Hey everyone! In this video, we're going to talk about how to get a product management internship.
My name is Kevin Wei. I'm a product manager and I'm here to share some pieces of advice to help
you land your offer in product. Be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for new
tech interview prep videos every week. Product management can be a very hard role to land
straight out of college. Most PM roles require years of work experience, plus there are many
technical and non-technical folks applying for the few pm roles out there. But there are several
steps you can take to maximize the likelihood of you getting that internship. First, you'll need to
get your PM interview. To do so you'll need a very product-focused resume. A product-focused resume
is one that shows you either have PM experience or you have potential to be a PM. If you don't have
prior PM experience, think about any side projects that you've worked on where you've taken the role
of a PM. PMs work cross-functionally across teams from design to engineering to marketing.
If you have any experience in these areas that a PM would interact with, call them out—especially
if you made a direct impact on the product. And finally, if you have any leadership experience,
whether it's in a school club or at work, list those as well. It's definitely a good signal
to see aspiring PMs hold leadership roles of some kind. If you want additional tips on crafting your
PM resume, check out this video here where Stephen roasts his Google Associate Product Manager
resume. Now that you've crafted your resume, you'll want to get it seen by the right companies.
Something that i struggled with early on in my career was not knowing where to apply.
For engineering, nearly every company hires software engineering interns. But by contrast,
not every company hires PM interns. When I was in school, I sometimes would hear that a friend would
get an offer from company XYZ for PM, and I'd be like, "Yo, I didn't even know they were hiring PM
interns!" Something that I've also found to be valuable is to apply to PM roles with the help
of a referral. For some companies, applying with a referral will guarantee that a human will look at
your resume rather than just a bot that screens resumes for keywords. I mean, it makes sense.
Thousands of students apply to PM internships directly but only a subset of them will apply
through an employee's referral. Companies will see that an existing employee is referring someone and
it's reasonable to assume that most employees will only refer qualified applicants. So this
helps the company reach out to only the applicants who are the most likely to pass the interview.
Check out this video here that we did on how to get a referral.
So now that you've crafted your PM resume and you've submitted it to a bunch of roles,
you probably have a few interviews that you need to tackle now. For PM, internships there
are three kinds of interviews you'll want to prepare for—behavioral, product, and case.
Behavioral for PM internships—the behavioral interview is usually one where the team will try
to see if you'll be a good fit as a teammate. This means judging you on your ability to communicate
any past relevant experience you might have, as well as whether you exude positive energy.
Here, companies will also try to gauge why you want to be a PM in the first place. Common
questions I've gotten include, "Why do you want to be a PM," "In your own words, what is a PM,"
and "Why do you want to be a PM at this company specifically?" My advice here is to try to show
that you are a good team player and that you have a few stories prepared around why you want to be
a product manager. Second, you'll want to prepare for product case questions. The exponent channel
has a bunch of these in the form of recorded mock interviews which you can watch and practice with.
But in short, you will either be asked a product sense question or a product execution question.
Product sense questions test your creative problem solving abilities. An example of this could be
"Design YouTube for kids." Your interviewer will be looking for the ability for you to
be user-focused and solve user problems. Product execution questions on the other hand test your
analytical abilities. Here, you might be asked how you'd measure the success of a product
or how you'd find the root cause to some problem. Again, product case questions are the bread
and butter of Exponent, so check out our YouTube channel to see what to expect in these interviews.
Finally, some PM internship interviews will ask you technical questions. These questions will
not be as technical as software engineering interviews. But I've been asked to write
pseudocode for basic computer science algorithms in my past PM internship interviews.
My suggestion here is to ask your recruiter what you can expect in your interviews.
If they do mention that you'll have a technical round, you can try to dive a little deeper and ask
what kind of technical questions you'll get. For example, are there going to be discussions with
engineering, coding, or system design questions? We cover a lot of these on the Exponent YouTube
channel, so feel free to check those out to help you prepare for your technical rounds.
The technical round might be the one that's the most concerning for students applying to
PM internships, especially for non-technical applicants. It sounds intimidating, so I just
want to assure you that over the years I've seen pm internship interviews trending towards
being less heavy on the technical side and more focused on the behavioral and product case side.
But if you are worried about this round, you're not alone. Each company does have different
expectations for their PM interns, so just double check with your recruiter on how technical this
round might be for you. And that's it! You're now ready to apply and ace your PM interviews.
Thanks for watching and for more PM interview prep, hit that subscribe button
and visit tryexponent.com—and good luck with your upcoming PM interviews.