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Hadar's Product Interviewing Toolkit
Hadar's Product Interviewing Toolkit
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Hadar's Product Interviewing Toolkit

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Technical

No, you shouldn't have to code. Focus on collaborating with engineers and understanding high-level design
Note: This is not commonly asked in PM interview loops. Google does and some startups may.

What they're looking for

Are you able to earn engineers’ trust?
Are you comfortable familiarizing yourself with the technical architecture of what your engineering is building?
Are you able to represent technical complexity / constraints across the org as the team aligns on prioritization and product specifications?
You shouldn’t be expected to code, but you may be asked to look at some pseudocode, interpret the function of that code, and make some recommendations
How well do you understand software, at a high level?
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Types of questions you may be asked here

Tell me about a time you worked with your engineering team to solve a technical problem and how you approached it
Read this [relatively simple / human-readable] pseudocode and tell me what it does
What happens between when you hit enter to load a webpage on your computer/phone and when the webpage finally loads in your browser?
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How to approach these

Start with the goals / user value proposition at hand. Remember, you’re interviewing for a PM role :)
Suggest to the interviewer to go into the technical details of the parts of the question that you are most comfortable speaking to
For most of these questions, there are plenty of directions you can go in. Try to drive the conversation in the direction you want, but be careful not to be too forceful about it
Check in often with the interviewer and make sure they’re okay with the level of detail you’re going into
Spend some time beforehand studying basic concepts like
how the internet works
⁠
,
collaborative docs
⁠
, etc.
But remember, this should be the lowest priority area of your studies, and you shouldn’t spend time on it at all for most companies

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👉 Next up:
Estimation
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