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Product Manager interviews test for 3 core skills - product sense, execution and behavioral skills. The format is different for different companies but the interviews test for the same core skills. The hard truth is that most interviews require you to think on your feet and respond quickly. Frameworks help with that. I've developed the following frameworks after doing ~100 mocks, giving several interviews, and interviewing several candidates.

Things to keep in mind while using these frameworks

• Be flexible: Most interview conversations don't go as planned. Don't force a framework.
• Practice! Practice! Practice!: Practice mock interviews with these frameworks, and mould them into what works best for you. Your ideal is not the same as someone else's.
• Collect your thoughts: As a rule of thumb take a 20 second pause right after the prompt is given to you. It will help you collect your thoughts and decide on which framework to use and how.

Execution

This interview tests your ability to prioritize, identify the correct tradeoffs and set your team up for success. As a PM you need to create logical frameworks to make decisions against. There are 3 types of questions that are asked in execution interviews:

1. Trade off between A and B
2. Set goal for a product
3. Root cause analysis

Common gotchas

• Incorrectly defining the time period of the metric (e.g. daily vs monthly)
• Picking ratios as top line metrics
• Not thinking about the product wide impact
• Not thinking about all the stakeholders involved
• Not thinking about the short and longer term impact
• Not thinking about the correct population to experiment with