My thoughts on Product Management Interviews

I see some talks about “Product Sense” and it reminded me that I wanted to post this for a long time: “Product Sense” is in the Red Dot barely touching the Green

Instead Let me explain what we are looking for without mentioning Product (non-) Sense.

We value the following traits in Product Managers:
– Ability to decrypt and empathize with users needs
– Understanding of data, statistics and optimizations
– Familiarity with how tech products are built

What do we mean:
❓ — Ability to decrypt and empathise with users’ needs:
✅-> we want a PM who understands that people don’t buy Rolex watches because they want an accurate read of the time
✅-> someone who knows that it is 10 times more painful for a user to make 2 clicks instead of one for the same outcome

❓ — Understanding of data, statistics, and optimisations:
✅-> we want a PM who can write SELECT * FROM the_correct_table JOIN reference_table ON id=same_id WHERE field = what_we_need
✅-> someone who understands that there could be no difference between a test and control group with 10% difference in conversion on average

❓ — Familiarity with how tech products are built
✅-> we want a PM who knows that adding a filter to a page is harder than changing the colour of a button but will often have less impact
✅-> someone who can cut the requirements down to the minimum amount of work to validate a hypothesis