Case Study - Collecting Competitive Intelligence for a Product Manager Interview

As someone in deep into the interview process, how can I use publicly available online date to set myself ahead of the pack

In the late rounds of a company's product manager interview process, the conversations will expand beyond just the product team. You can even expect outside the entire tech side of the business! In addition to Engineering team leads and UX¹ designers, you can expect to meet someone in sales, partnership, or even the CEO themselves of a startup.

A VP of Sales is not the primary audience of your Product Story Stack. You need to have material prepared for a non-product crowd. Beyond this, as you progress deeper into your Product candidacy, it becomes more and more important to deep-dive research your prospective employer.

There are twofold benefits to your research

1. You’ll display competency, resourcefulness, and seriousness around the potential role - a means of standing out from the competition

2. You’ll get a sense of if this is a company you would actually want to work for. 

I had the following Twitter exchange with Tech Sales Recruiter Sam Marelich who shared this sentiment for the AE’s² he recruits

sam @sammarelich

@BowTiedWhiteBlt I wouldn’t even look at it in that sense.. it’s a good question in that it’s savvy. One of the most frustrating traits I often see in candidates (and a common reason I don’t move forward with candidates) is a lack of due diligence.

As a hiring manager in the Product Org - due diligence really is what will set a candidate apart from the pack. The activity of researching us - the prospective employer - is a demonstration of a candidate the critical Product skill and ability to execute effective discovery³.

bowtiedwhitebelt | Product Mgmt Insider (💡,💡) @BowTiedWhiteBlt

@sammarelich I bet that matters double with hiring AEs as knowing the competitive marketplace pretty much table stakes My product hires I want them to be able to interpolate our business model without me explaining Bonus points if they bring up a real pain point I have

If a candidate in the scope of an interview can show they have a base understanding of what we do, how we operate, and a general idea of where we might have problems today - I get excited and start slacking my co-workers. It oozes competence and status.

As I say often, Product Managers are the cool kids at a technology company. Nothing drips of professional swag quite like walking into a meeting and immediately understanding why everyone’s pissed.

One lens I’ve found incredibly helpful is to try, on my own, to piece together a companies Product Org Chart⁴

Understanding a Product Org Chart

Your products will mirror your organizational structure. Embrace the fact.

- Steven Sinofsky , former president of Windows at Microsoft

Steven dropped a hell of a truth bomb here, and thus why I use it as a means to understand better a prospective employer. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to explore just the product org to demonstrate the value, but you certainly expand to the entire company for the widest of perspectives.

To demonstrate how I would execute this product due diligence I’m going to take the following random Product Management JD I found on the internet for a Case Study.

I’m only going to use public-facing assets collected from the internet.

With those assets, I’m going to paint a picture of the company’s product org.

I then will highlight how I make those insights actionable in the context of interviewing for the role.

Outside this exercise, I had no prior knowledge of this company.