Hi folks, I know this has probably been asked before, but I've been approached a 3rd time by Facebook recruiters and have decided to go for it. I'm a little intimidated by the interview process, which seems that I have to prove my already 20 years of experience building mobile and web experiences for customers. I'm mostly concerned about some of the stages, including product sense, etc...as someone who's been working so long in the tech space (started in product design/development, but working as product manager for over 15 years), is there anything I should review or check out to show my best side? I get pretty nervous during interviews with people I don't know and can tend to freeze up. When I'm feeling like I'm talking to an interviewer who's talking with me and not at me, it's completely fine. Just wanted to know your thoughts. Also, how chaotic is the product management role at Facebook? I'm hoping to find a place that has a solid SDLC so I can focus on the important aspects of building, such as customer needs, etc...thanks for any advice you may have. #pm #product #productmanager
If you don’t tolerate chaos well, Facebook probably isn’t a great place to be. YMMV, but it’s the most chaotic place I’ve ever worked, and your job as a product manager is to shield your team from it all. You have to first see the chaos, understand the chaos, wrestle it into some kind of order, negotiate consensus around your vision of order, then guard that tenuous equilibrium as best you can until the next chaos inducing event, and then you start all over again. With that out of the way, the thing I’d suggest for interviews, based on what you mentioned about your interview style, is to prepare for them like you would for a standardized test. I also tend to do better in interviews when they’re conversational, and you could luck out with an interviewer who makes yours like a conversation, but that wasn’t the case with my interviews. Your interviewer has a very limited amount of time to get signal on a very specific set of skills, and they need you to get through the exercise to demonstrate those skills as efficiently as possible. It will feel very artificial because it is. PMs don’t put together a product strategy in 30 minutes, but that’s exactly what you need to do in the product sense interview. So practice and practice some more. Give yourself prompts and practice going through them in different scenarios until you feel comfortable doing them on the fly and doing them quickly. Remember the essay part of the SATs? It’s kind of like that. You need to put together a cogent strategy with a clearly structured rationale in a short amount of time. Practice out loud, until it feels less awkward, and get critiques from PM friends if you can.
Following
Following