The Parallelism between Product Jobs and Interviews

👋 Hey, I am Deepak and welcome to another edition of my newsletter. I am currently writing two long-ish series of blog posts:

1. Product Interviews

2. Operating Well as a PM

I have previously written a long series (42 posts long) on Product-led Growth. You can get it in the email when you subscribe, or can find it on the newsletter home page.

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Let’s dive in the topic now!

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When I started pmcurve in early 2022, I was very clear what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to create yet another course for ‘Cracking the PM Interview’. From a purely financial perspective, it did look like a good market. But a lot of good and ambitious folks have already done it, and there wasn’t much unique value to add there in my opinion.

So I went after a problem that I wanted to solve for my younger self — creating programs that help you master PM domain, and build+grow successful products.

15 months, 400+ paid members, and 2 unique programs on Advanced Growth and Product Sense later, I am not so sure of ‘not doing anything around product interviews’. Writing has a unique way to build or discard conviction around things we aren’t sure about. And that’s the reason I have started writing the Mastering the PM Interview series as part of this newsletter.

So you may ask the natural question — what changed? The experience of building pmcurve played an important role in arriving at the thesis of this essay: The Parallelism of Product Jobs and Interviews.

We tend to believe that product interviews are broken and far from what the real job demands. I used to believe the same, and that’s why the goal of pmcurve (helping PMs be better at their jobs) didn’t align with interviews.

The problem is that since we treat interviews and jobs as different, we don’t make best use of the things that make us a good PM in the interviews. We also don’t see interview prep as a way to fill our gaps. We do just enough prep to hack the interviews, which is a suboptimal use of that time.

So I entertained the idea that started emerging while designing these programs for experienced PMs — what if we started drawing parallels between the job and interviews? It could create a powerful effect in mastering the PM domain.

But to understand the parallelism, it’s important to understand how I arrived there.

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The Genesis of pmcurve

To understand how I arrived at the parallelism, you need to understand the thesis pmcurve started with. I have a strong feeling that without understanding the ‘Why’ behind pmcurve, you won’t be able to fully grasp the current thesis of parallelism.

“The Big Picture— The needs and preferences of Indian consumer is quite different than developed economies like US, Europe, and China. And while India is a large economy, the Indian market is an aggregation of many sub-markets. Each sub-market has its own needs and preference. All of this makes it way more difficult to scale a product because you have to solve for all these sub-markets. Otherwise, you will hit the plateau of growth.

So to scale a product, PMs need to continuously solve tons of problems. And that requires strong PMs in the ecosystem along with strong founders. But why can’t just strong founders be enough?

Significance of the PM role — Besides founders, PM is the highest leverage role in a tech startup because it sits at the intersection of tech, design, and business. The most expensive resources hired by the company (design, engineering) are actually working on decisions taken by a PM. A strong PM is the difference between success/failure in a company because the founder/CEO needs PMs to be their eyes and ears when it comes to ever-changing customer needs.

Problem — The key problem in the current market is that most PMs don’t have way to train themselves to be their best version. There is enough resources on how to crack the interviews, but there is no way to know how good you are in a certain area, and where you need help once you are in the role. Further, we lack India-specific PM case studies, content, and community.

Goal of pmcurve — From the Day 1, the goal of the pmcurve would be to help experienced PMs building for India create impact in their jobs via an affordable learning solution. This visible impact that they create on jobs will certainly fast-track their career.

Why is now the right time for pmcurve? — Indian tech ecosystem has gone through couple of cycles (ups in 2014-16, 2021-22). This does couple of important things. First, we have enough specific case studies to create a different curriculum for India. Second, we also have observed the problems experienced PMs face around mentorship/learning for some time now, and know that these aren’t going away on their own.

USP of pmcurve — Application Based, Experienced PM-focussed, Affordable, Content and Community that helps PMs in India

The Last 15 Months

The early GTM strategy of pmcurve was to introduce programs that helped PMs in areas they struggled the most. Based on my own experience and interviews, there were two areas where experienced PMs had most struggle:

1. Growing a product: Most PMs know how to build and launch a product. But when it comes to growing the users or revenue, they struggle with it. Reforge runs some reputed global programs around Growth for PMs.

2. Making the right product decisions (tactical and strategic): Product sense is usually the term we use to talk about making the right product decisions in day-to-day work of a PM. Product strategy is the term used when we talk about medium-to-long term strategic decisions. While there are few courses around product strategy across the globe, there is no course/program that teaches product sense.

Based on the insight, So we launched two big programs —

1. ‘Advanced Growth Program’ as the first program that helps PMs understand growth problems, build growth models, and come up with ways to move levers to attain growth. We added 600+ objective problems in this program, which is pretty unique. The reason to add these objective problems is to ensure PMs remember and apply what they learn.

2. ‘Product Sense and Strategy’ as the second program. I clubbed both sense and strategy since I believe that product sense and strategy aren’t separate. They are closely related. This took a lot of my energy and time in research because there isn’t any curriculum for product sense globally.

As a part of building these programs, we had to create and deliver the right content, case studies, and assessments. We also had to get the right PMs into the community so that the discussion don’t dilute over time. Till 4 months back, I was very sure that I didn’t want to address anything around the PM Interview. That changed when I started teaching the first cohort of Product Sense and Strategy in March.

The Change in Thesis

It was while teaching the Product Sense and Strategy program that my thesis started to change.

While designing the curriculum and content, I started seeing parallels between skills expected in product sense rounds for experienced PMs, and skills expected on the job.

I could see few examples from my own career on how interviews have helped me become better at product management, and vice-versa:

1. Interview feeding into the job performance: My interview in 2018 at Google led me to the realisation that I lacked technical knowledge to be a PM who could manage deep-tech products. What followed was a grind to understand tech, which eventually translated into the book ‘Tech Simplified for PMs and Entrepreneurs’. Over the years that followed, I have managed platform and deep-tech (AI) products at companies such as Unacademy, Flipkart — and that did make me a much better PM.

2. Job performance feeding into the interviews:My role at MX Player as Head of Product Growth helped me understand media and entertainment industry very well. To launch new initiatives such as games at MX Player, I had to build deep understanding of the video and games domain. The domain understanding helped me answer one of the key questions in the interviews the next year 'Should Flipkart launch Videos?'. What’s better, my expertise at building a 0 to 1 games platform helped me land the role of head of product - games and gamification at Flipkart.

My next hurdle was creating a map between jobs and interviews, aka the Parallelism.

The Parallelism

If you have a long-enough career in product, you will see the parallel phenomena pretty easily.

To observe it, let’s start at various responsibilities of a PM. PMs are responsible for these in their real-jobs:

1. Roadmapping for the next quarter or year

2. Creating PRDs of new products and new features

3. Doing RCA of a technical problem. Example — App crashes increased yesterday. Why did it happen?

4. Figuring out a growth problem. Example — The transactions are down last week, and have been dipping since last 2 months. Figure out why that’s happening)

5. Solving a growth problem. Example — Come up with the strategy to improve number of transactions on the platform, and get a buy in from leadership)

6. Working with teams well. Example — There has been a conflict with engineering on timelines. How do we move forward?

If we look at the interview problems, they mirror these interview problems:

1. Roadmapping is real-life response to ‘How would you launch X?’ — Roadmapping requires listing customer problems, looking at solutions, prioritising the features, etc. You are supposed to display the same skills in a limited time in the problems such as ‘How would you launch a new travel website for elderly people?’

2. PRDs are the real-life response to ‘How do you design or improve a product X?’ — Product Sense Interviews mirror PRDs. They start with the problem, why it’s important for the company, customers, their needs, solutions, which solution needs to be prioritised, success metrics, initial GTM, pricing, and launch strategy.

3. Execution interviews nowadays have become common for companies such as Meta and Google. These interviews have questions that mirror problems in real PM jobs. For example, in the real PM job, we often face these technical or growth issues like broken funnels, DAU going down, crashes increased, etc. We first have to understand the root cause of these problems and then have to discuss with different teams to solve it.

   Execution interviews gauge candidate’s ability to systematically understand the issues and solve them. Usually, you get better at real job problem-solving as you get better in the execution interviews, and vice-versa.

4. At leadership product interviews, the discussion also spans around product strategy problems. It could be entering into a new market, or building an entirely new product. This is very similar to boardroom discussions at highest levels which talks about company’s focus into new areas.

5. Behavioural questions in interviews tests how you handle the stressors at work, and your operating philosophy. Such questions are all about seeing whether you will be able to work well with the existing teams and thrive at work.

Interviews and Jobs as Two Sides of the Same Coin

The benefit of understanding the parallelism of interviews and jobs is that you can start becoming more conscious when solving a problem at work. You will further seek frameworks, case studies, and structured ways to solve these messy problems.

Being conscious improves the effectiveness in even complex jobs such as surgeon, pilots, etc. as the book The Checklist Manifesto covers. It has definitely helped me improve outcomes at job in the past, and still does at product development initiatives we are working on at the pmcurve.

All of this conscious effort makes you stand out in the interviews because it makes you better at structuring thoughts, seeking the right case studies for a particular context, and storytelling.

Similarly, treating your interview prep as a learning exercise about various different fields and filling your gaps in certain areas (like growth, data, product sense, strategy, etc) is more effective than merely hacking the interviews because it improves your chances of becoming better at job once you convert. It also helps you assess right opportunities in terms of behavioural fit.

This became quite clear when I was teaching product sense over the last couple of months. But that leaves couple of important questions people have asked me around this, and I feel it’s important to cover them:

Is it possible to still be good at the job and bad at interviews? Yes, if you treat them as separate and not prepare well, you won’t be able to transfer the abilities on your job to interviews. If you sit in interviews and solve problems naturally as you solve them, you would do a fab job.

Is it possible to still be good at the interviews and bad at the job? Yes, Interviews can’t test for many things. So it’s possible to hack interviews while still not able to do an excellent job.

My advise would be seeing the parallelism so that you are always prepared for interviews, and always doing some great work :)

What’s Next?

While the parallelism is obvious now, someone needs to layout how to use this framework. In the coming weeks, I am working on a proposal for Mastering Experienced PM Interviews. Goes without saying, it would be quite affordable :)

Stay tuned, and have a good day!

Deepak