Bhavish Gummadi’s
PM Recruiting Guide
A set of learnings from doing dozens of mocks, interviewing with top
tech companies & landing a full-time Google APM offer.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
New Grad & Internship Programs
Resume
Getting your foot in the door
Selling your story
Networking
Take-Home Assignment
Interview preparation
Reading
Starting up
In the interview pipeline
Reach
Mock Interviews
Thank you!
Introduction
I’m Bhavish and I’m a senior at the University of Michigan. After a
compilation of experiences in software, product, startups & consulting, I
realized that product was the best way to start my career. I obsessively
recruited for the PM internships, doing 140+ (highly excessive) mock
interviews, networking with dozens of individuals, and reading hundreds of
pages of resources. Most importantly, there was a lot of lost confidence,
tears, and frustration from rejection. I’m grateful & lucky that the hard work
came to fruition - landing an internship with the Google APM program. Next
summer, I’m happy to say I’ll be returning as a full-time APM at Google.
I made this document to compile my thoughts and learnings on PM
recruiting and how to optimize your time for an offer. I hope the effort I’ve
invested over the past year will help you land your dream role.
Before we get started, I’d like to emphasize one thing: this is my
perception of the PM recruiting based on the experiences I’ve had. This
document is not a silver bullet, and I’ve seen individuals land top PM
positions without the learnings in this document. This document will not get
you a PM offer nor is it an exhaustive list of insights, rather, it will give
you key learnings derived from hundreds of hours of successfully preparing for
PM recruiting.
New Grad & Internship Programs
Resume
In this section, I’ll share some key insights to ace a resume screen.
1. Have experiences driven by passion
Show you care about problems and solving them with your mind and soul.
Start your own company, write passionate Medium articles, start a
student organization, have a fun side project, whatever it is, put your
soul into it.
2. Have a quantifiable impact
For any experience, make sure you can quantitatively demonstrate your
impact. Even if you didn’t track metrics at the time of the experience,
try to retrospectively track the success of your project with metrics.
3. Tell a skimmable story
Your bullet points or summaries should be easily skimmable and visually
guide your reader. A successful resume will be able to tell a clear
story for each experience (and potentially an overall story) in a 30
second skim of the resume.
A great way to test your resume is by handing your resume to a friend
for 30 seconds and asking them to list the top 5 things they’ve learned
about you. This serves as a proxy for how a recruiter will learn from
your resume.
Getting your foot in the door
The value of your resume is a function of both its quality and how many
people actually read it. Firms are typically overwhelmed by applicants and
will take shortcuts to filter candidates. Simply applying online could lead to
an ignored resume. You need to have a series of other threads to pull on in
order to make sure the firm is legitimately looking at your application.
Here’s some ways to try to get eyes on your resume:
● Applying early
● Referral
● Email or LinkedIn message the recruiter
● Career fair
Selling your story
A strong story can help you at career fairs, emailing recruiters,
networking, interviews and being memorable. A storyline & relentless outreach
can significantly augment your likelihood to get your foot in the door.
Storytelling is a critical component of PMing, and telling your own story is a
critical part of recruiting.
After doing mock interviews with dozens of other candidates, I found
that one way I crisply differentiated my story was with specificity and
passion.
I encourage everyone, regardless of your career and ambitions, to
introspect and understand how the critical moments of your life have led you
to this professional path. Most importantly, this will help drive your work
ethic, passion and further your understanding of yourself. Ask yourself
questions like:
● What have I liked and disliked about previous experiences?
● What do I want to be known for?
● Why do certain topics bore you and other topics drive your
interest?
● What moments of your life have been the most formative for your
professional outlook?
After you’ve understood yourself and why you belong in this role, plan
how to tell this story effectively in any context. You’ll stand out as a
passionate, thoughtful individual in a pool of people just trying to pursue a
lucrative career.
Networking
Networking for PM positions and big tech firms will be useful for two
reasons:
1. Company specific knowledge
Every company has its own theory & scoping for PM roles. Learn which
skills and qualities you should highlight in a resume, take-home
assignment or interview for this specific firm.
2. If you’ve built a strong connection - mock interviews & interviewing
tips
Some individuals at your target companies may actually mock interview
you if they are allowed to. More likely, they’ll provide you with some
key tips and tricks from their interviewing experience. Only ask about
potential mock interviews after you’ve built a solid connection with the
individual.
Take-Home Assignment
Many APM programs will have some sort of assignment that you will have a
few days to complete. Here’s some steps can take to excel in this assignment:
1. Be scrappy
The prompt could be about any industry, with any number of users. Try to
be scrappy with gathering data, identifying user needs, and potentially
testing the feasibility of a solution.
2. Be ambitious
Set a high bar for your product vision. Find the data to back up your
claims and show why a crazy idea might actually make sense.
3. Be relevant
Understand the tech environment and how your pitch or product is
strategically relevant for your firm. A great PM will see their
product’s long term vision, not just its short term benefits.
4. Revise
Pull on your network and any other resources to review your assignment.
Try to find missing details, unconvincing arguments and whether or not
people would actually find this useful.
Interview preparation
Reading
This section outlines some key reading that really helped me throughout
the process. More important than reading, is being able to rapidly utilize the
knowledge you have and output the information when relevant in an interview.
There are a lot of readings here, but you do not need to read everything to
ace an interview.
Starting up
I’ll speak through some of the downsides of using these books later in the
document.
● Decode and Conquer (Use Lewis Lin’s Slack channel and build meaningful
connections with mock partners!)
● Cracking the PM Interview
● The PM Interview (skim for what you find relevant)
● Read and analyze the news!! - TechCrunch, The Verge, CNET, Hacker News
are some great resources
○ Some great newsletters are The Morning Brew, Accelerated
○ Be sure to read news specific to your passions & expertise!
● For fundamental tech knowledge - Swipe to Unlock is a great book to get
up to speed.
● Start obsessing over the details of products
○ Ask ‘why did they do this?’ for every detail you experience in a
product
In the interview pipeline
● CB Insights Strategy Teardowns on your specific company and their
competitors
● Seeking Alpha articles will have day-to-day updates on the activities of
big tech companies. This information will be granular and data heavy
which is great for interviews.
Reach
Most candidates will not go into the interview with this knowledge (I didn’t
either!), but it’s great to read if you have time.
[prioritized]
1. Inspired
2. The Lean Startup
3. Hooked
4. The Design of Everyday Things
Mock Interviews
Mock interviews are possibly the most important component of PM
recruiting. Big tech companies rely heavily on interview ability and practice
will help you perfect interviews. With that being said, I’ve seen candidates
with < 5 mock interviews receive an offer.
The most important part of mock interviews is viscously seeking feedback
and trying to break out of any conventions. So make sure you go into each mock
with a clear understanding of what you are going to do differently.
Here’s an inexhaustive list of insights I gained from doing over 140+ mock
interviews:
1. Break free from frameworks by experimentation
Frameworks outlined in PM prep books are great for nailing the basics &
understanding the fundamentals of PM Interviews. Unfortunately, these
frameworks will not help you stand out. Keep trying to find new ways to
tackle the same problems and show nuanced insight. You can think of your
interview as components (brainstorming needs, solutions, etc...) and
experiment within each of these components.
2. Don’t just practice ‘Design X’ or ‘Improve Y’
These are very common PM questions, and you will likely see them in an
interview for any big tech company. This is however a very small portion
of the questions you could receive. I encourage you to think of product
generation as a funnel:
Product design questions fall into the middle of this funnel, but often
do not tackle the specificity nor the ambiguity of the other levels of
the funnel. It is important to practice questions at all ranges of this
product funnel in order to successfully interview.
It is strategically beneficial to first master product design questions,
and then shift into strategy, execution, estimation and the various
levels of the funnel. Mentally prepare to rapidly generate new
frameworks to adapt to new problems.
3. Be principled rather than rehearsed
Interviewers can ask you anything - and it is important to identify how
to execute any question so you can still perform well. I’ve outlined
each of these principles as well as how you can achieve them in an
interview. Here’s the check boxes you want to nail in interviews (in no
particular order):
a. Structure
Goal: Break down problems into distinct pieces and have a clear
path for how you will solve a problem.
How to do it: Frameworks from PM prep books are an easy way to add
structure to your response, but because questions will be unique
and random, be ready to build new frameworks on the fly.
Additionally, before you start brainstorming or rambling, think of
2 or 3 areas you want to cover. Short-hand names for categories
will keep communication concise and clear. If you can think of
these areas in a mutually-exclusive but collectively-exhaustive
(MECE) format, that’s even better.
b. User Focus
Goal: Focus on how to build the best solution for the user. A
great interviewer will sympathize well enough to identify some
nuanced insight about the user. Once you identify that nuance,
make sure your interviewer is following the depth of your
thinking. If you can teach your interviewer something new about
the user, they will be impressed.
How to do it: For Product Design questions, you can achieve this
by stepping through the user journey in very low level detail. If
there are multiple users, identify them. Stepping through the user
journey in very low level detail will help you identify nuances
and interesting pain points.
For all other question types, try to think about the user’s
perspective before every step. You should vet any decision you
make in an interview with how it will impact the user’s
experience, their perceptions, and how it fits into their larger
goals.
c. Creativity
Goal: A really cool idea can make you look like a visionary. A
great candidate will always think of multiple creative solutions
and then prioritize down to one.
How to do it: Creativity frameworks like SCAMPER will help you
rapidly generate ideas. Always think of a diverse set of ideas to
tackle a problem before settling on a single approach.
d. Technical Ability
Goal: Some companies like Google will have specific technical
interviews or coding challenges prior to phone screens, but the
bulk of PM roles will not have specific technical interviews.
You’ll have to inject your technical knowledge into product
problems. A great candidate will be able to easily discuss
technical considerations. The best candidates will teach their
interviewer some new technical concepts.
How to do it: Take every opportunity to demonstrate your technical
knowledge and include technical jargon. Some great places to
demonstrate your technical abilities is during discussing
feasibility, brainstorming & long term strategy. Be as specific as
possible when you mention technical knowledge.
Reading tech news and doing side projects will put you at the top
here.
e. Prioritization
Goal: Always show why you’re picking one option over another.
How to do it: A great way to do this is to set some crisp
prioritization criteria. Some books will endorse using matrices &
point systems, but these will typically slow you down. A
combination of quick filtration & more point systems will be the
quickest and clearest.
f. Analytics
Goal: This will not be relevant for all interview questions, but
when presented the opportunity, show that you are data oriented.
This doesn’t mean that you qualify all your decisions with “well
if I had more data”. Rather, this means that you very specifically
identify the data that you need to define success.
How to do it: You’ll want to do 3 things
1. Understand your top-line goals (like DAU, revenue etc...)
early in the interview.
2. Identify very specific metrics for your feature or product
3. Feel free to modify the product or UX to gather information
(like a feedback form)
You can achieve specificity by stepping through each step of the
user journey and identifying the most critical components to your
objectives. Then determine which metrics would be critical for
those specific components of the user journey.
After defining success metrics, try to mention what success
actually looks like for a particular metric. So for example, if
you are tracking some clickthrough rate, what percentage do you
think should be considered ‘success’?
An excellent answer here would relate top line metrics like
revenue and tie them to granular metrics. For example, what level
of engagement is required to monetize a user?
g. Strategic Insights
Goal: You want to maintain focus on users throughout your
interview, but you also want to maintain a focus on your business
objectives. You should understand the business objective early in
your interview - this is a great place to inject your industry &
company knowledge. A great interviewer will always be thinking
about how product decisions interact with business objectives, the
wider industry, regulators and infrastructure.
How to do it: You want to keep your business goals relevant when
prioritizing and building a roadmap. Show that you are thoughtful
about industries and have an educated hypothesis about the future.
This demonstrates your long term thinking, as well as your
abilities to see opportunities. Reading the news is once again
critical here!
For product design questions, try to build your features into a
long term vision. You can do this by breaking down your solutions
into strategic versions, the culmination of these versions will be
your long term vision.
4. Understand what the interviewer wants
Interview questions can be very unique and confusing. It is important
that you are aligned with your interviewer's expectations. Are they
asking you about design? a strategic decision? A single feature? how you
would communicate with stakeholders? It could be any of the above. Take
some time to understand the direction of the question.
Additionally, questions will lack context. PMs need to make the best
decisions based on evidence, and if you try to proceed in an interview
without context, you will be on a fast track to failure. Either assume &
state a context or ask your interviewer for context.
Thank you!
I hope this document was helpful to you. If you have any questions, and would
like to see them answered, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You’re on
a difficult road - success will take immense grit - and I wish you luck in
your journey to becoming a great Product Manager and changing the world
forever.
