I would specifically give people on my panel roles.

You five people are on my interview loop. Here are your roles. You just do this. You just do that. You just do that. And I get all the feedback and I get to make an informed decision across all of it. But someone might fail product vision and strategy, but rock on execution and structured thinking. And I'm like, I'm good to make that bet. And so it's not like everyone had to come out with fives across this. Interviews I think go wrong because people don't have specific roles.

So as a candidate, I'm just getting asked the same question different ways by five different people. And you're like, what the hell? That was stupid. And as evaluators, I'm not actually getting a 360 view on the things that we think matter.

I would use this document when prepping a panel to interview for a new role. In reality, it's not like the document changes drastically for each new open role.

For example, the role might change, but I don't come up with a whole new category that I'm interviewing someone on every six months. Sort of like once it's out there, you onboard it onto it and, you know, so then it would be like your recruiting partner and then the people on your interview loop and the other PMs that are also going to hire. That's the audience.

So the recruiting partner, it's so they can talk to the candidate about what the process is going to look like. Hey, here's what our process looks like. We have a section on product strategy and vision. Tom's gonna talk to you about that one. Head of Design's going cover these types of things. We got an engineering partner who's gonna talk to you, structured thinking, this is what that's gonna kind of look like, you know, etc.

For each of the interviewees on my loop, I would do some in flight training.

At the very lightest end it would be like, here's the doc. I want you to cover up on design thinking. Read the section, and if you come away not knowing what to do, let's talk.

At the most heavy handed, it would be some type of mock 20 minute interview, and we walk through what the exercise would look like. And I find mostly people don't need that. If you're like a very junior interviewer and you're just learning, you might shadow someone or even just watch a recording of someone doing the interview.

But otherwise, it's mostly just sending the doc.

I like to start with the mission at the very start of the document.

If you ask what is the mission of what product management should do, it's still slightly different at every company. And everyone comes in with their own mindset on it.

So for instance, you're coming into a company and the the org is not already totally established or you're trying to reestablish it. And in those cases, I think it's really important to say like, this is our goal, this is our mission. I'm putting out a statement that this is what I think product management should do and therefore other teams should have their own mission and they should not overlap. The missions should be complementary and augment each other.

Curate and execute - those are two key words to me. Your job as a PM is to put together the product, vision, strategy, and roadmap. You know, you're prioritizing things.

Curate and execute matter to me because it's not about the PM literally having every single idea and curation helps imply that. Really good PMs are able to be pickers. They're like a stock picker. They're able to provide enough context that they can farm ideas from the organization and from their cross-functional team.

And they're able to say, actually, someone else has a better idea than I did about how to solve this problem. We should go with their idea and not mine. And it takes maturity to say, that's a better idea than what I had. But the reason why there's an incentive to do that is because the PM is incentivized by actually providing results.

So if what you are saying is gonna have better results than what I'm saying, why would I not want to choose what you're saying?

I would try to standardize the experience by having the same interview panel. So let's say it's a person for each of these big topics and they were the same ones that were with me throughout the entire process. So each candidate met the same person who talked about product vision and strategy. So therefore they didn't come up with new things to talk about each time.

And I would try to build that over multiple roles too, where that person got really good at asking this vision and strategy question. So like they just were the go-to for that. You know, and then you build a little stable of other people that were pretty good on that too. And then if they're out for whatever reason or too busy, you can add someone else in. And same for design, same for structured thinking, all of that stuff.

I would prioritize these core skills differently based on the level I was hiring into and the type of PM I'm hiring for.

So say it's someone more junior and they're coming in as an IC PM at a more junior level. I might not expect them to crush it out of the park on product strategy and vision because the reality of their job is not gonna be a ton of strategy and vision. It's gonna be execution. So I would want them to be very good on execution.

But then on communication, have they honed their ability to inspire broad groups of people? Probably not, but I'd want their communication to be motivating for their team and for them to be very clear so people aren't left confused. So at least the team walks out knowing what they need to go do. And so this is where mapping this to the career ladder becomes very helpful. So now I know I'm hiring for like a level two product manager and you know that communication skill they should have is they should be able to motivate and inspire their cross-functional team of five. Versus a level eight is like, you should be able to move the company and get up in front of an all hands and they go, you know what, we should do what they're doing and we, we should follow that, that direction and that logic. So there's level.

And then there are different types of roles. So like a platform PM that might want to have more execution orientation, structured thinking and technical abilities versus someone who's building the front end UI. I'd want to have very good on like the design thinking and being able to articulate what a user needs.

This definitely evolved over time. I originally had product vision, design thinking, structured thinking and communication.

I added execution over time. Because I'd hear from people on my interview team - it feels like we need to actually talk about how they ship and get stuff done. I think it's implicit in some of these categories, but that was one.

And then the other one that came up was leadership management, for people that are hiring managers and gonna lead teams.

This and the career ladders are linked. So for instance, the career ladders spreadsheet has sections on product vision and strategy design thinking, and what I'd expect you to be able to do on each of these things at different levels.

That's partly where the execution thing came from, was as you started to evaluate people, you're like, execution really matters. And we don't even ask about that in our interview process, but it seems like it should be in the evaluation criteria.

I found that people will use some of these example cases or maybe even create their own. I give them guidance, but they can use what's here or they can come up with their own.

Each company I would go to, I'd change it. So, you know, at Coursera, I wasn't asking about Opendoor. I may have switched little things out, but the general structure was the same.

The execution piece gets undervalued at too many companies.

I've just seen so many things take too long, not come out the other end the same way as you thought it would. There's a thousand decisions that happen during execution.

At the beginning, like, this is what it "should" be. And then before it's shipped, you've got like 15 iterations of that because there's been so many details that you think through as it goes. That execution piece is another act of curation.

I like the motivation at the end here. More like an attitude that I want PMs to have because you know, it's like I do believe what I'm saying here.

Like if you don't have engineers, nothing gets built. If you don't have sales, nothing gets sold. They're no designers, it looks like crap. But if you don't have PMs, it's like shrug. I don't know. It's still, everything still happens. So it's like that attitude of as a pm, because there can be an air of importance and you've heard, it's like there's been talk PMs have been talked about is like, well you're the mini CEO so I should tell everyone what to do and all this nonsense.

You're choosing things, but at the end of the day, you're expendable. Like if you left, we could still get all the work done. So in other words, there's like a, a hustle mentality and a mentality that's like trying to help the whole cross-functional team be successful that I want to see in really great PMs.

I would sometimes include a question bank at the end for anyone that needed extra inspiration.

But in one of my favorite questions - one of the things I really try to get at is - what's an idea you've had that others disagreed with that you had to bring to fruition?

So much of the product manager's job is to identify problem areas and orient the company around them. And some of the very best ideas will be non-consensus -- or rather -- pre-consensus. If you're always non-consensus, it's just gonna be wrong. Pre-consensus means you're basically just a little ahead.

For some stuff, everyone sees it and it's obvious you should just go do it. But where the rubber hits the road is when you've got some conviction but some others don't share that. You might have like most of your team on board, but like your manager isn't, or the head of product isn't, or the co-founder isn't.

And how did you deal with that? Like, what did you do? How did you get it over the finish line? And what did you learn?

That line of questioning -- to me -- gets at a lot of what I want out of product managers, which is the ability to build conviction and and persuade the organization in some way. And that persuasion might be, you know what, the founder didn't agree with me, but I had built up enough evidence that they let me do it.

Tom Willerer

When hiring new product managers at Opendoor, I used this document to ensure the hiring panel was prepared and aligned on what we were looking for in candidates.

 Opendoor’s product vision, strategy, and roadmap. This involves identifying, prioritizing, and managing the execution of Opendoor’s seller, buyer, and operator facing product, ultimately creating a product experience that is delightful for users and profitable for Opendoor.


 Evaluate if the candidate is capable of distilling a problem to its essence and proposing big, bold ideas. We want to weed out those who play it safe and those who are less likely to find the next big thing for Opendoor. Importantly, we need someone that can articulate a strategy (what we’re doing/not doing, why, whom we’re doing it for and how will we know if we’re successful). Bad would be a list of features. Good is someone that can tell a story, tie their strategy to business impact, etc.

Think about Opendoor in 5 years. How will Opendoor need to evolve?

If you were leading the growth team at Lyft, what would you prioritize?

If you were head of product at Doordash, what would you focus on? Why?

 Evaluate raw design sense and ability to iterate. Does this person understand basic concepts of good design (simplicity, well-reasoned interactions and flows, applies design patterns from other products)? Are they open to feedback and able to learn quickly from feedback? It’s important to include 3 stages in whichever question you choose so you have a natural structure to give feedback:

Idea generation (does this person have good instincts of what problems to solve?)

Wire-framing on the board (can they formulate good flows?)

Justifying design decisions (can they critique their own designs and express why?)


How would you redesign our mobile app to make it clear you can buy and sell with Opendoor?

If you were the PM on Podcasts at Spotify, how would you orient the app to help listeners find more podcasts they may love?

 Evaluate logical reasoning and an excellent command of metrics. Can the candidate logically break down a problem and measure its impact? Be sure to evaluate both. Good answers to all these questions show:

A sound logical framework for breaking down the problem.

A creative use of proxy metrics to estimate the hard-to-measure behavior.

Insights into the core problem we’re trying to solve

How would you measure the success of our mortgage products? (If consumer)

How would you decide what to prioritize and how to measure the success of the tools we create for home operations (explain a bit of what they do; if internal tools)

Walk me through a project you’ve led from start to finish. What was the problem, for whom, what was your role, the team’s role, etc?

Communication. Evaluate the ability to distill complex ideas into simple to understand frameworks as well as the ability to set context such that the team is motivated. We are looking for people that can work through context, not control.

Clearly state their hypotheses and assumptions?

Seek to understand by asking clarifying questions?


. Evaluate their ability to work through natural inertia that builds up at an organization to get a lot of high impact work done.  Do they have examples of projects they completed that did not have org-wide acceptance? What is their process for creating alignment on ambiguous projects and initiatives? How do they go about creating x-org alignment? How do they articulate the trade-offs between speed and quality? Do they have good examples of being able to unblock their team’s work? How did they do so?


How do you ensure progress against KPIs and outputs?

What are the tactics you would implement to ensure a wartime mentality?

 Evaluate the ability to distill complex ideas into simple to understand frameworks as well as the ability to set context such that the team is motivated. We are looking for people that can work through context, not control.

Seek to understand by asking clarifying questions?

How would you describe Opendoor to a kindergartner or your grandparents?

Suppose you were interviewed by a reporter and you needed to tell the story of why Opendoor matters to the world. Why are we not just a house flipper? What would you say?


Evaluate leadership and management skills and intuition. Are they able to attract, retain, and inspire world-class PM talent? Are they able to inspire confidence x-functionally with their peers and other execs? Can they create a team culture and structure a team to maximize impact?


What qualities do you seek in leaders, in PMs? Please illustrate through the hires you’ve made.

How do you know when things don’t work out with one of your reports?

What set of processes do you use to guide the team and ensure high output?

Could you give a sense of the largest organization that you’ve led? Most ambitious project that you’ve delivered on? Riskiest project that you’ve tried?

Product management may be the one job that the organization would get along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives. It's important to remember that - as a PM, you're expendable.

Now, in the long run great product management usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to prove it. Product management also combines elements of lots of other specialties - engineering, design, marketing, sales, business development. Product management is a weird discipline full of oddballs and rejects that never quite fit in anywhere else.

Product Manager interview panel guide at Opendoor

PM Interview Panel Guide Document

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