Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (Cracking the Interview & Career)

How would you design a bookcase for children?

Falling revenue results from a decrease in sales volume or a decrease in price. This could mean a shift in purchasing behavior across tiers of the product.

for either of those types of users.

Big O allows you to state this sort of information clearly and succinctly. It expresses how the execution time of a program scales with the input data. That is, as the input gets bigger, how much longer will the program take? Just a little bit longer? A lot longer? Will the time increase, say, exponentially with the size of input (yikes!)?

This is a very important thing to understand. You should never express an algorithm as “O(2N).” This is not a “more precise” or “better” answer than O(N); it’s only a confusing one. A so-called “O(2N)” algorithm is O(N) and should be expressed as such. Which of the below expressions are equivalent to O(N3)? O(3N3) O(N(N2 + 3)) O(N3 - 2) O(N3 + N lg

Companies tend to use technical experience as a proxy for the real qualities they’re looking for: Able to form a relationship of mutual respect with engineers. Companies almost always hire a product manager to join a team of engineers who already work for the company. They’re not willing to hire someone who won’t get along with the team or who can’

The product life cycle varies in length from team to team. When you’re starting out, you can pick up experience more quickly by finding teams with shorter launch cycles.

be as much of an observer as you can. Don’t try to disrupt or change things too much early on. You’ll come to a product and have your conceptions of what needs to change, but most times there’s a culture of making decisions and reasons for why things haven’t been high priority in the past. You don’t want to pull the trigger too quickly.

The best way I’ve found to really understand these pain points is through user interviews seeking to understand your audience’s motivations, daily workflow, existing tools, current frustrations, and more. The focus here should be problem space more than solution space to really get at what problems would warrant product solutions.

What this also means is that as a PM, you have to recognize that you will never be the best marketer, or engineer, or sales person. You have to be proficient and versed enough in a lot of these areas and have a good sense of how they fit together in the product.