Ask about who you’ll be working with on your core and extended team. Find out how much of your time will be spent writing specs and how much you’ll be working with designers. Learn where the balance is between PMs, designers, and engineers in making product decisions.

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

One thing that really makes Airbnb unique is that it’s a two-sided marketplace (guests and hosts), and a lot of the experience is offline. Producers at Airbnb think about the offline “frames” (another movie-industry reference). Thomas, a producer at Airbnb, shared an example: You might assume that Airbnb has no impact on how kind and professional

Make it clear to the people around you why you’re making a particular decision so they see that you’re consistent with your decisions. There’s nothing engineers hate more than subjective decisions that change from one day to another.

The top-down vision makes it hard to make big changes in direction in the middle of a launch cycle. Even if the idea is great, it’s hard to find developers with spare time to build it. On the other hand, you’re generally working on features that everyone agrees are important. This means that you can spend your energy trying to build something great

Sample Questions Tell me about a time when you made a mistake. Tell me about a time when you failed. Tell me about a time when you improperly analyzed a situation. Tell me about a time when you were disappointed with yourself. Tell me about a time when you were unable to juggle all your responsibilities.

Another reason this cross-team work is valuable is that it helps you form relationships with people throughout the company.

Approximate Value Data 300 million US Population 3 Average People per Household (US) 100 million # Households in the US 80 years Life Expectancy (US) 65 - 70 years Life Expectancy (World) 7 billion World Population 700 million European Population 4 billion Asia Population 9000 Hours in a Year 500,000 Minutes in a Year --- Company Revenue ---

This was where I learned that whoever writes things down has the power. People in different disciplines such as test and dev think that PMs make all the decisions. Then when they switch over and they wonder how they got to make decisions, and it’s because whoever writes things down records history. The ways you write things down and what you write