How I Prepare for PM Interviews (and How You Can Too)
It’s exhausting so don’t forget to snuggle with your dog between reps
Here’s a rough idea of how I prepare for a standard PM interview. First, the foundation: I’ve read Cracking the PM Interview, Decode and Conquer, and Interview Math probably 10 times each. Not exaggerating. I initially bought them to prep for what I thought were the most challenging interviews of my life—Google, Meta, Amazon. Haven’t made it to final rounds yet (ouch), but the prep made me a better PM regardless.
Out of all of them, Cracking the PM Interview is still my go-to. It’s the most comprehensive breakdown of almost every question you might get asked, and it doesn’t just stop at examples—it gives you frameworks, insights into big tech expectations, and a good sense of how great PMs think. It's like a mini-MBA in book form—though I have no idea what an actual MBA is since I dropped out of college. But hey, I use these skills daily.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that success in PM interviews boils down to a few critical things:
Having a solid framework for almost every question.
Doing enough company research that you could fake being a PM there for 20 minutes.
Prepping real examples from your own work that support whatever recommendation you're pitching.
And here’s the kicker—it’s not just about knowing your stuff. Interviewing is a weird format. It’s like verbally giving a slide deck presentation… while building the deck from scratch… in real time… under pressure. It’s mentally taxing. They say it burns as many calories as a round of chess, and I believe it.
So yeah—overprepare. You can’t wing this.
The Book That Changed How I Prep
Cracking the PM Interview is over a decade old, but it still delivers. Jackie Bavaro, one of the authors, was an early PM at Google and later the Head of Product at Asana back when it was still small. She gets both the large org structure and the messy ambiguity of startups.
If you're trying to break in, move up, or just sharpen how you think about product and business—this book will help. I mark mine up and keep it nearby like a PM survival guide.
The Four Phases of Interview Prep (and How I Approach Each One)
1. Research
Let’s start with the hardest one. Research is brutal, especially when you’re interviewing at a startup with zero public info.
If the company’s public? Congrats. Read the S-1. Listen to the earnings calls. Yeah, it’s boring, but it gives you the narrative: what’s going well, what’s risky, where they’re doubling down.
If the company’s private, then you need to go full scrappy mode:
Website
App store reviews
Glassdoor
LinkedIn (team makeup and structure)
Articles, interviews, Reddit, forums
From that, try to piece together:
What products they’ve launched
Who their users and customers are
How they make money
What market they play in
Who their competitors are
What their mission is and how it reflects in their work
I recently had to prep for a company like this—barely any info out there. All I had was their company values, a few scattered blog posts, and some half-useful reviews. Still, I built a profile based on what I had and tried to tie my suggestions to their likely strategy.
General Research Notion Template
Company Research Notion Template
2. Behavioral Interviews
This one’s sneaky hard. You’re essentially trying to prove you can lead without authority, build trust, and not implode when everything’s on fire. PMs live in whitespace. That means you need strong communication, empathy, and decision-making across every function.
Why is it so important? Because interviews are one of the most high-leverage events in your career. Think about it:
Whether or not you get the job
How much you’ll get paid
The network you might gain from people who interviewed you
Each hour you prep for an interview might be the highest ROI thing you do in your entire year. Not kidding.
I prep behavioral answers using the STAR format and group them by:
Leadership & Influence
Teamwork
Wins
Challenges
Mistakes & Failures
Track your stories. I use Notion. You can use a doc or spreadsheet. But have your examples on hand, and rehearse them until they’re crisp.
3. Estimation Questions
Ugh. These still wreck me. Market sizing, TAM calculations, how many people in LA own dogs—that kind of stuff. All verbal. All on the fly.
The good news is you don’t have to be right. You just need a clean process:
Start with top-down if you know big numbers
Try bottom-up if you understand the user workflow
State your assumptions clearly and justify them
Sometimes I’ll sketch out ballpark figures in advance so I have mental reference points.
Highly recommend Interview Math for this. It's got formulas, logic, and examples to practice with. Bonus points if you have a few math tricks to avoid reaching for a calculator.
4. Product Thinking
My favorite section—and probably the most revealing. Most PM interviews serve one of these three question types:
Design a product – Google loves this one.
Improve a product – Meta does this a lot.
What’s your favorite product and why? – Common in gaming and creative spaces.
Here’s the formula I use across all three:
What’s the goal of the product?
Who are the users and their personas?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What solutions might work for them?
How would we measure success?
If you're designing or improving something, don’t just fix what annoys you. That’s the easy way out. Instead, pick an underserved user group and think about their pain. That’s what shows product empathy.
Also, be careful picking a product that’s already highly polished. It leaves less room to find opportunities. I usually pick something I love that’s still flawed.
Final Thoughts
Now you’re in the practice phase. And full disclosure: I hate this part. I don’t love asking friends to roleplay interviews with me—but it works.
If you don’t have PM friends? Try a mock interview platform or record yourself. Play it back. Cringe. Fix it. Do it again.
If you’ve read this far—thank you. I wrote this because I’ve had friends, mentors, and strangers help me in ways I’ll never be able to repay. This is my version of paying it forward.
And finally—be kind to yourself. I still beat myself up after interviews. I know what great looks like. I know when I fall short. But I try to remember:
“You just weren’t the right person for that role. Someone else is out there looking for exactly what you bring.”
Take a break. Go for a walk. Say thanks to your nervous system. Then try again.
You’ve got this.
