 Hi, my name is John Kennedy and welcome to interviewing for B2B product management roles I'm really excited to give this webinar for product school. It's a topic. I've been wanting to talk about for a long time Today, we're going to be focusing on Being an interviewee. So, you know, if you today are thinking about You know going and finding a new role as a product manager. This is for you There's a whole range of topics I could talk about if we're going to talk about how to interview product managers if you're if you're looking for a product manager, but today we're really going to focus on on the the skills and some tips If you are an interviewee so briefly Look at the agenda. We're going to talk about some key questions You should ask yourself and get clear on before you start the interview process Or if you've already started the interview process some good questions to think about You know right now so that you can get clear on broad topics that will help you when you're interviewing as PM We'll talk about some general tips for interviewing the essential research that you should be doing on each company before you go and interview with them We're going to talk about behavioral interviewing as a process And what that looks like, you know, that's a frequently used interview Style and process at large companies and then why and how you should write 12 stories about your career And you know how that will help you in the in the interview process as well So a little bit about myself, you know, I'm currently head of product for AWS game tech for a product there You know, I've been building Cloud technologies for over 20 years now I've been a developer a systems engineer a software development manager solutions architects and the product manager I've also been a regional director for a series a startup You know, I've been on the leadership team for a field team in the series e2h, you know a later stage startup You know, obviously, I'm in a public company right now, and I've also been a founder I've also, you know being involved with products across a range of different, you know Functions or industries including machine learning and digital experience and gaming and a few others as well And you know over my time Building products. I've interviewed hundreds of Potential PM candidates for this presentation. I'm really going to focus on the experiences and the learnings. I've had Interviewing candidates at AWS and I've I've interviewed over 60 product manager candidates at AWS at Amazon And you know, I think that that's it's been great for me to bring together those learnings And I hope you're interested in learning what I've learned today. So The big questions you should ask yourself And we're going to go question by question in a second and bit as an overview What is a PM, you know the definition of a PM changes company and they all may say similar things about the role But the authority and responsibilities very dramatically in different companies It's important you answer this question yourself and know broadly What could be in the PM role before you start interviewing? What does a PM do best some of the best stories that you're going to you know form from your career I'm going to be linked to the the unique capabilities that a PM has So it's really important to be able to answer this question of what is a unique PM uniquely suited to do And then is there such a thing as a generalist PM or our PM is fungible between different product manager roles You know, this is somewhat of the philosophical question but But I think that if you think about this question and understand Where you know a company sees you as either a domain expert or a generalist PM It's going to help you in your interviewing. So first up What it's a PM This framework is by no means definitive This is something that I used to think about all the capabilities of a PM But there are plenty of other frameworks out there The way that I think about a PM is a combination of product strategy So can you go out and have customer conversations and bring it together into a Into a strategy which could be an Amazon style doc or an 18 month you know narrative or 12 month roadmap or a PowerPoint presentation But can you bring together all of those customer insights into a strategy? Program management, which is really about coordination and stakeholder management Can you coordinate all the projects going on around a product whether that be between engineering teams, you know on topics like compliance or security or whether it be between external stakeholders like partners or Other products you're coordinating with around the business and other functions That's a critical part of product management. Sometimes companies have dedicated program managers who they'll You know who will work with product managers, but often many those capabilities fall under the product management role so technical product ownership is really your the capabilities around the software development process, so you know Can you lead a sprint view a sprint planning a Stand-up a retro. Do you understand how agile software development works or the you know another framework that you're using? works, can you help engineers make prioritization decisions between two different technical solutions, obviously they own the solutions, but then can you help them make those decisions informed by by customer insight And then product marketing all the things like naming and branding and pricing You know and writing copy and working could be working with the marketing team or if you're early on Really driving the product marketing yourself in larger orgs Influence is going to be critical the ability to influence people in smaller orgs. Flexibility is going to be critical Grit the kind of attitude of jumping and owning it and just getting things done so Next let's talk about what a PM can do uniquely And you know the way that I think about this is customer insight if you were at Amazon You might call it a customer obsession and the way that I break it down is really into three stages, but These all happen simultaneously. These are happening continuously and all the time if you're a good PM You know, you're having customer conversations You're turning those customer conversations into strategy and voice the customer so you can go and share those insights with your engineering team Your marketing team leadership supporting functions like legal and finance and then executing, you know, based on that insight Getting things done working with the support team working with the BD team working on partnerships or or You know writing up strategy. So these things are things that uniquely a PM can do And you know, overall, I think like the if you had to really boil it down I would say that PM's help organizations make hard decisions with customer insights But you know, all of these all of these capabilities are kind of integral to that So for the third question is a peer is a BWPM fungible between domains You know, this is important when you're going to talk to an interviewer is you know Is their perspective on the role that you're interviewing for is it really important to have domain specific knowledge or you know Is are the general PM skills more important? I've had to switch domains multiple times in my career and be painful Cloud has been a constant theme But I've also moved as I said before between machine learning and you know E-commerce and gaming etc and each has given me a sense of respect for its experts and a sense of the common similarities in product management between all of those domains You know in a large company often, you know, the the philosophy is that you can just pick up a PM and put them somewhere else But important to know, you know to know your opinion on that and so you can talk about how your generalist PM skills Interact with your domain specific knowledge that you may have picked up along the way things like, you know If you're in an industry like health knowing the customer profile Understanding their typical problems in the sales cycle that's that's generally used in that industry to sell software or to go to market You know the marketing strategy, etc And then on the PM generalist PM side, you know all the skills we talked about a second ago. Can you can you? Write an 18 month plan. Can you gather an interpret? Metrics that you're gathering from the product and do you understand the software development process? So some general interview tips and you know anyone who's been interviewing for a long time Knows all of this. I'm absolutely sure but but good things to remember anyway interviewing is is by the numbers and when I say that I mean that the more interviews the better generally Interviewing is a skill, which means like when I start in the past when I've you know gone and had to Think about interviewing as an interviewee It's taking me at least three interviews before I've really hit my stride Because interviewing is actually a skill you lose while you're not interviewing So having lots of interviews is going to help you skill up You know, and you're gonna have better and better interviews each interview is a data point and You know, you're going to understand the salary Expectations and the role title expectations of your level of experience as you have more and more interviews And then obviously more offers more leverage. This has really helped me in my career negotiate offers as if I have a counteroffer So it's tempting to just you know, once you've scheduled your first interview to kind of stop there and for that to be the the the you know the thing that you wait for but It's so important to schedule lots of interviews so you can kind of gather the data and And skill up on interviewing which is a very distinct skill versus, you know, being a PM and then, you know getting leverage but Each interview also deserves research And each is an opportunity to learn about the business but all about also about how people think about, you know how PMs should operate and You know and trends this in the industry and these kinds of things So let's talk about all the research that is good to do before you go and talk to a company So, you know, the first thing that I I think about is what's the unique value? What are the three biggest problems they're solving for customers when you find this on their website, you know If you if you kind of look into their messaging You should be able to decipher What they think the problems are they're solving with their products or you know and how how they Solve those problems. Is it is it strictly products? Is it services? Is it a combination in solutions? It's really important to understand their you know Their idea of delivery and how they deliver value to customers even better is to try out their product This is not always possible with a bit of be, you know, SaaS product But if you can try it out, if not, you know Maybe watch a YouTube video of someone using the product or talk to someone who you know who who's used the product That's still very worth doing before you go into the interview process Secondarily knowing their go-to-market, you know knowing How they're doing enterprise sales or are they using marketing channels or do they have a channel sales team? Have they got a partnership network? Do they sell primarily through partners? How large is their market? You know as a PM your opportunity is really tied to their opportunity as a company So it just shows your professionalism to understand the size of their opportunity And that you've done good research and you care about your career by doing that research So understanding, you know, their TAM or the the size of their market, maybe their customer segment They're their optimal customer and then the competition they might have in their market So the final one how is their team structured is usually pretty hard to get a hold of but if you have an insider contact Or you're just really good at deep research is a great one to do as well You know, are they product-led are they primarily developing features to gain organic adoption or are they sales and marketing led? You know, what's the approach they take? How do they break down their product responsibilities? You know is is a is a PM, you know from that chart. We looked at before They primarily focused on strategy or they you know Or are they doing a lot of program management or a lot of product marketing or are there dedicated people for product management? product marketing and program management and Maybe even technical product ownership with people in the engineering team How did the product responsibilities break down and then how large is the product team versus the engineering team? Is it, you know, two p.m.s? to to six products with You know a hundred on the team on the engineering team or is it six p.m. So two products You know with 50 on the team It's really important to understand that balance because it'll give you an idea of the responsibilities that you'll be taking on And the ownership that you can have and the results that you can have for the business Alrighty stories are powerful We're now going to talk about why stories are really important as an interviewee To tell the story of your career So stories are memorable they're relatable they engage our brains because they encourage us to do the thing that our brains were designed to do Which is prediction You know the surprise of being wrong When you're being told a story it lists its emotions and we remember those emotions So when you get that prediction wrong, it really locks it into your brain as a learning so when you get to the interview stage you're probably there because The company has formed a picture of who you are and they want to confirm that and in average companies Your best bet is to help them confirm that but in the best companies They're looking for something unexpected that puts you ahead of the pack and at Amazon we would call that raising the bar Telling stories can be the most memorable way to explain what makes you unique and bar-raising And you know and one trick you can use to tell a compelling story is to include a surprise A surprise that could be a learning that you had During the story it could be something that's counterintuitive, but that will really lock it in in their memories Too many surprises seem makes you seem chaotic No surprises lists no emotions and makes the story unmemorable, but having a really good learning in a story will make it memorable Additionally the best way to bring the listener along is to make it relatable to them So we're going to talk about how you can form stories about your career But in the relation of those stories and the telling of those stories It's also really important to remember who you're talking to are you talking to a software engineer who's going to be really interested in the technical details Or are you talking to leadership who are going to be in interested in the impact to the business or more interested? I think they're both, you know, it's still worth telling all the important points of the story But important to remember who you're talking to So great Stories are powerful. What do we do with that? Well, first, let's talk about how an interview might ask you to tell a story behavioral interviewing Is a interviewing technique and process a lot of large companies are used to to interview perspective product managers behavioral interviewing is designed to elicit stories and You know as a primer The the behaviors that they could be Interested in, you know, for instance at Amazon, it might be the Amazon principle of ownership You know, there's a range of different behaviors that Companies could be looking for or it could be framed as a question about a skill like road mapping or hiring or data analysis You know, often these questions are open questions So let's talk about how to prepare to answer a behavior of a behavior a question that's that's asked as An open question and it's designed to elicit your Experience and your decision-making process and your adaptability and how you how you handle changes So When you're asked a question at one of these open questions that's really it's not Generally, they stay away from hypotheticals or we stay away from hypotheticals We're really asking for a really specific situation in your career The best way to answer the question is to answer With a structured story and a great way to structure a story is is the staff format So situation task action result the situation is all the context Around the story the task is the task you are given to do or you owned or you knew was the task The action is what happened, you know during the the period of the story and then what was the result? What was the impact for the business? When you're thought thinking about how to come up with with 12 stories You should have a filter on the the stories that you can come up with in your career And you know one of the filters should that you should have should be the impact If it's low impact, it's not worth telling the story the impact has to be high on the axis of business impact business metrics or the impact to your career or the impact to your team or the impact to the career of someone in your team or your manager That those the kinds of you know the types of impact that an interviewer is really going to care about It's also really important to filter on on stories that you Where you can really explain the detail where you were the main character where you are owning What was happening at least in some facet? Because you're going to have to explain the context and the trade-offs, you know, you're gonna have to potentially explain Disagreements that may have happened. So it's really important that you have the detail And that's one of the other great reasons. It's you know, another great reason to actually write it down and And and get that detail So I've I'm gonna give you a set of prompts to help you write these 12 stories But first I want to talk about an overall principle about writing these stories and that is Above the line behavior so You know, the term above the line behavior is in relation to Ownership and accountability that comes from a model of personal responsibility often used in leadership development and management training and personal growth It's typically represented by this horizontal dotted line You can see I've put across the page that separates positive above the line behavior from negative below the line behavior In response to situations and challenges and issues Above the line behavior includes taking ownership being accountable taking responsibility for one's actions It represents proactive solution oriented behavior where individuals Acknowledge their role in situations and take steps to address or improve their own behavior But hope below the line behaviors on the other hand include blaming others Making excuses denying one's role or responsibility It represents reactive or problem-focused behavior where individuals avoid taking personal accountability and instead deflect or evade responsibility The idea of kind of framing it this way and thinking about above the line behavior Is to encourage individuals and teams to live Above the line and choose to respond to a challenge in a way that promotes Personal accountability and ownership and positive growth Or a growth mindset It's about recognizing that while we can't always control what happens to us We can control how we choose to respond and when you're framing your stories when you're writing down your stories That that you can then use to to talk to interviewers and to answer questions It's really important to have the framing of ownership and to use the language of ownership Such as you know, I choose I prefer I will I can I did Explaining what you did and your ownership over the situation rather than language of blame You know, I have to I can't I must if only it wasn't possible That's all all of that language is really disempowered language So if possible, you should think about each of your stories in terms of your own growth And it's great to to share learnings you've had as you share stories So Right Let's get to the 12 stories. I've been having a lot of fun recently with chat GPT To the point where I've gotten really used to coming up with prompts And so what I've done is I've created 12 prompts For interview stories that you can use to form up these little star format stories that you can write down to You know to make sure that you've got the detail to make sure you're the main character Just make sure that those stories had impact And I absolutely do not suggest asking chat GPT to answer these for you The answer should be real and not from a simulated version of yourself That chat GPT hallucinates But you know The and the prompts that I'm going to give you a not definitive if you are interviewing for a specific company It's worth going to their website checking out what they see is a really important Important parts of their vision and then kind of coming up with prompts that relate to that But here's a here's 12 prompts That should be helpful To come up with an initial set of stories that you can write down ownership Great topic to begin with we're just talking about ownership, but it's great to have a story which really relates to ownership So a question that you might get is can you tell me about a time you owned an outcome over and above the responsibilities of your normal role And then an interviewer might dig into that with did you deliver Against that project and what did that uh delivery lead to what was the impact that come, you know for the entire company So, you know Being able to describe a situation we can really describe your own strong ownership So important just about for every interview that you ever do customers You know, have you ever gone over and above? Your role for a customer, you know, can you demonstrate customer obsession? What did you learn about the customer what what outcome was there for the customer? having some really customer oriented Stories is is great because that is as I said before really the key capability that a pm has over over anyone else Disagreements this is one, you know, it's kind of like the question You know, what's what what are your worst, you know, what what are your weaknesses? It's It's really hard personally to go off and answer this question But it's so important to have an example of this in case In case this questions asked, it's great if you've got a story that you can tell about this. So As an example, can you talk about a time when you disagreed with your manager? What happened? What have you done differently? And it really comes back to To ownership and the way that you think about disagreements And the way that you think about your learnings strategy You know, obviously, this is more of a this is more of a skill for a pm than a behavior Still really important to be able to talk about a time when you've owned a strategy or you've contributed to a strategy You know, what research did you do to come to that conclusion to build that strategy? Were your assumptions correct? You know, was that strategy net positive? Really important to think about all of those for a story that you form up around strategy technical this obviously varies between whether you're a pm or a pm but either way great to have a story in your back pocket about Talking about a time you helped a a technical team or an engineering team make a decision between two different options And going deeply into the solution that came up with in the trade-offs You know with that solution For large organization, you know stakeholder management Supercritical really for any of everyone, but it really comes to the fore for large organizations So having a story there is a is a great idea. What were the what was the greatest amount of Greatest number of stakeholders you've ever had to manage. What does best practice looks like in terms of stakeholder management? risk, so, you know Risk is super important for product managers always making priority decisions always having to act on on insufficient data Can you talk about a time that you have had to take a calculated risk? It's a really good It's a good prompt for you to come up with Something that shows How you take action in a situation, you know, what research did you do to show that you're not full hearty? You're still, you know, you're still still doing risk management, but you're able to move forward quickly trust so important to earn trust with your With your engineering team and with your leadership and with customers great to have have a story or a couple of stories around earning trust Data once again more of a skill than a behavior, but still great to have a story around this if you can often, you know You're going to be asked functional questions Skill-based questions and interviews so great to have a story around how you've been able to gather data interpret data You know take insights form a narrative around that data Big ideas as a PM, you know when you're writing strategy It's so important to be able to see the bigger picture and potentially You know bring a bigger idea to your greater team to inspire them to give them a direction for the future You know an ambitious idea that That takes important insights from customers In your industry and what's going on with the product development and and paints a picture picture of the future And then if you are interfering for a manager role Obviously really important to cover things like hiring and mentoring having stories here And can be really important less important for iC roles But if you're in an iC role or interviewing for an iC role where it's our individual contributor role where you are Thinking about leadership or management. These are really important as well so obviously or not obviously but hopefully on it obviously honesty is is crucial with all these stories you have to be able to Really honestly answer hard questions about these no one's asking you to reveal proprietary details, but you know It's crucial to earning trust that you're really Answer you're telling stories that are Fully formed where you can give the details and And really kind of give the nuts and bolts of how you acted and the learnings that you had in each of those situations Now apart from all of those stories that we're forming up Just as as a bonus round sometimes Companies will ask you impossible questions. I've specifically had the logistics question asked of me How would you organize logistics to most efficiently deliver large items the continental us? I think the important thing to remember here, whether it's you know This kind of question or the future prediction question or the pedophile question any of these types of impossible questions It's really just important to show your your Unique expertise and how you would apply that expertise to the impossible question and then step through the process That you would go through so these come your way I don't think it's critical to prepare for them But good to know that they exist so you're not thrown off and you know that when you hit with one of these questions You know, you can just use use your experience to explain how you would step through these questions Okay, bonus bonus round These are probably super obvious but worth Rementioning again get good sleep That's probably the most critical thing of all the preparation Know the schedule that really shows that you've prepared and you care about their time and then arrive early because Early is on time and on time is late All right, thank you for attending the webinar. Um, I'd really love your feedback And if you want to reach out and ask more questions, there's my there's my linkedin contact And uh, I hope that's that's helped