WMT Interview Questions
For PMs
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately (hiring PMs for my team @ Amplitude), and all the phone screens reminded of how much I enjoy a good back and forth. I’m especially a fan of open-ended, multi-layered, tangent-spawning questions that can fill up the allotted time. I was opining about this on LinkedIn the other day, and someone asked for an example, so I wrote these up along with the why? behind each of them.
“walk me through an instance of you disagreeing and committing with an executive or peer on what direction to take your product in”
from this I can learn:
if you’ve ever disagreed and committed
if you’ve dealt with executive pressure
if you can connect strategy <-> tactics
if you focus on being right or rigorous
if you can remember how it netted out
“walk me through a product trade-off where the data in your hands vs the intuition in your head didn’t jive, and how you made sense of it”
from this I can learn:
what level of trade-offs you have made
if you use data and to what degree
do you over-rely on data to guide
how you build / refine product instinct
if you follow curiosity or index on delivery
“walk me through a contentious product decision that you helped navigate where there were legitimate points of view on multiple sides”
from this I can learn:
how you operate in a group dynamic
methods you use to get to decisions
what you optimize for in decisions
if you can argue other points of view
“walk me through a series of product bets you were part of that ended up in compounding value for your customer / step function change in your business “
from this I can learn:
do you think in chunks (multi-release)
can you break down work to de-risk
can you tell a long-term story
what lens (customer, business) you use
“walk me through a time when you made a trade-off between experience and cost, and the eventual outcome of the situation”
from this I can learn:
your ability to build a business case
if you can align business and customer outcomes
how you balance inherent tension
how you gauge things that are hard to quantify
how you think about the customer working backwards
Since they all start with “walk me through” I refer to them as WMTs. I hope these are helpful, no matter which side of the interview you’re on. And of course, they’re not unique to PM interviews - you easily replace the term “product” in each question with technology / design / comms / etc…
I’d love to hear from readers on their experiences with open-ended, multi-layered, tangent-spawning questions - please chime in via comments👇. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing.
further reading / references
some examples answers to the “data vs intuition” question
for a detailed breakdown of how to evaluate product competencies across levels, check out the PM Mindset Ladder
if you’re starting out and building a new team from the ground up, check out the archetypes behind Exponential Hires
multiple WMT questions touch on decision-making aptitude - here is a shortlist of Mindbending Models
The Power of Layering Product Choices is actually my own answer to the WMT question on “a series of bets that compounded value”
an essay that offers many tips on figuring out “what’s going on here, with this human?”
the single best interview question according to Peter Thiel
childish drawing / interpretation
As a hiring manager myself, I found these examples and additional elaboration very helpful. i think these are good candidate questions for 'behavioral questions' to assess couple key PM skills, e.g. strategic thinking (trade/offs), communicate up and with cross functional teams, leadership.
One call out I have is, these might not be good questions for more junior PMs.
Nice concept , thanks for the sharing these questions with us.