Cracking your next PM Interview: Engineering round

As a PM, you end up spending a significant amount of time with your engineering team. Not all companies will make you interact with the engineering team, however most will definitely check on your basic engineering skills.

Technical questions:

At hard core tech companies you can expect technical questions in this round. You are not expected to code, but you are expected to know the basic building blocs of the product you are going to manage. Here are some sample questions….

1. How does Google Doc work?
2. If you were to make an app like TikTok what different elements you will consider and how should they be interacting with each other?
3. What happens when you type www.google.com in the browser?
4. What are some of the technical metrics that will track for a website like Netflix?
5. Can you explain different technical blocs in the product you manage currently?

Preparation: You may already know answers to some of these questions however it is good to brush up on some fundamentals. You can also look at system design youtube videos. No body is looking for right answer, they are looking for your approach to the problem and basic understanding of the systems.

1. Look to build end to end understanding of customer journey
2. List down activities that will be carried out by customers
3. Identify points where data at scale needs to be handled
4. Think in terms of scalability, performance, fault tolerance and cost
5. Think about the eco-system — list all the players

Behavioral questions:

These are more common in interviews than the technical questions listed above. These questions will mostly be oriented towards your understanding your approach to dealing with various real time situations. Below are some sample questions…

1. What level of detail do you provide to your engineer when building product?
2. What are some strongest disagreements you have had with the engineering team?
3. How do you deal with a situation when the engineering team does not agree with you?
4. What is the process you follow when working with the engineering team?
5. How do you deal with technical debts and bugs in your product?
6. Have you faced any scale related issues in your product and how did you solve them?
7. Have you been in a situation where you felt the technical solution provided by your team was not enough and how did you handle this?

Preparation: Because these are likely to be based on actual situations, you will not be able to fake any of these, however its important to reflect upon past situations and put them in structure.

“Do you have any questions for us?”:

Its more likely than not that you are facing this round with engineering team so you should be prepared for questions that will make you sound like a person who values the engineering culture. But don’t fall in the trap of asking complex technical questions and then not having an answer for a follow up question.