This is the standard template for most PM roles I hire for, but I tailor the specific case study to the role. In this case I was hiring a payments PM, so unsurprisingly I gave them a payments case study.

The most important thing I’m looking for at this level is whether they can structure and prioritize a plan. Do they have a sense of how expensive their work is, and can they size it meaningfully? How do they respond when I throw a curveball like “What would you get rid of if you’ve just lost half your engineering team?” 

The best candidates are not the ones who come up with a list of 40 ideas, but the people who can come up with 40 ideas, trim it to 5, explain why those are the most important 5, and then react when I throw a curveball in the middle of the case, which I often do.

In this case, I was looking more for PMs and senior PMs, so I wasn’t overly directive. I was trying to get away from a long back-and-forth between me and the candidate asking questions. I included these assumptions and data because these are pretty commonly what they would have on hand if they actually worked at the company.

I also wanted to get a sense of whether they could follow directions. What happened a lot was that people would actually jump down here and not answer the four questions at the top.

This is usually the last round of the interview, but depending on the company, I might add a round after this to determine cultural or executive fit. It’s so important that someone in this role can communicate with the exec team, so I weigh EQ a lot more heavily now than I did 3 or 4 years ago when I was first hiring. I’ve frequently seen people ace the case study but lack EQ; never seen someone bomb the case but excel in the EQ side.

There were a few people who I thought did a great job defending their positions during the case, but when I thought about it later, I realized they were getting defensive and weren’t really listening to me when I threw a curveball. Ability to think on your feet and potentially adjust when necessary is much more valuable than always sticking to your guns no matter what.

Barron Ernst

I used this take-home exercise to hire a payments PM at Showmax but have tailored this template to hire for a number of PM roles at different organizations.

Interview Panel Plan - Product Candidates

You have joined Showmax as a Product Manager. 

As one of your first areas of ownership, you’ve been asked to improve payment conversion through our signup funnel

please prepare a 30-60 minute presentation/plan

What are the key steps in our conversion funnel?

What opportunities do you see to improve the conversion in our funnel for new signups to drive more total signups and payments?

Prioritize the work based on what you think will have the highest impact for the lowest cost. No need to write requirements, just give a sense for what order you would do the work and why you selected that order

What KPIs would you measure? What data would you seek initially

Traffic to the landing page is constant. But you can provide other tactics to increase traffic if you think those are more important than conversion optimization (but you need to justify this)

You can’t increase marketing spend to drive more signups through traffic increases. Ideally, your goal is to decrease marketing spend in the long run, but for now assume it’s a constant and a variable you can’t move

You have a small engineering team at your disposal and a designer and analyst to help in this task

Assume something like the following (demonstrative numbers, not actuals, but use for the purpose of this case study. The rates are not reflective of Showmax actuals so don’t assume because a certain rate seems higher than industry standard that it indicates we are doing something well). 

5k provide a payment method and start the trial

You will be presenting this plan to the head of product, head of technology, head of payments and partnerships and select others from the company.

Product Manager Take-home Exercise at Showmax

Interview Panel Plan - Product Candidates

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