I know sometimes these stories sound like 'I am telling you what you want to hear' ...but in this case, she sounded super authentic, well spoken and candid - I would hire her !
If she already had tangible product experience, she was already a PM before stripe then right? I'd love to see someone transitioning from some other non technical field like design or marketing that broke into PM. Much harder to answer some of these without that experience.
I want to express my gratitude. Your videos and your free masterclass helped me so much that I received two job offers in the same week. One of the offers was almost a $20,000 increase from my previous salary. Thank you once again.
I have a question about the scenarios that she shared relating to failure and conflict. To what degree will the interviewer be thinking in the back of their mind about the potential for these scenarios to come up again? Will this candidate be seen as a risk if the failure or conflict story is large enough that it provides additional cause for concern? Just wondering from a candidate standpoint where the limits are and what we should be comfortable sharing.
Deal with Failure - Sunset You mentioned you were “sizing” the various brainstormed ideas, when working with design/engineering. You mentioned ideas were barely moving the needle, what kept the team from reaching out to executive team members to salvage the concept, perhaps bringing in even more brains?
You can't escalate every feature that isn't going how you want. That could be the case here. She probably talked to her manager also and came to the conclusion that sunsetting was the logical next step.
I believe the intro was quite detailed and wasn't required. I will benchmark her answer from one of the videos from this channel on - tell me about yourself. It should be following a structure where you "peel off the onion" but here it seemed like the onion was cut half open. Then writing points down for extremely fundamental questions like these doesnt make sense especially when the framework has just 3 components - S+A+R. I really liked the case interview with Abhishek and thats the bar I'd like to see more here.
Minor critique. Taking a few mins to answer questions such as "tell me about a time when you dealt with conflict" would be a red flag to me as in interviewer. Seems like she may be coming up with an experience on the spot, even though she is clearly just trying to structure her thoughts. The rest of the answers were wonderful, honestly very well thought out. Great work.
One thing I've done in the past is say "an example comes to mind, give me a moment to write down some thoughts I want to make sure to capture". It's really hard to make up an experience given that there are usually many follow up questions. I really think it's much more beneficial to take time before answering, even if there is some awkwardness, rather than ramble.
@taeghsokey5310 It's okay to ask for some seconds to streamline your thoughts. Even without asking for the brief timeout, you might end up with "uhh" which in itself is a pause.
A red flag? Only clowns use star process questions. It’s either rehearsed or not rehearsed. There are no star process questions that reveal anything else. So a red flag for not rehearsing? Seems odd. Why not use your brain and actually get to know a candidate.
@@WinstynSaylesI think he only said that in context with question about being in a conflict. People always demand time to think while solving case studies. But, it’s just an opinion. Normally, if you’ve really encountered a situation, it’ll flow immediately from you. But, it’s really up to interviewer in the end. I’m more concerned about the fact that Engineering Manager escalated to her Manager even when they had agreed the feature is something that should go live. This situation is a little weird. No Product Manager unilaterally decide. It’s always a discussion with Engineering Manager and then a timeline is arrived at. Now, unless she went ahead and socialized that we will make it even despite EM asserting that it’ll be challenging, that’s clearly her fault and deserves an escalation. But, if it was jointly discussed and still EM decided to go escalation route, that’s truly not good professionalism.
