This process mimics the one used at companies like Zynga, Lyft, and Shipt, and the questions here are very similar to the ones that are actually used, but with a different context.

Before this doc was created, the hiring process at this company wasn't this rigorously thought out, so the actual hiring experience was non-uniform and subjective and dependent on the particular Hiring Manager.

This present version of the doc was used over 8 months to screen 150 applicants, interview 100 candidates over 150 video calls, and eventually hire 3 Product Managers for backend heavy products.

And this process itself was quickly organically adopted by many different Hiring Managers across the company.

This version evolved over time. The previous version was longer with a take home assignment, which took 5-6 hours to complete, followed by seven 45-min video interviews totaling 5 hours 15 minutes of virtual onsite.

That loop looked like this:
1. Take home assignment
2. Product Sense
3. Product Analytics
4. Leadership & Soft Skills
5. Experimentation
6. Product Process
7. Diagnostics
8. Customer Empathy & UI Design

The take home assignment isn't required by all tech companies, and was leading to many candidates dropping out. And the ones turning over the submissions were taking longer than requested time and stretching out the interview cycle.

This updated version has no take home and only 6 video interviews, some of which are only 30-mins long, totaling 3 hours and 45 minutes of virtual onsite.

Despite being shorter, it still has given us the signals we need to make good hiring decisions.

The interview panel was created with a diverse group of cross-functional leaders to:
(a) give the candidate a chance to interact with the broader team,
(b) empower other leaders to decide who they want to work with, and
(c) prevent any affinity bias from any one type of role or function.

This created a culture of reciprocity and collaborative hiring as other cross-functional hiring managers also started to invite product managers into their hiring loops as well.

In most companies, the performance review process for employees of the company is based on both "what" outcomes they achieve, as well as the "how" they achieve them.

This interview process was designed to assess both these attributes: the technical and case questions focused on the "what" to assess a technical and domain fit, and the Leadership questions focused on the "how" to evaluate culture fit.

This was a high leverage step. It was very low time investment on the part of the Hiring Manager, that was me, but left a big impression on the candidates and improved our advancement rate through the funnel by 30-40%.

Since the recruiter was cc'ed on the email, it was a signal for the recruiting team to move on to the next step and talk to the candidate.

But on the rare occasion when the recruiters did not reach out to the candidate in a timely manner, the email allowed the candidates to follow-up with the recruiters and cc me back, which helped quickly resolved any unforeseen delays.

The applicants were either inbound, were sourced from staffing agencies, by our recruiting team, or my direct outreach. Adding the Hiring Manager email increased the outreach-to-interview rate from 60% to 95%.

I was able to identify opportunities to improve the process because I was tracking every step of the funnel (such as time between application to Hiring Manager email, then the recruiter call, receiving submission of the take home assignment and so on) in my own spreadsheet, instead of just relying on the ATS statistics. The ATS had some analytics but looking up candidate profiles or doing anything even slightly custom was a pretty tedious.

On the other hand, the spreadsheet gave a full snapshot of the entire process in one view and was much easier to search for candidates and run custom analytics on. So using the spreadsheet, I calculated statistics like average funnel transition time and rate of advancement, which helped identify inefficiencies in the process and iron out the kinks to speed things up.

One of the promises we made to the candidate was that unlike a lot of other companies, we would:
(a) definitely get back to them with a decision, instead of ghosting them, and
(b) if they wanted, we would be willing to share interview feedback with them.

The intention was to be respectful of their time and effort that they had put into the interview process, and help them improve for their future interviews.

For those who were interested in feedback, the Hiring Manager (who was me) sent them a brief email about 2 weeks later and got on a short 15 minute call to chat.

Many companies start their interview cycles with a take home assignment and use it to determine if a candidate should move to further rounds or not.

We also had a take home exercise but scrapped it after two months for three reasons:
(1) When we were using it, it was a buyer's market with more jobs than candidates, and 1 out of 3 candidates were dropping out of the interview loop at this step and instead opting to continue to interview at other companies that did not have a take home assignment,
(2) Most candidates who returned a response were either taking longer than what we had requested them, thus slowing down the interview cycle for others, and
(3) Stronger candidates were subjectively being given exceptions from submitting a response to this exercise to keep them in the loop, which was ultimately unfair to the other candidates who were submitting a response.

Scrapping the take home exercise improved the funnel advancement rate by 1/3rd. However, in a different hiring environment where there are many more applicants than jobs, I would strongly recommend bringing back the take home exercise because it is a fantastic way to assess a candidate's data-driven reasoning and presentation skills.

The questions here are similar to the ones that were used by the company to hire, but not the same.

The ones used by the company were more specific to the domain and the problems that the company was trying to solve, instead of generic prompts about unrelated but well-known 3rd party products not belonging to the company.

New interviewers were added to the panel through a cross-training process, which was that the new interviewer initially shadowed an existing one, and after a few interviews, the older interviewer then reverse shadowed the new one.

This not only helped us autonomously scale the panel horizontally, but also created extremely consistent ratings across the different interviewers themselves. That helped us interview more candidates in parallel (by creating different panels) which sped up the hiring timelines, and it also allowed for comparison of feedback and ratings across the different panels.

The Hiring Manager did not do the phone screen but was part of the Final round.

This was done for 4 reasons:
1. Since there were a lot more candidates at the Product Phone Screen level vs Final round, it helped scale the process better with more people at that round vs only the Hiring Manager.
2. It avoided an early false negative "do not proceed" rating from the Hiring Manager, who was the bar raiser, and created a fairer chance for the candidates to move ahead to the Final Round as they were interviewed by different PMs.
3. It helped prevent authority bias avoiding a false positive "go ahead" rating from the Hiring Manager at the Phone Screen round from influencing the rating of the panel in the Final Round as they interviewed the candidate, and
4. After receiving the email from the Hiring Manager, it felt conventionally more appropriate for the candidate to meet the HM as part of the Final round.

A potential improvement to the process would be to shorten the loop. The Design interview didn't feel necessary for a backend focused role, but was left in to be inclusive of all cross team roles in the hiring panel. Similarly, for a frontend heavy role, it would be ok to remove the Experimentation role but leave Design in.

Between the 2, since UI is developed more collaboratively than Experiments, which can sometimes be owned independently by Data Scientists, between these 2, Design would be a more necessary skill to assess.

This reverse interview was another high leverage step for a relatively low time investment. At this point, we liked the candidate and wanted to extend an offer.

This step was not an offer conversation. The goal behind it was to create a radically transparent, and psychologically safe and trustful space for a discussion where candidates could ask us anything without the jitters of still being in the interview loop.

The elevator pitch was: "Your main interview loop is over and the team likes you. But interviews are a 2-way process and since you gave us the opportunity to ask you questions, before we extend an offer, we want to give you the opportunity to ask us any questions as well so we can mutually assess if we are a good fit."

Hearing from the Skip Manager of the Hiring Manager made a big difference in the candidate's interview experience and decision to accept, which was something that we heard from the employees that we hired.

Although it never happened, it also technically did leave the option for the Skip Manager of the Hiring Manager to veto the hiring panel's decision to make an offer if they wanted to for any reason.

No good product or process can ever be built without user feedback. So we asked the candidates to give us feedback to help us improve our process, and received some very useful constructive feedback in this step which helped shape the final version of this doc.

For example, despite having gender diversity on the panel, one female candidate who went through the full loop shared feedback that she only met male interviewers. This was because the names of the male panelists were before the names of the females in the "Interviewers" list for each interview, which was completely unintentional. With this feedback, the lists were adjusted to intentionally put our women leaders first.

Overall, this process helped us in many ways:

1. It created a superlative interview experience - The post-interview feedback from the candidates said that this process was one of the most structured and well thought out loops they had seen at different companies across the industry. The non-overlapping questions tested different skills and despite being an exhaustive test, the entire loop was extremely quick. So the candidates really enjoyed it and walked away with a very positive impression of the company and the team itself.

2. The feedback template made the process very autonomous and easily scalable - The ratings of the new panelists became extremely consistent with the rest of the group within only 2-3 interviews and the following debriefs. And it also helped us normalize ratings across different interviewers and account for "tough-grader" bias for example.

3. The process itself helped improved the team's collaboration via a low stakes cross functional activity like hiring - The cross-functional partners felt more respected as their opinion was sought and they were included as part of hiring product, and in exchange, they also started inviting Product into their hiring loops as well.

4. It generally improved hiring culture by cross-pollinating hiring rigor across different teams. For example the feedback template was used in Engineering hiring loops, some questions here were used by the Operations team for their hiring and so on.

5. It avoided false positives - the hired employees did phenomenally well and stayed with the company for many years. And it also avoided false negatives - out of the remaining 97 candidates that were interviewed but not offered a position, only 2 joined comparable companies.

As a Hiring Manager, I always kept this doc up to date, and the recruiting team used it as a playbook to literally run the play before setting up any interview.

So to schedule any particular interview, for example, the recruiters would look at the first name in the "Interviewers" list of that interview, check their availability, and either schedule the interview if they were available or move on to the next person and so on.

Vishal Kapoor

This product management interview process reflects the lessons that I have learned building product teams at Zynga, Lyft, and Shipt. The questions are particularly well-suited to hiring technical and data-oriented PMs who work on backend and marketplace products.

Personal Leadership & Product Analytics - 45 minutes

Interviewer:  Product Manager   OR   Lead Product Manager

What factors / metrics to consider when building a system?

Walk through the details of one of the past technical products that you built.

Describe a time when you led your team through 

Prompt: Case Study -- Why is this metric abnormal

Prompt: Case Study -- Design an experiment to launch a given idea

Case Study -- How would you upgrade and launch a new feature internally?

Case Study -- Walk through building an app

8.  Rejection call with offer to share feedback

Reverse interview and Final sell call - 30 mins

Interviewers:     Hiring Manager   OR   Hiring Manager’s Manager

Probe for any flags discussed in debrief, and a chance for candidate to ask questions

11.  Offer conversation with Recruiter - 30 mins

12.  Requesting candidate's feedback in an anonymous survey

13.  Zoom call to give candidate feedback if Rejected - 15 mins

1. Personal email from the Hiring Manager to each selected candidate

My name is [HIRING MANAGER’S NAME], and I'm the [TITLE] in the [TEAM NAME] at [COMPANY].

I'm the hiring manager for the position that you applied for. I'm looking for Product Managers passionate about solving cutting-edge problems, and am very selectively reaching out to people like yourself with an impressive background. If you are open to having a conversation, I would like to learn more about your experience and expertise, and talk to you about the exciting product areas that we are working on as well as the career opportunities that we have at [COMPANY].

To take this further, please let my recruiter [RECRUITER NAME] (cc'd here) know some days/time when you're available to connect.

Feel free to interrupt the candidate to move things along by politely raising your hand in zoom.

Please manage time, and extract all the signals expected from each interview.

If the interview is going in an unexpected direction, interrupt the candidate and ask them a leading question (such as: “How would you measure success?”)

Sometimes candidates tend to give long intros. Tell them: “

Let’s do intros for 1 min each, and get into questions.”

Give the prompt to the candidate at the start of the interview, and use the 

 to record raw notes and your final recommendation.

Leave 5 minutes at the end for the candidate to ask questions.

1.  Theme: Personal Leadership & Product Analytics 

Interviewers: [Product Manager NAME]   OR   [Lead Product Manager NAME]

What factors would you consider to build a Netflix user’s top 10 recommendation list? - 20 minutes

 like viewing frequency, time of day, language preference, past history etc.

Out of the factors, which top 3 would you pick to build an MVP? - 5 minutes

What metrics would you use to measure MVP’s success? - 5 minutes

2. Theme: Product Sense & Prioritization 

  [Hiring Manager NAME]   OR  [Peer NAME]

Part 1 - Product Sense: Choose either prompt - 30 mins

Build a marketplace for a senior community center. Build a roadmap for an MVP, and explain you would launch it.

Ideal response - Candidate should start with identifying personas and pain points, brainstorm features, prioritize them into a roadmap using some criteria, set goals / metrics, then present a plan to launch top 1-2 features as part of an MVP and present a launch plan.

Part 2 - Product Prioritization - 10 mins

The MVP was launched a year ago and you’re running it successfully. The VP of Product comes to you and asks you to increase the fee to improve profitability. How would you execute that?

Product Manager Interview Plan for Marketplace PMs

Product Manager - Interview Plan

Overview

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