Now that we’ve generalized about what Microsoft does, we should also leave you with this advice:
be careful about generalizations at Microsoft, particularly with respect to hiring. What your buddy experienced at Microsoft might have little to do with what you’ll experience.
Microsoft teams hire mostly independently. One team might want deep technical skills and therefore demand that you write some pseudocode, while other teams might want to test your design skills. It’s all over the map.
Facebook was built on a hacker culture, and this shows in their culture. Facebook wants PMs who show this entrepreneurial drive.
Like other companies, PM candidates start off with one or two phone interviews. The phone interviews often cover behavioral questions, and may also ask why you are passionate about Facebook. The best answers may include anecdotes about real-world experiences with Facebook or a desire to have a big impact and work with smart people.
If you do well on the phone interviews, you’ll be brought in for four to five onsite interviews. Each interviewer wears a specific “hat”:
Technical and Logical: You will be asked some quantitative questions, especially around metrics and implementing experiments. If you have a technical background, you might also be asked to code (although Facebook has relaxed this requirement more recently).
Design: These will include typical product design questions. Additionally, if you’ve built anything, they may ask to see it. Think about what services and apps you like and why you like them.
Futurist: These include questions like, “What is the future of TV?” Show that you can reason about the future. You don’t just want to talk about symptoms of the future; you want to think about what will fundamentally change to get that way and what effect those changes will have. You want to be a storyteller.
Guru: For experienced roles, they’ll ask about your core strengths. They want to check your sense of self to see if you understand what you’re good at.
Entry-level PMs generally get hired at Facebook as generalists rather than for a specific team.
Experienced PMs mostly interview for a specific team, but Facebook still expects these candidates to be generalists at heart. They will interview with some team members and some non-team members.
How Decisions Get Made
Facebook interviewers do not directly make offer decisions. Instead, interviewers submit written feedback to a hiring committee which is a mix of peers, managers, and recruiters.
You will be evaluated in several categories during your interview. The hiring committee will need to see strong performance on all of these categories to extend an offer.
Special Focuses
Typically, Facebook will ask PM candidates to code. They understand you might not have coded in a long time, and that will be taken into account. What they’re looking for here is someone who can think like a software engineer. Do you understand, more or less, how to break down a problem into steps?
Knowing the ins and outs of data structures and algorithms is generally not expected, but you should know some basic ones like hash tables.
Apple
People joke that Apple is a cult, and perhaps there’s some truth to that. Apple does really value culture fit. This is reflected in their interview.
Apple hires for specific teams, not for the company as a whole. Apple’s interview process kicks off with two phone interviews. After that point, you are brought onsite for in-person interviews.
Some teams stick with the standard four to five hour (or so) long interviews with members of the team. Other teams, however, may give you as many as twelve 30-minute interviews. These teams apparently value culture fit so much that they want you to meet with a lot of people.
Your interviewers will come from a variety of roles: other PMs, designers, engineering managers, an executive (e.g., Junior Vice President of Product Managers). In many cases, a hiring manager will interview you over lunch, but they might also ask someone to fill in for them if they’re busy.
Part way through the day, the interviewers might check in with each other to ensure they’re following the right process.
How Decisions Get Made
After your interview, the hiring manager and team will meet together to make a decision.
Special Focuses
Apple believes passionate employees make good employees, so they want people who are passionate about the company and its products. Expect a lot of questions about why you want to work at Apple.
Have a good pitch ready.
Similarly, you should know Apple’s products well. Be prepared to describe what you love about them and what you think could be improved.
Amazon
Amazon candidates start off with two short phone screens. These are just 30 minutes, and they typically don’t drill too deeply into your skills. They’re mainly looking to understand your background to see if you should be brought onsite.
The onsite interviews consist of four to six in-person interviews, each about an hour long.
Interviewers will be looking to see how you match up against Amazon’s 14 leadership principles (see: Amazon Leadership Principles), with each interviewer covering two to three principles. If an interviewer doesn’t feel that she did an adequate job covering one, she might ask another interview to follow up.
Of these 14 principles, an ability to get things done (“bias for action” and “deliver results”) and customer obsession are particularly important.
One of your interviewers will be the “bar raiser.” The bar raiser is a special interviewer from another team. This interviewer is tasked with “raising the bar” and ensuring you are better than 50 percent of Amazon PMs. He is often easy to pick out from your interviewers: he’s the one brought in from another team.
The bar raiser is also often the person who will challenge you the most. For example, he might be testing the “having backbone” value. Do you have a position that you can back up while respectfully disagreeing? Don’t be surprised if the interviewer continues digging into something until you’ve given a satisfactory answer.
You will also likely interview with a hiring manager.
How Decisions Get Made
After your interview, your interviewers will meet to discuss your performance. The bar raiser is responsible for the interview process and gets veto power. The hiring manager also gets veto power;
it’s her team, after all. This means you need to impress both the hiring manager and the bar raiser (and ideally everyone else, too).
Special Focuses
Amazon tends not to focus too much on technical skills, although some technical aptitude might be expected in more technical teams like Amazon Web Services. What the company cares about more are your business skills and background.
All of Amazon’s leadership principles are important, but the Customer Obsession one is especially important. When in doubt, do what’s right for the customer (even if it isn’t the right “business”
decision).
Many Amazon questions deal with pricing specifically, so make sure you think about how different Amazon products (e.g., Amazon Prime) are priced. Think about what you would change.
Amazon interviewers like to dig deep into your resume. That line you have about how your feature boosted efficiency by 30 percent? You’d better back that up. Be prepared to justify exactly how it did this and exactly how you measure this impact. Hand-waviness won’t cut it.
Finally, these leadership principles are not a joke. If you pay attention and know the leadership principles well, you might recognize which one an interviewer has in mind with a particular question.
You can then address it directly. Better yet, prepare for this; review your resume with these leadership principles in mind.
Yahoo
Yahoo recruits for both the product manager and the associate product manager roles. The procedures for these interviews are mostly similar, but they have a few differences.
Both product manager and associate product manager candidates start off with one or two phone screens. Successful candidates are then brought on for a full day of interviews.
In the onsite interviews, PM candidates interview with people from multiple roles and levels. They should have at least three interviews with fellow PMs of the same level or higher, plus at least one person from a different team. One of your interviewers will also be the hiring manager.
In APM interviews, candidates do not interview with the specific team. After an offer is made and accepted, you will be asked your team preferences. You will then be notified of your team one to two weeks before you start.
How Decisions Get Made
After your interviews, each interviewer submits written feedback to the hiring manager, who then puts together a packet. If the team is feeling positive about the candidate, the packet is sent to the hiring committee and then to executives for final approval.
For APM interviews, offer decisions are made by the APM steering committee, then reviewed and finalized by the executives.
In either case, Yahoo looks for people who are passionate, high energy, and capable of getting stuff done and launching products.
Special Focuses
Yahoo is looking for deeply technical PMs, so you should expect to prove that you have a solid technical foundation. You need to show you can communicate with engineers, but it’s unlikely you’d be asked to code.
You should also expect product and analytical questions. Try to have a framework and a specific point of view.
Twitter’s process starts with a hiring manager who does a general phone screen and then matches you with a specific team. You will do one or two phone screens before being brought onsite.
In the onsite interview, you may go through as many as seven interviews that are 45 minutes each.
Your interviewers will be a mix of peers (fellow PMs) as well as people whom you might work with, such as engineering managers, tech leads, or people from the support team.
How Decisions Get Made
Each hiring manager does things a bit differently. However, Twitter generally only extends an offer when someone is a “slam dunk.” They want someone who brings something new to the team.
Special Focuses
Twitter really wants people who have done their homework and love Twitter. Applying to Twitter just for its brand name (as oh-so-many people do) won’t cut it. Instead, you should play with their technology and really understand it. You need to “get” Twitter, not just be a casual user. What do you think is really cool? How does it work? What would you do if there were an issue? You should be obsessed with creating a great experience for the user.
Twitter also wants people who can handle change, since Twitter is growing rapidly. You should be willing to wear many hats, be good in stressful situations, and have excellent interpersonal skills.
Behavioral questions are very important.
Twitter PMs will generally not be asked coding questions, but they may be asked how to technically design a product. You should understand concepts like preloading and calculating on the fly.
Dropbox
Drew (Co-Founder and CEO) tells each new hire that their #1 job is to recruit other talented people.
Given this, it’s not surprising that almost half of new hires are referrals and the recruiting team is very active in sourcing candidates from existing PMs.
While the interview process is still evolving, the PM candidate profile is very well defined. Dropbox is looking for people with a technical background that also have experience as a startup founder or who have demonstrated substantial accomplishments as a PM at an established company.
Once you’re in the door, you go through two phone screens with other PMs who ask typical PM questions about your favorite products and potential improvements.
If you are invited onsite, you will typically face four interviews with PMs, engineers, and product designers. These will include PMs who ask product questions, engineers who go through a technical screen, and product designers who may ask you to design a new product workflow on the whiteboard.
Either that day or soon after, you’ll also interview with Arash (Co-Founder and CTO) who asks product questions related to Dropbox and also screens for cultural fit.
Depending on current needs and candidate backgrounds, PMs may be hired for a specific team or simply as a generalist to jump into a specific team soon after starting.
How Decisions Get Made
After the interviews, the interviewers will debrief together to make a decision. The recruiter is in touch with the interviewers throughout the day, so if you don’t pass the initial interviews, you may not speak with Arash. The bar is high and Dropbox will take their time to find the right candidate.
Special Focuses
One of Dropbox’s engineering values is to “sweat the details,” and it applies to the PMs as well. Be prepared to think through all the edge cases of your product answers and designs in detail. Cultural fit is also extremely important, but they don’t ask any special questions to screen for it.
Dropbox has a very focused set of products, so be familiar with all of them and think through what you would do if you were a PM there.