The PM Case Interviewer Guide
The PM Case Interviewer Guide
How to distinguish the best PM candidates from the merely great
Everyone uses case questions in their PM interviews:
Uploads of photos on Facebook are down 10%. What would you do?
Design a Mars spacesuit for kids.
Improve onboarding for Notion.
But hardly everyone is sold on their value. In fact - the most common thing I hear from hiring managers about the case interview is:
I’m not so sure about it. I tend to rely on historical behavioral questions more. It helps me dive into what they actually did.
And it’s not just PM hiring managers. Colleagues across departments—from engineering to design to marketing—often express doubts about the effectiveness of PM case interviews:
It’s the paradox of case interviews: they’re everywhere, but no one loves them.
The obvious solution, if we’re going to use case interviews, is to get better at using them.
That’s where things get interesting…
Where is the content?
Normally, to get better, we’d turn to the internet.
But, it turns out that there’s almost nothing available on how to use case interviews well.
On Google, I couldn’t find absolutely anything:
I tried multiple search terms:
None had good results.
Even ChatGPT and Claude Opus didn’t have anything interesting to say.
Your Guide to Interviewing Better
This lack of resources got me thinking. What is more valuable than getting more out of your interviews?
As a hiring manager and product leader, few things rise to that level of importance.
If you can get people 10% better at using interviews they already have on their calendars, your product team’s impact is also going to increase dramatically. It’s really high ROI.
So I wanted to put down the learnings from my experience on case interviews. This is ‘that piece’ to forward to your team.
Today’s Post
Words: 3,943 | Est. Reading Time: 18 mins
The Basics:
History Lesson: Why did we adapt the case interview to begin with?
How prevalent the case is and who uses it
Case interview types
The Principles of Case Interviewing:
The anti-patterns of case interview evaluation
The ideal case interview rubric
Good v bad questions
Tactical Specifics:
Rubric & answer details for each of the 5 types
Improving as an interviewer
My ideal interview process
1. The Basics
1.1 Why did we adopt the case interview to begin with?
In the mid 2000s, case interviews were hardly formalized, like they already were at that point for consulting.
Case interviews weren’t even called that. They were just questions that certain hiring managers at big tech companies like Google and Microsoft used:
Design a phone for elderly people.
What’s your favorite product? And how would you improve it?
We’re having trouble improving our site speed. How would you help?
These questions arose from PM interviewers' genuine desire to better assess potential candidates.
As big tech companies started to hone in on the science of interviewing, and standardizing their practices with things like the APM program at Google, the case interview became an official subject.
By the time Cracking the PM Interview was published in 2013, it had become a well-known topic amongst PMs. And that knowledge quickly expanded to aspiring PMs as more books were written on the subject.
So, the entire field is at most 19 years old.
1.2 How prevalent the case is and who uses it
Nowadays, use of the case is ubiquitous through the Director of Product level. Once you get beyond that, it’s often dropped in favor of more managerial questions.
But, until that stage, it’s hard to find companies that don’t use the case interview.
Big Tech: Everyone from Google and Meta to Apple and Microsoft
Growth Stage: Canva, Notion and the other PLG darlings employ it
International Tech: Swiggy, CRED, Ola, Xero, and Nubank all use them
I researched 30 top tech companies’ PM interview processes. I couldn’t find a single one that doesn’t use case questions.
Some may not have a dedicated round focused to the case, but they all ask case questions.
Overall, there’s been a significant vibe shift in the past 10 years. In 2013, you might find in-demand candidates who dropped out of your process after learning of a case.
Nowadays, everyone expects them.
1.3 The types of case interviews
The types of cases that people rely most on are:
Here are archetypal questions in each category:
Debugging: Discord comments are down 15% in the last week. What happened?
Goals/ Metrics: How would you measure success for X Premium?
Root Cause Analysis: New Notion Docs created are down 5%. How would you identify the root cause?
Trade-Offs: How many ad slots should be shown at the top of Google search results?
Technology Company Strategy: As Canva’s CEO, what are your top 3 priorities?
Mergers & Acquisitions: How should Palo Alto Networks assess the acquisition of CrowdStrike?
Real-World Strategy: Create a climate reduction strategy.
Product Improvement: How would you improve LinkedIn’s Home feed?
Market Entry: Should Capital One expand into any new developing markets?
New Tech x Business: Should Spotify enter short-form video?
Product Monetization: How would you monetize OpenAI’s Sora model?
X for Y: Design a video editing app for the blind.
Design X: Design a viral consumer social app.
Redesign X: Redesign Google Maps.
Real-World Design: Design a digital ordering system for restaurants.
Product Improvement: How would you improve Photoshop for product designers?
Product Growth: How would you solve a declining NRR for Snowflake?
Product Launch: How would you launch a CRM as a PM at Gong?
Product Design: How would you design paid subscriptions for YouTube?
Product Pricing: How would you improve the pricing model at Miro?
Technical Problem: Our website is down. How would you work to bring it back up?
Reduce Costs: Help decrease infrastructure costs by 30%.
Improve Performance: Decrease our load time by 15%.
Improve Developer Experience: How would you deal with developer complaints of experience and speed?
System Design: Design a scalable system for video streaming at Spotify.
To get the most out of such questions, you need to have a very specific approach.
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