Preparing for an interview is like getting on board of a spaceship - lots of settings, buttons and complex instructions. It’s completely unclear how to start and what the fundamentals are. Well, I think a lot will depend on the initial settings and your expectations beforehand. During the past year I helped dozens of people to prepare for an interview for a Product Manager (PM) position in various companies, from startups to big corporations, and was surprised how helpful it is to manage the initial settings right. So here is a list of important tumblers to set up.

1. Define the company stage

Are you going to apply for a PM role in an A-series startup? Or is it a small business with a proven product-market fit? Or maybe you decided to go for a big company with thousands of employees? The interview process as well as the questions you’ll be asked will significantly vary depending on the answer to this question.

If we are talking about a big company, the interview process for any position will most likely be formalized, so each and every candidate goes through the same stages. For a PM interview specifically these stages might include the following:

• Product Sense interview
• Product Execution interview
• Written exercise
• Leadership interview
• Analytical interview
• Technical sense

Such formalization is easy to explain - the interview process in big companies is very similar to a decentralized conveyor with hundreds and thousands of people involved. In order to ensure all the candidates have similar experience and are equally evaluated, the interviewers are trained to follow the company standards to conduct the interview.

Opposite to that, the interview process in early days startups is way more chaotic and varies a lot from one company to another. However, some tips could be useful here as well:

• Most likely you’ll be talking with one of the key people in the company. It could be CEO or CPO (Chief Product Officer), and it’s your chance to convince one of the key decision-makers in the company that you are that exact person who’ll drive their business to new achievements.
• Usually, interviews in startups are more experience-centric, meaning that you should expect more questions about your past experience as a PM rather than some hypothetical ones about how to spend a million dollars to improve an airport experience. Be sure to tailor your experience to what the company is looking for. Let’s take an example here.

Let’s imagine Jane is a Product Designer with several years of experience. She decided to switch her career path and become a Product Manager. In her previous role she fulfilled some PM tasks such as backlog prioritization and user stories creation but has no solid experience as a PM. She’s applying for a PM position in a quickly growing startup which is about to enter the market. So how to tailor her experience to what company is looking for? My advice here is to play on her strengths instead of admitting no experience as a PM. Thus, Jane could emphasize that she’s a great multitasker (combined designer and product activities in her previous role), knows the execution part of a PM role very well (sprint-related activities) and has a great senior PM mentor who helps her grow into the PM role.

• You can also expect that there will be a call with the engineering team working on the product. It’s well known that team spirit matters a lot, so ideally a PM and an engineering team should have a team match. Big companies simply can’t afford to have a team match call with every candidate but startups often can.

1. Connect role description, PM ladder and yourself

I think it’s a very underestimated setting which is overlooked by many candidates. It’s true that each company has its own PM ladder but there are five general ranks at least:

• Associate PM/Junior PM
• PM
• Senior PM
• Lead PM
• Chief PM.

Depending on this the questions, especially behavioral ones, will vary a lot. Thus, junior and medium positions will most likely focus on execution and ability to create a plan of work based on the defined strategy while a senior position requires such skills as defining the strategy to address a complex problem, the ability to lead the team and managing high level of uncertainty. The tricky part is that the majority of role descriptions posted by the companies are vague and include all the common buzzwords like manage the roadmap, own a product strategy and advocate for the user. My advice here is to do some detective work - search for PMs who have already joined the company and try to come up with a very high level org chart so you could guesstimate how much space is left for you. Prepare specific questions like “How does PM org look like in the company” if you are not sure.

Finally, try to be honest with yourself and do not apply for a senior role if you are junior PM and all you have is a couple of completed courses on the Internet. Evaluating your hard skills based on the PM matrix could help here (DM me if you’d like to get one for yourself).

1. Set the correct communication settings

Sounds quite obvious, ha? Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be so simple in practice. So what are the communication settings to tweak?

1. Speak slowly. It's okay to talk fast when you are with your friends. But if you study the people with high competence triggers, like the President, actors or public figures, they speak extremely slowly. Why? Because, I know, if I have a high status and am confident, you’re going to listen to me for as long as it takes. Every single word I speak is impactful. People do react better when you speak in a slow and intentional way. Talking calmly and slowly not only shows you’re in control of your emotions, it helps the interviewer understand you. Moreover, when I speak slowly it gives me time to plan the next ten sentences in my head.
2. Smile. Smiling will help you build rapport and look more confident. But there are some obvious caveats. You can't simply keep the smile on your face, so let your smile come and go.
3. Do not talk for more than 2 minutes. This is one of the most incorrectly set communication settings I have encountered while interviewing candidates. For some reason, candidates often think that if they are silent it’s a bad sign in the interview. Well, to be honest, it’s quite the other way round. Speaking in short chunks reveals several good things. (a) It allows you to validate whether you are going in the right direction. Usually the interviewer asks some clarifying questions if not, so by pausing for a while you give them a chance to ask this question. (b) it allows you to take a break and plan your further answer. And ( c) it will turn the interview into a dialogue.
4. Sell yourself. Some candidates tend to use the word “we” instead of “I” while answering behavioral and experience-related questions even when talking about their solo achievements. Teamwork is great but remember you sell yourself at the interview, don’t be shy!
5. Avoid coming up with crazy use cases. I’ll give you an example here. In one of my interviews the candidate was proposed to come up with a number of use cases for a hypothetical ridesharing product. Surprisingly, all their use cases started with “When I’m drunk and I’m in the bar…” While it might be a good example if we would design the product for drunk people, it was not the case for a common ridesharing one. So be mindful.

Hopefully this article will help you land your spaceship at a dream job! And remember, the best way to pass any interview is to practice, practice, practice.