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.

Nobody asked to be able to read the measurements while pouring, but Oxo was able to see the need. They now sell a measuring cup with the measurements at an angle so you can see the lines while pouring.

Good intuition on how long engineering work should take. A good product manager understands the technical framework he’s working with and can help the team prioritize and make tradeoffs between the time spent on engineering and the value of that work to the customer.

PMs who like excitement and are comfortable with doing things the quick and dirty way do well on early stage products. For PMs on early stage startups, the most exciting thing can be taking a product from a tiny user base to a much larger one.

All of those excellent product management skills will go to waste if the product manager alienates his engineers and can’t earn their respect. Product management is a job where you have to lead without authority. The only way to get great work done is to bring the team onboard with your vision.

Most teams are a little bit suspicious of new PMs. They’re worried you’ll create busy work for them or slow them down in other ways. It doesn’t help that most of the work a PM does is behind the scenes, so your coworkers might not see how hard you work. You can counteract their fear by focusing on helping out your team when you’re new.

As a PM, you’re bombarded with tasks, and you need to know what you can drop. You want to be responsive to your team and never become a bottleneck, so it’s important to prioritize how you spend your time.

Marketing folks focus on getting users into the product, while product managers define what happens once the user is in the product.