Read on Twitter
After having a great conversation with @TheHonorableAT about this yesterday, I am STILL super fired up today about the ways in which many product management interviewing practices result in the WORST POSSIBLE PEOPLE FOR THE JOB being hired.
Product management is fundamentally collaborative and facilitative work. As many have pointed out, being able to say "I don't know" and learn from your colleagues and customers is a key key key key part of the job.
But so many product management interviews reward individual heroics and rapid-fire bullshitting. These are the very behaviors that diminish team trust AND result in products that deliver no value to anybody.
Honestly, I think a lot of this comes from the well-documented "best practices" of famous tech companies. The very IDEA that a product management interview is some kind of 4-dimensional puzzle that needs to be "cracked" is plainly fucked up and counterproductive.
It's particularly funny to me when companies embrace these manipulative, adversarial interviewing practices, then complain that product managers aren't "team players." Nooooooooooooo shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
Years ago, I was subjected to a "brain teaser" interview by [famous tech company]. What was most striking to me wasn't the question itself--but rather how the dynamic of the interview was the EXACT OPPOSITE of what good product management feels like in practice.
Any attempt I made to work in a collaborative way--or discuss *how* I would work in a collaborative way--was met with a disapproving glare and the exaggerated writing of evaluative notes. The [young, white, male] product manager interviewing me kept pushing for an "answer."
So, who thrives in this kind of interview? Folks who:
* Rush to answers
* Suck up to authority figures
* Are overconfident in their own knowledge
If those are the kinds of product managers you want at your organization... by all means.
* Rush to answers
* Suck up to authority figures
* Are overconfident in their own knowledge
If those are the kinds of product managers you want at your organization... by all means.
