 I would have never thought that I could get into a fan company, to be honest. And in the end, I did get into a fan company and five offers. Guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, Director of Product from DrNancyLee.com. I help people transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. Today, we had a pleasure to have my student, L, to share with you how he became a product manager at Facebook. And he also got five product manager offers during COVID. We're going to share with you all the secret behind the scenes, how to prepare for interview, how to increase success rate, and what specific strategies and secrets you should use so that you can achieve your dream offer as well. To learn the most effective way to become a product manager, you should check out this free webinar. We talked about how I got four product managers within 60 days during the pandemic. If you like any of the tips we share with you today, please smash the like button and share this video with other aspiring product managers. So let's get started to learn about Facebook product managers. Today, I had a pleasure to have my student, L, join us. He is a Facebook product manager and he has a lot to share with you guys regarding how to get a job in fan companies like Facebook, how to get prepared, and also what his advice to you if you just get started with your product management career. Hi, L, how's it going? How are you? I'm doing very well. Thank you so much for joining us to share your knowledge. Thank you for having me. Great. Do you want to quickly introduce yourself and as we join fan company, want to hear all your experience getting into fan? Sure. So my name is Al. I've had a little over 10 years experience in developing and launching technology products. I've been trying to get into fan companies for over a year now. I've tried several other programs like product gym, but didn't achieve the same results as Dr. Nancy Lee's program. In fact, I was overwhelmed and at the end of my job search, after entering Nancy Lee's program, I ended up with five offers. So I've had like several product roles in my career. They all seem to fit in with my knack for machine learning. In my most recent role, I worked in a team that tries to understand how people move in physical space in big box retail stores. So with the current situation or the speed of innovation, I stand by my choice in being a product manager and building exciting products with cutting edge technology that help address problems for consumers. I love finding simple, elegant solutions for complex technical problems while motivating the team and driving business impact. So if you love finding simple, elegant solutions and doing the same thing for solving problems for people, then Dr. Nancy Lee's program will definitely get you on track to being the best product manager in the market. Awesome. Thank you all. Congrats. By the way, five offers within like three months. That's very fast. And also congrats or join Facebook. Would you like to share any secrets? First of all, what the interview process of Facebook? Can you tell us more? Sure. A high level overview was it's like any other tech company out there. It's like the usual. You're going to submit your resume either through network or referrals. I just submitted a resume and applied. The next step of that would be HR phone screen. That's the first interview with HR. And then I moved on to the PM phone screen, which was the two interviews that I embarked on. And then the last one was also a phone interview. And that was more of a chemistry test. Mind us that we're just trying to come out of COVID. So everything was done remotely and by phone. Each interview that you'll be working in at Facebook will be taking about 45 minutes and follow one of the following themes. We've got the product sense, which is where you'll be tested on product design and strategy execution, where you'll be tested on data analysis and prioritization skills. And the third one is like leadership and drive, where you'll be asked to demonstrate how you can be an empathetic leader. Some of the product sense revolves around how you identify who to build for, what are their needs and how you focus on creating value and impact. Some execution questions will be revolving around how you set the right goals for the product and measure against them and how you identify frame and evaluate trade-offs, which is very important in product management field. And some of the leadership questions will be revolving around how you earn trust or take ownership and also how you process and grow from past experiences, failures or successes. And so I also had a technical interview because the position that I did take up is a technical position. I was asked to dive deeper into technicalities of my most recent job. And this was more of a discussion of certain builds and dependencies of products that I have built in my most recent job. Awesome, thank you. So among all different kind of interviews, some say you have four types of interviews. So which one do you think is hardest and how would you prepare for those interviews, especially as a part of manager Facebook? I know it's very hard to get in. The chance of getting in is less than 1%. So tell us your secret. So to answer your first question, which one was hardest for me? It was definitely the technical one. It was quite technical. But I loved it and I did it with passion and a smile on my face. However, to prepare or address your second question, how I prepared was basically this program, the Dr. Nancy Lee program helped me solidify my product knowledge and brought out the experience the best way it can be presented in an interview. The course work was well thought through and the time to value was indeed very quick. If you follow the exercises, attend the classes and watch the videos, I assure you you'll be well prepared for even the toughest questions. The following is what I did as well. So what I did was I dove deep into product and organization. So as you probably figured out from like the examples that I've told you about earlier is that you can't become a PM at Facebook without being familiar with the company's products. So it's good to have an account, play with it a little and you'll need to do some homework. The next thing is brush up on product fundamentals. If you're already an experienced PM, then this step doesn't really apply to you. But just to reiterate, Nancy's coursework provides a great subsidy in gaining this knowledge regardless of what level of professional you are. You need to learn and understand a consistent method for answering PM interview questions. There's plenty of frameworks that Nancy has taught us in the coursework as well. As mentioned, Facebook will ask you certain questions that fall into this category and also behavioral design, strategy, estimation, and metric questions as well. So approaching each question with a predefined method or the framework will enable you to build strong interview habits. Awesome. Thank you. This also gives the audience a reminder. We do have lots of free training on YouTube, a different kind of framework. You guys should check out this video about how to answer, how to design an app for blind people. So feel free to check out this video and learn our free framework starting from today. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so another great thing that I did was I practiced by myself. So I did several recordings every day to make sure that I had the flow and I was most understandable in the best way. And then I also tried to find people that were experienced PMs to also mock with. And you should also try this and practice with experienced PMs as much as possible. They'll be able to give you much more accurate feedback than friends and peers. So if you know a product manager who can help you out, that's fantastic. But like for most of us, it was tough to find the right connections to make this happen. This is where the mentorship program at Dr. Nancy Lee's program will definitely help you. Getting the job was step one. I wish I would have had this mentorship to help me excel through my previous notes as well. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, if people don't know about our mentorship program, it's that we recently launched a VIP mentorship program, which I have a lot of connections from like fan company, Google, Facebook, lots of my students. They wouldn't hear it such an out yourself. You weren't here to mentor my other students. So therefore our alumni network become much stronger. Yes. I encourage everybody to come back and help more. Awesome. So let's do this. I also have another follow up question regarding what do you wish to know before you become a product manager? I know you represent a group of people who aim to join like Facebook, Google, this company. Now you get here, if you can look back, is there anything you wish I've known earlier you could done better so that people can follow your past as well? Sure. As I mentioned earlier, getting the job was step one. I wish I would have had a program like this that would help me excel in my previous jobs. When I first started my PM job, I had so much anxiety in doing well and didn't know how to conduct my job the best way possible. I wish I would have found a mentor earlier to help my career and excel it in a way where I would feel so much self accomplishment. But back then, there were hardly any programs that were like this. Product management has been evolving over time. When I embarked on this career, there were certain frameworks that I wish that Nancy would have provided for me back then if we're looking in the past. There's frameworks right now that is part of Nancy's program that are really, really important in succeeding. This would have springboarded my knowledge and understanding in this field much faster if I had those frameworks. I would have had ammunition for me to make better decisions on the job as well. Although I learned on the job, I'm sure that a program like this would have been handy to enable me to build better products over the course of my career. 10 to 15 years back, if I'm looking back, coming from a person who had no experience at the time, I could have used a good mentorship program as well. This would have given me great pointers in how to answer interview questions better and what tools to bring out of my toolbox when faced with different situations in a normal day of work for product managers. Awesome. Thank you for sharing with all your wisdom. Now, one last question is, now you're starting a new job in Facebook, what would be the new career expectations you want to see yourself growing into once you join Facebook or any exciting news or product you want to share with us? Sure. So my career has spanned over a long, long period of time. I've been a principal PM in different companies and that's the highest level that an individual contributor could be at. I would like to see myself in a more managerial position where I would lead a team of senior PMs and PMs to continuously build products that will tend to our everyday lives and solve problems for customers and bring huge impact back to the companies that I work for in the future. Awesome. Thank you. This is also one of the reasons that related to why you want to work in here to be a mentor for others because I see how it's part of the quality of growing into a leader. Yes, no, definitely. Helping people see their potential is definitely one of my goals in life because I would have never thought that I could get into a fan company, to be honest. And this program really changed that perception for me. And in the end, I did get into a fan company and I'm really grateful for it. And that's why I want to pay it forward and continuously mentor anybody that thinks that they can't do it and show them that it can beat up. Thank you for sharing with me. I was so touched when you said that you never saw you could get in because always being perceived as someone who's very confident. Thank you for sharing with us. And final message to everyone who's watching this video is that lots of time people tell you or you thought you cannot achieve that goal. No, tell them no. All you need to do is focus on what the best strategy to get there and never give up. Thank you so much for sharing with us, Al. Yeah, thank you for your, thank you everyone. Awesome. Do you have any last minutes, like the tips and summary for all the audience who's watching us right now? Sure. For everybody that's watching and aspiring to be a product manager, chin up, work hard, and you'll eventually get there. Continuously making wonderful products to change our lives for the future. God bless. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. So this is our sequence interview of product managers in different top tech companies. And feel free to comment down below and let me know who is the next company you want to talk to regarding product management. Thank you so much for joining and also thank you so much, Al, for joining us, sharing all your wisdom. All right. Have a good day. See you guys. Bye.