How would you prep for your next interview!

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

While this is mostly for product managers who are are interviewing for their next role, this also applies to the other interviewers who are working to get their next job.

Let’s start out with some of the basics. In this session, we will not go over the way to get your first phone interview or to tighten up your resume. That’s already covered here and here. Here, our main focus is on helping you prep for the interview.

In general, anything less than 30 days is a bit short. So first of all ensure that you have 30 days to prep for your interview.

Now lets start out with the basics:

There are three four type of questions

1. Design and Product Questions
2. Strategy and Go-to market
3. Personal Experience
4. Technical

As part of each of these, you are also measured against your ability to communicate, your leadership style, how you take feedback etc.

Now there are a few ways to just get started:

1. Get a book and one of the most appropriate book to start out with is Cracking the PM Interview!
2. Readup on the various topics and the most common items are generally around design, go-to market strategy, personal experiences and technical as listed above.
3. Start preparing by answering questions. Some of the most common sites to answer questions are listed here.
4. Ignore the different frameworks. While the frameworks are important to use a benchmark, they add little value in providing any detailed services.
5. Start preparing to the next level, i.e. mock interviews.
6. Mocks are the best way to speak out your answers and then translating them to areas where you can improve upon. Even in mocks you could use a method where you start with the most easy questions and then start scaling the questions further.
7. Finally, build a full day of interviews, almost like a marathon where you start preparing for the questions and answering them. There are several ways to go about doing that.
8. Signup for a mock interview with the experts: www.jinaldalal.com
9. Now, start interviewing. You start with the most unusual interviews where it does not matter whether you get a job or not.
10. Now start taking on the first set of phone calls. If you don’t have phone calls lined up, try to do that.
11. Finally, start interviewing for the roles that are most critical to you.
12. Now keep in mind that interviewing is all about numbers. Higher the application, more the first calls leading more final call and job offers.
13. Finally, start to give back!

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