The Most Important Question in Your Product Manager Interview

I’ve conducted quite a few interviews at this point, for varying levels of candidates in product management and software development. Rookie numbers compared to some, but enough to know what I’m looking for.

I’ve had colleagues and peers ask how to structure an interview, and most importantly, how to truly assess a potential hire’s knowledge and capabilities. The thing I always come back to is the system design.

What is a system design question?

Systems design questions are longer questions where a candidate is challenged to design an application on the fly. Think things like “design an app for a sports stadium” or “design TikTok”. They’re meant to assess a candidate’s ability to break down a business problem, gather requirements, and come up with a technology solution to solve the problem.

Most of your big tech companies have these included in at least one of the interviews for product hires. A simple google search will make you realize there’s an entire sub-industry devoted to helping candidates ace the interviews, teaching things like horizontal scaling and the like.

I personally think that a systems design is a good thing for an interview. This is important, because it gives you a chance to see how your candidate approaches a real-life problem.

But how you structure this case or design should depend on the key criteria you’re searching for in a candidate…