Tips to Land and Excel at Your Dream Product Gig by Google PM
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Being a Product Manager is really a challenging role. You need to be the calm voice of reason in the room more than any other, be it the developers or the analysts. Manini Roy, a Google Product Manager, has some expert advice for prospective PMS, on how to prep your mind for the behavioral questions in a Product interview, and how to get into the right mindset once you land that dream Product job.
Manini Roy: The Yogi Product Manager

Manini Roy is a Chemical Engineer who chose to become a Product Manager. She started her career as a PM from AMD working on the hardware end of the spectrum. Then she shifted to becoming a PM at a software industry, with Microsoft.
She finds Chemical Engineering more relevant to being a PM as the time passes. She is currently working for Google as a Product Manager and believes yoga has played a major role in keeping her cool while managing tasks.
Landing the Dream Product Gig
Tips to prep for a product interview
- Research
- Study the right content
- Practice, practice, practice!
#1 Research Phase
- Most PM interviews. Questions are a combination of estimation, product design, strategy & execution questions.
- Some will be a subset of the above areas.
- You will always get behavioral questions (so nail those.)
- Some companies also have a technical round.
- Determine what content is coming.
- Understand what the acronym “PM” means in different industries: Product Manager, Program Manager, Technical Program Manager, Product Owner, Project Manager, and Product Marketing Manager.
#2 Study the right content
- Find the right books
- Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle McDowell and Jackie Bavaro
- Decode and Conquer by Lewis C. Lin
- Google search is your friend
- So are actual friends!
- Find people in your network that can introduce you to PMs (preferably folks who currently work or have worked in the company you are interviewing for)
- Find or create frameworks that work for you
Check out our Product Manager events for local networking opportunities.
Examples of framework
Circles method:
This method talks about things you have to think about a product design solution.
- Comprehend solutions – What? Who? Why? How?
- Identify customers
- Report customer needs
- Cut through prioritization
- List solutions
- Evaluate tradeoffs
- Summarize recommendations
#3Practice practice practice

- Practice on your own
- Find a friend to practice with
- Practice in the correct environment (phone interview or in-person)
- Practice the standard questions( i.e the favorite product, favorite product from company X, etc.)
Check out our Ultimate List of Product Manager Interview Questions
Things to remember during an interview
- Pause – helps you compose your thoughts
- Ask questions
- Use your framework
- If you are not already a Product Manager, draw from skills obtained from your other role to demonstrate why you would make a good product manager.
PMs often come from other related disciplines (Design, Engineering, Data, etc) and almost every time it helps them to gain a larger perspective of the role and bring some new insights to the team.
This is not a disadvantage, it’s something that your interviewer will be expecting. So look for what you’ve done well from your past, whatever your experience!
Once you land the job, now what?!
- Communicate
- Build great relationships
- Keep calm and carry on…even when everything is falling apart)
Manini recommends that when you try to control a situation, always take a step back and take a cleaner approach when things go wrong. Often, time will handle the situation.