I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management. Heres a summary from. Kathryn Youngs. Fill in the gaps with side projects. Its uncanny how many of these questions I got asked during my actual interviews. I was one of ~15 people to join Facebook's (now Meta's) Rotational Product Manager program during the summer of 2019. Here's how to get into an associate product manager program at a tech company. With this course, you can take luck out of the equation for getting your dream PM job at Meta! All of the above information are facts to the best of my knowledge. I learned a ton about computer science and featured this course prominently on my resume. Created with the help of 14 current and former Facebook PMs, including 6 M1 and M2 Product Leads and 2 D1 Hiring Managers, Facebook Company Level Strategic Overview & Monthly Updated Most Common PM Interview Questions, Tax deductible expense under continuous education category (USA). Can you zoom out from your personal user needs and think about how this product could scale and provide maximum value to Metas global user base of over 3 billion people. - Rather than coding, learn the basics of storytelling with data. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: various, managing, impact). Id prepare using the following guides. This will help you figure out new product ideas, features, and ways to improve the user experience of existing products. I wrote a full guide on prioritizing as a product manager. These two buckets cover 100% of the possible options for why this change may have occurred. Why is this bad? I think something really unique about the program is after your second rotation, you get to go on a two week long research trip around the world with the other RPMs of your start date cohort. With an understanding of the interview structure and practice in breaking down problems, brainstorming and prioritization, youre ready to do mock interviews. The following are some of the skills and qualities that youd need to demonstrate in order to land a job as an associate product manager and succeed in your career: Since youll be responsible for rallying, managing, and guiding entire product management teams, you need strong communication skills to keep everyone on the same page. Can you openly and honestly share your failures and how you learned and grew from them? This is why product management continues to grow in influence and popularity. The product development framework that every Meta PM is taught during PM Bootcamp for new hires at Meta is Understand, Identify, Execute which means: While this framework is taught once you join the company, the PM hiring committee at Meta is looking for candidates who intuitively use some variant of this framework already. Include your resume: this gives them a chance to dig deeper into your background and even refer you without any additional follow-up. This is where its important to have experience in either design, engineering or data analysis. Its easier for an organization to hire an associate product manager who has no previous work experience, and thus, is a blank slate that can easily be reprogrammed according to the organizations vision, goals, and needs. Check out Growth.Design or UserOnboard for great examples of doing constructive app critiques. Built a custom Tableau dashboard (result) by integrating with Salesforce data platform (action); enabled the team to accurately track user engagement metrics (context) and build a roadmap to grow engagement by 20% (result). Focus all your time on getting the right experiences, making the perfect resume and getting referrals until then. After these levels, it's Product Manager 1, 2, and 3 In Facebook/Meta, for instance, they refer to their entry-level PM position as RPM or Rotational Product Manager. Key idea: Your experiences dont matter once you get to the interview stage; its now all about performance. No-code tools make it easy to build a product. This will make navigating the ambiguity much simpler. How to Ace Facebooks Product Execution Interview (free): two friends of mine wrote a great guide for Execution interviews. View more Product Manager salary ranges with breakdowns by base, stock, and bonus amounts. Whats the coolest thing about the RPM Program? They not only own the decisions about what gets built but also influence every aspect of how it gets built and launched. Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact. I think a pretty big difference at Meta is you do 3 six month rotations instead. The most important of these is the right resume as this is how youll be evaluated. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap. This is largely a behavioral interview. It's meant to present you as a wholesome candidate by showcasing your relevant accomplishments and should be tailored specifically to the particular product manager / associate position you're applying to. At a glance, the best PM side projects involve building something and taking it to market. by integrating with Salesforce data platform (, ) and build a roadmap to grow engagement by 20% (. This means succeeding in the interviews. With interest in a lucrative tech career higher than ever, APM programs at companies like Visa, Google, Roblox, Salesforce, and Meta are proving a popular path into the field for anybody who either didn't study computer science in school or doesn't have relevant work experience. Joining one of these programs exposed me to smart peers, incredible mentorship, new cities, new countries and new ways of growing my career. They can focus on a select area of the product, or a specific set of ideas and features, without being drawn into the full scope of the product. If you are struggling with getting your first product manager internship, you can set your sights a little lower, then climb up the ladder. LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills youre missing. Self-study: easily the most underrated step, studying by yourself will help you solve interview problems with greater ease. The exception is if you are confident youll get an interview (e.g. For $19/month, you get access to their full product interview resource library. Effectively practice for interviews: learn the interview rubrics, self-study frameworks and practice a ton. I used the projects section to highlight three projects I worked on with engineers at hackathons. I know high level technical concepts and business strategy is extremely vague and not very helpful. I spent years refining the art of creating good experience bullet points. For current PMs, I hope this guide can be the perfect response for when someone asks you How do I become a product manager?. The only way to do them well is to practice (the. For example, if you lack design experience, anticipate questions like Whats your favorite product and why? Is this program only for recent graduates? This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume. Example question: how many Google Maps users are in New York City? There are tons of drills, technical skill reviews and product sense exercises to choose from at a reasonable price. Find a data set thats interesting on Kaggle (a site with awesome, free datasets). In my cohort at Facebook, about half were new grads and the other half had backgrounds in analytics, consulting, program management or finance. Key question of the interview: Does this person meet the job requirements? "One of the compliments I got when recruiting for my next job was, 'Wow, for someone who has been a product manager for a couple of years, you are able to grasp problems and thrive in ambiguity quickly," Raina said. It depends greatly on how the product organization is structured. Love podcasts or audiobooks? Key idea: Dont prepare for interviews until you are at least 80% sure that you will get an interview. : Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. At Facebook, we would have a manager for the entire 18 months, a mentor, small-group mentorship and alumni support. : a great, supportive community of aspiring PMs. What this means is that the PM role at Meta is much more product strategy orientated rather than technical project management focused. Having a small group of people allowed us to get to know everyone individually and have intimate conversations that were not performative. The work experience section should be the detailed summary of your latest 3 or 4 positions. You can check it out here if youd like. Product Alliance blows competitors out of the water in terms of quality, quantity, and depth of content. The best way to perform better is through effective practice. As you learn from a senior product manager directly, youll quickly pick up their skills and their frameworks. And, with that, good luck on applications! Id suggest taking a free LinkedIn Learning course, practicing saying your answers during mock interviews and practicing structured communication. Impact: Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome youve created, Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products. One interview will evaluate your product sense, while the other will test your execution skills. Heres an example using a strong PM bullet point. ) 2x Bestselling Author and Product Manager at Facebook. Complete most of the tasks an established Product Manager does with little support. Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. This will show that your process is objective, logical and auditable. Meta's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Unlike most other companies, Metas Execution interview focuses much more on data driven decision making rather than project management. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. All opinions below are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of Meta or the RPM Program as a whole. With Product Alliance, I was able to ace multiple FAANG interview loops and land offers at Amazon as a Principal PM Manager and Google as a L6 PM on GCP. When I first started in product management, I had no idea what associate product managers were, and how they fit into the broader career trajectory for PMs. Featuring them prominently on my resume helped me get my PM job. I would try 1-3 people at each company youre aiming for. (paywall): The things that interviewers are looking for during product sense interviews. How would you improve the peer-to-peer payments product on either Messenger or Whatsapp? As a Facebook employee, I might be a little biased in my opinions but its worth noting I turned down offers from both Google and Microsoft to join Facebook. Product managers are responsible for supervising the development or improvement of a product. Manager continuity lets you have a single point of contact who you can work with to achieve professional growth and development goals. I would spend hours each day self-studying, specifically by practicing: Segmentation: breaking down ambiguous problems into actionable pieces, Brainstorms: creatively think of many options given an ambiguous prompt, Prioritization: choose the best option amongst a series of reasonable ones, These areas are agnostic to the interview type or the company, so practicing is high-leverage when interviewing for multiple companies. When Raina started looking for opportunities to work in product full time as a recent graduate. How would you describe the core responsibilities of a PM. You don't need to have a story that goes "I've wanted to be a Product Manager since I was 3 years old, as I've been an admirer of [Company X] and [Y product] since." Why are you going to subject yourself to this potentially long and arduous path of trying to get into Product Management? What are all the metrics we may want to track? Something went wrong while submitting your email. Reading good answers in those books have become tables stakes. We are looking for an innovative Associate Product Manager to join our team! It's even harder to get one at a top company that invests time and resources into teaching you about the craft of product management. Where is the RPM Program? : We had many events where 5-6 PMs would have a candid conversation with industry titans like Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Sumo and Chris Cox. APM/RPM programs are no different. Key question: can this person use logic and math to handle ambiguous situations? You need to build the right experiences, make a killer resume and network to be a part of the 3%. Then I would recommend reading our product release updates and watching our annual Connect product conference and just generally researching 3rd party news publishers like TechCrunch for updates on what products Facebook Inc. might be releasing in the future. Use Excel, SQL or Python to find interesting trends in the data. Its a rotational product manager program consisting of 3 six month rotations. On a resume, they are a great way to fill in your skills gap. The best way to do this is to look for buckets of mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive (MECE) options. I focused on a specific set of use cases for our CRM product, whereas my product manager focused on a different set of use cases. The RPM Program takes place in Metas Menlo Park (MPK), NYC, Seattle and London offices. . For $19/month, you get access to their full product interview resource library. Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in. Whats something you have built or created outside of work? Again, remove irrelevant information. This is just great. Product Alliance's video courses almost feel like a collaboration between Harvard & HBO. As an intern for an Associate Product Manager rather than a more senior PM, you'll basically do the same work and get the same experience, but with a little less impact. Understanding the basics while working on a real project is hugely valuable. The skills necessary to succeed as a product manager include soft skills and hard skills. These programs are transformative -- both for your personal learning and your socioeconomic standing. You may notice some gaps in your skill sets and experiences. Note that just because an associate product manager program is famous or prestigious doesnt mean that its the best fit for you! Thank you for putting it together. This lets you get exposed to a lot more diverse product challenges on a faster time horizon. The program is meant for relatively early career stage PMs. If you have gaps in your skillset, take a short course. Some companies have a career track where product analysts become PMs instead. Figma Essential Training: The Basics - Figma is the premier design tool for UX designers. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences. Being a great interviewee is useless if you dont get an interview! Key idea: Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlighted specific to the PM job. As a bonus, I shared this project with a Research Scientist at Spotify and it helped me build a great relationship (while developing my skills). Some companies promote their associate product managers based on tenure, e.g. Heres my general advice: your main focus needs to be on getting an interview. Now the next steps are to find the right person to refer you and to send them a great message. When Marissa Mayer first became a Product Manager at Google, she and other senior leaders realized that the engineering-driven culture needed PMs who could collaborate creatively with engineers, designers, and other functions to determine what teams should do next. This interview is meant to access if you can tactically get things done on a daily basis to build your product vision. But that's not all. Id love to interview for Facebooks RPM program, would you be open to referring me? My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills. Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to. Now, I have had the benefit of seeing hundreds of PM resumes and interviewing over 50 candidates for PM roles at Facebook/Meta. This means that associate product managers might sit on the bench until the organization determines that there is a new need for a dedicated product manager. As another first-generation immigrant, I could really relate! Structures like these are very common parts of product management interviews. Therefore, if youre interested in becoming a great associate product manager, then check out our certification courses to help you do just that. Key idea: Each APM program gives people with no formal product experience the chance to work in an interesting product space, bond with a talented cohort and receive training within the company. Thank you Product Alliance! Each APM interview process will have different interviews. Preparing early is what sets strong candidates apart. I think of soft skills as the bare minimum that you need to demonstrate to get an interview. For this interview, Ill point you to several great resources that can help you best prepare. San Francisco Bay Area. Solutions: do we build a VR shopping experience or a new standalone Google App? Why is this better? Meta.app.manager is a package name for the Facebook App Manager app on android that is associated with Facebook-related apps like Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. However, all RPMs do their first rotation in Menlo Park regardless of their home/permanent office. What is the RPM program? If youre looking to learn more via video, then watch below. : Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points. do I need to code)? Key idea: The right experience is in alignment with the PM job requirements.