one week if you feel comfortable and they're both similar in process and structured but focused on different types of questions so i mentioned in the product management interview you're going to have most importantly product strategy slash product sense questions and execution questions that are focused on using data to drive decisions so week two and three is split by
using one week to focus on one type of question and the other week focusing on the other type of question in weeks two and three the first thing you want to start off with number one is to create your own framework and again this step is so crucial to developing something that works for you and not just what is written in the books or in videos like mine for example for the product strategy product sense question you've realized as a pm you've always incorporated the company's strengths when you answer the question what should we build
for x if that has helped you in the past create really solid answers or come up with really great solutions you might incorporate that into your own individual framework or if in the books they tell you to set up a goal early on in the product sense product strategy question and you realize every time you do that you come up with something generic and it might fit better towards the end that's another way that you're not just following the books blindly but you're critically analyzing sensing that what the books are telling you to do just
doesn't feel right because you've had several years of pm experience so the second thing you want to do is to watch a couple more videos and now particularly focus on mock interview videos you're going to spend this time scribbling down notes from the point of view of an interviewer what worked what didn't work i have a ton of videos on my channel answering product sense and execution questions and i want to challenge you no i want to allow you to actually go through those videos and write down parts of what i said that didn't resonate
with you and parts that did the third thing part of weeks two and three is to start playing around with the products i noticed people interviewing infrequently do this and hence it's so hard to develop empathy for the execution type of questions to understand what data you need you want to play around with their products to start developing an understanding of what products are available what are key flows and how it works so that when they ask you the question about their product you don't have to spend all that time asking them oh i'm not
really familiar with the product can you tell me a little more so i want you for the company you're interviewing for to try out their products if it's a consumer product sign up and go through the major flows for b2b business to business products or even enterprise products sometime you as an individual might not be able to sign up a lot of times they offer demos so check those out to develop some familiarity with the products before you go into the interview other times you can check out youtube videos of people going through the flows
of the product telling them what they liked what they didn't like so that's another source if you can't get a demo or you can't get access to certain apps that might be overseas what i might not recommend as much which i hear a lot of people doing is reading blogs about the products it's a bit harder to read through text on how the product works the last thing i want you to do in weeks two and three for both the product sense and execution type of questions is to jot down your challenges in answering these
questions for example when you're trying to answer the product sense slash strategy question where are you getting stuck is it figuring out what the user segmentation is because i know a lot of people have challenges on that and if you do i have a video out there for you answering that and you basically then want to hone in and deep dive on those particular challenges to get really good at think about if you were playing sports and let's say basketball and your weak spot is dribbling dribbling dribble is it yes struggling is the right word
and and if your weak spot was dribbling up and down the court and instead you use your time trying to shoot four pointers and practicing that it's never going to help you get holistically good at the game because dribbling up and down the court is so important to actually getting closer to the rim and if you don't solve that gap you're never gonna holistically be able to get good at the game and if you're not coming up with much research work with the trained coach who can give you advice based on having interviewed tons of
interviewees or you might ask other people who you've observed do really well in that particular part of the question and get their tips or watch them do it now we're in week number four so the first part of week number four is to actually do a ton of mock interviews with other people that are prepping for pm interviews this is going to be super helpful to helping you do the drills necessary to develop the instinct the muscle memory and even figure out what challenges you were having in these particular questions if we're going back to
the basketball analogy if you're preparing for a basketball game you're probably going to spend a lot of time practicing in mock games well i don't know what they call it but let's say mock games where they are playing with their team mimicking some parts of the real life setting and using that to help them get prepared so here you want to put your framework into use to check whether it holds in the situations and also iterate off of building that framework so during the mock interview part you want to practice interviewing with other people and
this is to really get yourself into that mode of doing the actual question out loud with someone on the other side that could put you and give you some anxiety which is part of the interviewing and doing this as much as possible can help you get prepared for the interview itself and here i want to call out the main focus of mock interviews is for you to do the drills the drills here being doing the actual interviewing in 30 to 40 minutes which is a lot of time that you're given during an actual interview of
course it's also helpful to get feedback from the person on the other side we might need mock interviewing with but it will depend on the person a lot of people who are mock interviewing their peers know they might not have the trained expertise on knowing what signal to look for on what follow-up questions to get and how to actually critically assess the interview and hence a lot of people get thrashed when they're receiving feedback from one peer mock interviewer and another peer mock interview that can conflict so i would say take the feedback with a
grain of salt and as with everything critically analyze the feedback that you're given if you want to do mock interviews and ensure that you get feedback that are going to help you in the interview i recommend working with a trained interviewer and that might be a coach or someone who interviews pms at another company hopefully the company you're interviewing at ideally during mock interviewing you find other people that you think are quite good and have a good chance of passing the interview and continue working with them tactically where might you go to find mock interviewees
and how many mock interviews would you do so the first one check out some websites like stellar peers exponent they both have done a great job in creating a community of other people who are awesome mock interviewing and helping them find other people to mock interview with for the second part i might recommend for this week week number four anywhere from four to five mock interviews could be a good amount to start ramping that up the second thing during week number four is finding trained interviewers this could be immensely helpful to get real strong feedback
on what you could be doing better and what some of the best candidates show that you might not already be doing so here you might find friends who have interviewed at those companies to give you a hand in doing a mock interview with you or giving you tips you might find a loose connection of a friend of a friend that might be willing to help you out let's say you don't know someone at the company you're interviewing for in that case there are coaches that you can hire to help you out week number five is
focus on optimization so the first part of this week is you want to collect all the feedback you received in the week before during mock interviewing and critically analyze what are things that you need to work on what are things that are your strengths already and here is the part where you want to focus in on those gaps and figure out ways to optimize it so how you optimize it might be taking the advice from the trained interviewer coach that you worked with last week or you might spend some time just thinking through those gaps
the second part of week number five is now tackling even more questions but on your own why because you want to take those optimizations that you thought of and actually incorporate them into the answer and it might be a bit hard to do that in a mock interview setting because let's say you're anxious or you forget versus doing it on your own you have the paper right next to you telling you these are the things that you want to work on and incorporate and you have that time and giving yourself let's say an hour to
actually incorporate it and hopefully after incorporating it you assess whether your answers are getting better so here you might want to be doing one to two questions on your own per day yes that's a lot but it's time to ramp up the number of questions and the number of reps the third part of week number five is start optimizing your timing so when you're doing the questions on your own the first few take as much time as you need but the latter few start getting them down to about 30 minutes 40 minutes max and time
which section is taking the longest time for the silences that you take to think how long they actually take and this way you use that to identify opportunities get the time down you might then take out things that feel less relevant to needing to answer the question and the last thing for week number five is to tackle the third type of question that the interviewer will ask which is behavioral questions here you want to start by collecting the type of questions that are asked in behavioral interviews for pms and then use those questions start brain
dumping responses stories experiences that can contribute and answer those questions this now gives you a draft of answers to the behavior questions that then you would use next week to optimize we're at week number six the final week of preparation now this final week you want to start off with going back to mock interviewing but here it's especially important to mock with those people that you saw had a high performance or gave you really good feedback or mock with those trained interviewers and trained coaches the second part of this last week you want to play
yourself into the interview mode where stakes are high so because when you enter an interview on top of just answering the question there's all this anxiety and all this rapport building you need to do with the interviewee interviewer signing up for some actual interviews that you go through this might mean signing up to mock interview with some pretty senior people the third part of week number six is you want to tackle non-traditional questions non-traditional questions are things that they might ask that are not aligned with the typical questions they ask it might seem like a
curveball or it might seem like a question that isn't off of a framework that you had studied i've heard so many interview candidates trip up on these and they prepared so hard for the traditional type of questions and when asked these non-traditional questions it was a total curveball and the last part of week number six is to optimize the behavioral question stories that you have at this point you want to pick the best stories for certain type of questions at this point you want to make sure it's organized well and structured well into something like
the star framework and if you're struggling here check out my video on answering behavioral questions in a way to stand out in the description below or the note above here you also want to spend some time mocking with folks to convey your story and getting some feedback on whether what you were trying to convey in your story certain traits qualities experiences actually were communicated through that was a long six weeks even me explaining it felt pretty exhaustive so no like i said it is a marathon and not a sprint you want to give yourself sufficient
time to develop an intuition but for the things that resonate with you use them and spread the love by sharing this video with someone else that is preparing for the pm interview and help support the channel by liking and subscribing to the channel and i will see you next time
