Notes on cracking the PM Interview

Gayle Laakmann McDowell & Jackie Bavaro. (2013). Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology. CareerCup.

主要挑了和产品经理无关的通用章节阅读.

Resume

略过 attributes of a good PM resume

The rules

A resume isn’t read; it’s skimmed. A resume screener will glance at your resume for about 15 seconds (or maybe less) to make a decision about whether or not to interview you.

Shorter is better. A good rule of thumb is to limit your resume to one page if you have less than 10 years of experience. It’s best to stick to just the highlights.

Bullets, not blobs. The longer a chunk of text is, the less likely a resume screener is to read the resume. Blobs of text—that is, bullets or paragraphs that are three lines or longer—tend to not be read. Keep things short. The impact of your work often matters more than the details, so it’s okay to skimp here.

Additionally, you should aim to have no more than 50 percent of your bullets expand to two lines. That is, at least half of your bullets should be just one line, with the remainder being two lines. If just a few words of a bullet cause it to flow to the next line, trim it. You will waste space otherwise.

Accomplishments, not responsibilities. People don’t care what you were told to do (responsibilities); they care what you did (accomplishments).

Your responsibilities are often pretty obvious. Prove to the resume screener you had an impact. Focus on the impact itself; the “what” more so than the “how” (although both are important).

Responsibility Oriented: Design features for Amazon S3 and oversee development of the features across software engineers and testers.
Accomplishment Oriented: Designed the SS Frontline feature, managed its development, and led its integration across three products, leading to an additional $10 million in revenue.

While the first bullet gives some some information about what you did, th reader won’t walk away saying “You were a success because…” Make your resume look more like the second bullet. That shows success.

Your responsibilities should generally be clear from your specific accomplishments and from your job title. However, if you feel you must explain your general responsibilities, a good place is immediately under the job title and in italics, so as to separate it from your true accomplishments.

Don’t skip the best stuff. Many candidates leave something out because they didn’t feel it was “appropriate” for a resume for some strange reason.

Ask yourself: what did you not include? Are there projects you’ve done (on your own, for school, for a friend’s company, for a hackathon, etc.) that you haven’t listed? Any relevant hobbies? Or interests which have some interesting accomplishment (e.g., completing a triathlon)? If it makes you a more interesting or more attractive candidate, include it.

What to include

Your resume should obviously include your work experience and education. What about all the other little details?

Objectives: No. Objectives are almost always a waste of space. Objectives are just a verbose way of describing the role you’re applying for. There is no need to state what will already be clear from your application.

Summary: Rarely. With few exceptions, a summary is rarely useful. If your resume is sufficiently concise, it already is a surmmary.

Moreover, most summaries are laden with fluffy, subjective personal descriptions such as “dynamic” and “action-oriented.” These carry little weight in the eyes of the reader.

Occasionally, summaries can highlight specific accomplishments or responsibilities that might otherwise not jump out at the reader. However, this case is unusual. A proper design can almost always make your highlights readily apparent.

Skills: As Needed. Skip obvious skills, such as Microsoft Word. Listing this as a skill communicates only that you know how to open a file, edit it, and save it. Everyone knows how to do that.

Awards: Yes—And Make Them Meaningful. You should list awards you’ve received. Even ones that don’t seem directly applicable to the skillset are often relevant in showing success, hard work, or creativity.

Ideally, your resume should describe what the award is for and how selective it is. The award above, for example, might be listed as:

John R. Robertson Memorial Prize (2013): Placed 1st out of 75 students in business plan competition. Entered business plan for low-cost solar heated pools.

This establishes both relevance and selectivity.

Activities: Sometimes. Try to back each up with a concrete accomplishment. Even if the activity itself isn’t particularly relevant, what you’ve done with it might be. For example, running is probably not applicable to your job application (unless you’re applying to a fitness-related company). However, if you’ve completed a marathon in 17 states with a lifetime goal of covering all 50, then it might be relevant in showing determination—and in just making you “interesting.”

Projects: Yes
Website URL: Yes
Social Media Accounts: Maybe 和工作相关就有价值, 记得弄掉黑历史.

College / University Details: Sometimes The further you are from college graduation, the fewer details should remain on your resume.

Use the following as general guidance (Show more »)

Club Membership and Other "Participatory" Items: Simply being part of a club doesn't say anything about you. These can be removed upon graduation, if not earlier.
Programming Projects: If you have programming projects, these can stay on your resume for about 2 - 3 years after graduation. If you can replace them earlier with more interesting projects, that's even better.
Substantial Leadership Positions: If you were the president of aclub or had major accomplishments as a leader, you could justify keeping these on your resume for 2 - 5 years after graduation. Simply being "VP of Marketing" for a club doesn't say much and can be removed fairly quickly.
Founding Accomplishments: Founding a club, charity, sport, or another major activity shows you have initiative and that you get things done. Therefore, you can justify keeping it on your resume for a bit longer—possibly 5 - 10 years, depending on how significant the accomplishment was.
Awards: This varies wildly depending on the awards.An extremely impressive award could conceivably stay on your resume for 10 years (or even longer). Less impressive awards, such as winning third place in a college programming competition, should probably be removed within about two years.

Define yourself

这一段对我而言不是作为面试参考, 而是这些问题真的很重要.

主要得翻原文看例子.

“Tell Me About Yourself” (The Pitch) 看原文.

“Why do you want to work here?”

Company Research: 关于公司或职位的调研 (比如公司某人做了某事让我怎么样), 可以展现热情.
Relevant Experience
Passion

In general, big companies will be less impressed by your having researched the company or being really passionate about working for them. It’s better to show a passion for the role/team, or some experience that makes you a good fit.

At a startup, passion for the company or expertise in the space can be really important.

“Why should we hire you?”

An interviewer might instead ask you why you think you would be a good fit for the role or what you think you could offer the company.

Why you are a good PM
Why you area good fit for this space: Have you worked in an area relevant to the team or company? Are you really passionate about the space?
Why you are a good fit for this company’s culture or work environment

“Why are you leaving your current job?”

Often, this question is asked as an icebreaker. Your interviewer isn’t necessarily looking for anything specific; she just wants to learn a bit more about you. Your goal is essentially to not screw things up.

What can screw up an answer? Any of these things:

Complaining about your current role.
Focusing on money.
Being bored and not learning. Being bored at your current role means your most recent experience isn’t very valuable or interesting.

Instead, focus on the positive. What are the things you are looking forward to in a new role?

“What do you like to do in your spare time?”

With this question, your interviewer is primarily looking to get to know you and what you’re interested in. The best answers to this question might show some sort of experience that’s relevant to the position, but discussing any passions that you have outside of work will be a positive.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

An interviewer asks this question for several reasons:

To understand if you actually want this job: 看职位是否符合长期目标. If you’re not prepared to answer this question, it might be a sign you don’t really care about the job.
To see if you even have a plan
To test your ambition: Ambitious people generally make good employees.
To ensure the company can give you what you want: 如果不符合预期, 求职者工作也不开心.

“What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

For your strengths, focus on things that are specific, relevant to the position, and can be supported with evidence.

Do not list “intelligence” as a strength. Yes, you might be very intelligent. Yes, it is relevant to the position. However, listing this just comes across as arrogant, and, frankly, the interviewer wili make her own decision as to whether or not you’re intelligent.

For weaknesses, you want to give a genuine weakness. The old trick of disguising a positive attribute as a weakness (“I work too hard”) does not work—and probably never has. Your interviewer wants to see that you can admit to your faults.

That said, it is a good idea to accentuate—-or at least mention—the positive side of the weakness. What have you learned from it? Are there any benefits to this? How do you compensate for this weakness?

Generally, try to avoid weaknesses that are too tactical or temporary. An answer like, “I don’t have much experience in people management” doesn’t help an interviewer get to know you and doesn’t show humbleness. In fact, it just looks as if you’re afraid to admit to genuine weaknesses—or don’t think you have any personality faults.

Behavioral questions

Ultimately though, they’re all looking at the same two factors: your content and your communication.

Content
- Have you really done what you say you’ve done? The fact is an interviewer can’t bet their interpretation of a line on your resume matches what you actually did. Your accomplishment might have been a lot harder or a lot easier than you made it sound.
- How have you made an impact? “Tell me about a challenging problem you’ve faced.” If you haven’t had professional wins and losses (substantial failure), then many would argue that you haven’t really done much at all.
- Do you have the relevant skills and attributes for the job?
Communication
- Nugget First
- STAR
- Speak In Bullets. The interviewer has far less context than you.
  - “I did three things. First, I talked with … Second, I… And third, I…”
  - “We had two issues with this plan. Number one, we… And number two, we…”

Preparation

Step 1: Create a Preparation Grid

Job 1	Job 2	Extracurricular
Leadership/Influence
Teamwork
Sucesses
Challenges
Mistakes/Failures

Fill in each cell with one to three stories.

Step 2: Master Five Key Stories

Is each story substantial? “Meaty” STAR
Is each story understandable? If you’ve stripped the story down to just the essentials and still find yourself explaining a lot of details, it might be time to kill the story. This is especially common with stories requiring technical, product, or mathematical knowledge.
What does each story say about you?
Is it really about you? If you find yourself constantly saying “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me,” you might want to tweak your wording—or find a new story entirely.
Do you “get” other people?
Do your stories have good coverage (step 1 五个话题维度) and good flexibility? You should have at least one story per topic. Ideally, several of your stories will fall under two or more categories.

下一小结是五大话题的要点和样例提问, 看书.