Complete Guide to Master The Vibe Coding PM Interview

Also known as AI Prototyping

👋 Hey, I am Deepak and welcome to another edition of my newsletter. I deep dive into topics around AI and product management. I run a live cohort-based course on AI product management as well.

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Let’s dive in the topic now!

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It’s been a while since companies changed how to conduct PM Interviews. The usual rounds of PM interviews are product sense, analytical, technical, and behavioural rounds. For more senior roles, we add strategy, growth, and leadership on top of these skills, though they don’t result in separate rounds. Product sense becomes product sense and strategy, analytical becomes growth, and behavioural becomes leadership. This format is what we can expect more or less across companies.

So when a candidate posted that he had gotten into a vibe-coding round for the Google AI PM role on Reddit PM community , it caught the PM community by surprise.

I had two unrelated thoughts that I shared last week on LinkedIn also. First, the post shouldn’t be treated as truth. The hiring manager rounds happen at Google for team matching, and aren't a part of initial set of 4-5 rounds. They happen after the candidate has cleared the initial rounds. Google recruiters are pretty consistent about telling you what to expect in interviews. So maybe it’s true, maybe not.

The second thought I had is vibe coding will inevitably become a part of PM interview process. It’s already happening for AI PM roles as few folks in the AI live cohort that I run told me, and it will happen for even traditional PM roles eventually. The reason is pretty simple - for the first time in the history of product management, we don't have to rely on subjective questions to see what a candidate can do. A vibe-coding round can reveal their technical know-how of the candidate, their design sensibilities, and decision-making.

So the question we should be asking ourselves should be — WHEN companies will adopt it, not WHETHER they will adopt it. And that’s where this post seemed relevant to write. In this post, we cover

• what’s vibe-coding

• relevance of vibe coding for Pms

• key concerns PMs have around vibe-coding round,

• skills required to master this round,

• key categories of questions and motivation behind them,

• a set of 40+ questions that are being asked/ can be asked in this round

• evaluation criteria

• interview formats

• framework to use in this interview

As for how to solve these problems, I believe that live session is a better way to teach that. So I would also be conducting couple of live sessions around ‘How to vibe-code in PM Interviews’. With this post, and the upcoming sessions - you should be able to master the round. You can checkout the session here

So let’s start with the first question — what’s vibe coding.

What’s Vibe Coding

Vibe-coding is a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, a popular AI engineer who has been part of Tesla, OpenAI, etc. Here Karpathy explaining it —

In simple terms, vibe coding is coding an app via natural language such as English. You put a prompt in a coding agent tool such as Lovable, Replit, Cursor, etc. and the coding agent writes the code. At times, it does everything perfectly, starting from design to code to QA. At other times, it fails by encountering an error, or can’t debug the code issues.

The important thing is that you can give instructions in plain English and it will be able to write code around the instructions. That means PMs can do it, and so could 90-year olds.

Relevance of Vibe Coding for PMs

Given the capability we have at hand, companies expect PMs to prototype an idea using these AI tools. The prototype could be a simple static design, or a dynamic app with a fully functional backend. Prototyping an idea quickly has major benefits - you could show it to customers and get feedback, show it to leadership to get buy-in, and present it to cross-functional teams like business and marketing in the roadmap session. That’s why when it comes to PMs, we prefer to refer it as AI Prototyping, rather than vibe coding.

If it’s so useful, are many PMs aware of this and working towards this? DEFINITELY! 3 months back, I created an entire free AI Prototyping course for PMs and Founders around it and more than 3,000 PMs have completed this course. That tells you that many PMs are learning this skill, and applying it. You can access the course here

Key Concerns

The first concern that is re-surfacing for tons of PMs — Do you need to learn to code? The short answer is No. A better questions to ask would be — Do you need to understand how technical systems work, how bugs get resolved, etc.? The answer to this question is YES!

To elaborate, you need to understand how to define database schemas, commons bugs and how to debug them using AI prototyping tools, etc to be good at this skill. I come from a non-tech background, and over time, I have also started reading the code while building these prototypes. I wouldn’t recommend you to read the code when you are starting, but I definitely see you graduating to it organically. If you don’t know where to start, start by going through the free course I mentioned earlier, read this post thoroughly, and join the upcoming live sessions.

Once people become comfortable with ‘learn to code’ question. The next set of questions are around —

• what skills do I need to crack this round, and how to acquire them?

• what kind of questions do we get asked in this round?

• can we get a set of questions being asked so that we can practice?

• what framework do we need to follow for these interviews?

These questions is where we are going to focus on next in this post.

Skills and How to Build Them

The skills that you need to crack this round is — AI prototyping, technical system design, and root-cause analysis.

You can learn fundamentals of AI prototyping from the course I mentioned earlier. It will arm you with sufficient skills on how to use various tools like v0, Lovable, Replit, etc.

Technical system design has been part of technical rounds for PMs for a long time. If you lack the foundational knowledge, please read the book Tech Simplified. You can also go through another post I wrote about this round a while back on how to crack technical round of PM interviews.

Root cause analysis is finding the reasons behind a bug, and fixing them while vibe-coding. This is the hardest skill to master among the three, and should be focussed on once you have done the first two. We will show how to do it in the upcoming Maven sessions.

Now that we understand the core skills, let’s move to types of questions that can be asked in this round.

Question Categories and Motivation

Questions that can surface in these interviews are of 3 kinds. It is quite important to understand the intent behind these questions to answer them well:

1. Design a product (UI only): This question can be asked at junior PM levels to gauge their design sense. We can see this happening in product sense interview rounds.

2. Design an AI prototype for a fully functional product (UI + Backend): We can see this happening in technical rounds for both junior and senior PMs. It let’s the interviewer see if the person can do quick prototyping, system design, and RCA.

3. Design an AI prototype for a fully functional AI product (UI + Backend + APIs from LLMs): We can expect to see this happening in AI PM interviews. It let’s the interviewer see if the person can build AI products - quick prototyping, system design, API integration, temperature adjustment/ context engineering and RCA.

All PMs need to focus on category 1 and 2. AI Product Managers need to focus on the category 3 as well.

So what kind of questions get asked in this round? We are still learning, but I will share a set of questions you can expect based on both primary and secondary research we have done.

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We would be running 3rd cohort of AI Product Management, starting September. We help PMs learn and build production-ready AI apps in this program. The applications are open now. Please check the program and apply if interested,

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Sample Questions

If you are looking at for a question bank of real questions around this, it doesn’t exist yet. But we can be reasonably sure they look like the ones below. I would recommend you to focus on skills first, and solve 3-5 questions of each kind to be well-prepared. Note that some of these questions are of advanced levels and for senior PMs, and you should start simple and gradually move towards those.

Category 1: UI-Only app (Design)

Tools: Lovable, v0, Bolt, Claude Artifacts

Landing Pages

• Create a landing page for a meditation app like Headspace that converts users to sign up

• Build a pricing page for an AI SaaS product with 3 tiers and feature comparison

• Create an onboarding flow for a travel booking app such as Agoda

• Build a signup form for an eCommerce portal

Interactive UI and User Flows

• Build a task management software interface home page

• Design a settings page for a D2C brand

• Create the home page of an e-commerce site

• Create a multi-step checkout process for an online store

• Build a user profile creation flow for a social media app

• Design a search interface for an ed-tech marketplace

• Create a feedback form that adapts based on user rating

• Build a dashboard for a fitness app showing progress metrics

Category 2: Full-Stack app (UI + Backend)

Tools: Replit, Cursor, Lovable, etc.

General Apps

• Build a simple CRM system where I can add, edit, and delete customers

• Create a expense tracker that categorizes spending and shows monthly totals

• Build a book library management system with search and borrowing features

• Design a project management tool where teams can create and assign tasks

• Create a restaurant reservation system with availability checking

Real-Time Apps

• Build a chat application with real-time messaging

• Design a voting/polling app with live results updates

• Build a live comment system for a blog or article

Transaction apps

• Build a marketplace where users can list and purchase items

• Design a food delivery app with restaurant listings and order tracking

• Build a booking system for services with calendar integration

API Integrations

• Connect your app to a weather API and display current conditions in a location

• Integrate with a payment provider to process transactions

• Build a news aggregator that pulls from multiple RSS feeds

• Create a social media scheduler that posts to multiple platforms

• Integrate with Google Maps APIs to show nearby locations

Category 3: AI Products (Full-Stack + LLM Integration)

If you are a traditional PM, you should skip this section unless you are preparing for an AI PM role.

Tools: Replit, Bolt, n8n, etc.

AI Applications/ UX

• Build a customer support chatbot that can answer FAQs and escalate to humans

• Create a content generation tool that helps users write marketing copy

• Build a personal finance advisor that provides budgeting recommendations

• Create a language learning app with AI-powered conversation practice

• Create an AI-powered job matching platform that scores candidate fit

• Build a travel itinerary generator that creates custom trip plans

AI Workflows

• Build a meeting summary generator that extracts action items from transcripts

• Create a content moderation system that flags inappropriate text or images

• Build a prompt template generator for different social media platforms

• Create an AI writing assistant with different tone and style options

• Design a data analysis tool that generates insights from uploaded CSV files

Advanced AI Apps

• Build a multi-modal app that can process both text and image inputs

• Build an AI-powered A/B testing framework that optimizes experiments

• Create a smart inventory management system that predicts demand

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Before we get into the framework, it’s useful to talk about what sort of evaluation criteria such interviews have.

Interview Evaluation Criteria

While it may feel like vibe coding rounds are about flawlessly using the tools, that’s isn’t the truth. The skills that interviewers are evaluating are technical knowledge and execution, product sense, and communication.

Technical knowledge and execution

• Can they translate broad requirements into working prototypes?

• Do they understand basic system design?

• Can they debug and iterate when things don't work?

• How well can they structure their prompts and commands?

Product sense

• Do they ask clarifying questions before building?

• Can they prioritize features for an MVP?

• Do they understand user experience nuances throughout the process?

• Can they make intelligent assumptions and validate them through prototype?

Communication

• Can they explain their thought process while building?

• How do they handle ambiguity and make trade-offs?

• Can they present their prototype effectively?

• Can they present their prototype effectively? In interviews, this is akin to keeping interviewer in the loop on whatever you are thinking, and asking for explicit permissions at times.

To judge candidates on this evaluation criteria, companies conduct this round in various formats.

Interview Formats

Format 1: Live Building Session (45 mins)

"Use a tool of your choice to create X feature" in real-time. You really need to master a tool before appearing for these rounds.

Format 2: Take Home Assignment (1-2 days)

Candidate gets it as a take home assignment. The assignment could be a complex multi-feature application. Once done, they can share it to the recruitment team. In this case, it becomes a screening criteria.

Format 3: Take Home Assignment + Real-time Presentation (1-2 days)

This is similar to case studies that companies ask candidates to work on, and present to a panel. In this case, they can gauge your strategic thinking and technical depth, along with your presentation skills.

Personally, I love both formats 1 and 3.

So now that you know almost everything there is to know about this interview, let’s talk about the framework

Framework for Vibe-Coding Interviews

We don’t have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to vibe coding interviews. It’s the same process we follow in detail while we are doing it at the job.

1. Clarify: Ask clarifying questions about users, goals, and constraints

2. User segments

3. Prioritising a segment and their needs

4. Solution: Narrate the solution/ core features, and list nice-to-haves

5. MVP System Design: Explain technical decisions. Take feedback on system design.

6. Coding MVP: Build the MVP by using one of the AI tools. Talk about it while building, gather feedback, etc.

7. QA: Do a comprehensive QA, and debug systematically.

8. Success criteria: Define the success metric and guardrails of this product (optional)

This is already a long post, so this is where I want to wrap up this post.

In the Maven session, we will show you how to solve 1-2 of such problems with the tools. You would also be able to understand nuances of this framework. Go through the post again before joining the session.

Thank you for reading the post. See you next week,

Regards,

Deepak