Learn A Consistent Method For Answering Prioritization And Trade
In this article, weve outlined a step-by-step method you can use to solve prioritization questions. Wed encourage you to first memorize the basic steps, and then try solving a couple of the sample questions on paper.
This will help you to understand the structure of a good answer. This is a good first step, BUT just knowing the method is not enough, as you also need to be able to apply the steps in interview conditions.
List Of Practice Questions
Now that youve got a framework in mind, use it to practice some real interview questions that were asked in past interviews at big tech companies. Here is a list of prioritization questions from PM interviews at , , , and Lyft, according to data from Glassdoor.com and Blind.
Example prioritization interview questions
- Imagine youre a PM at a startup that works with big data from the NHL whats the first product you would ship?
- How do you build a roadmap?
- How do you prioritize what to build?
- If you have projects A, B, C, how do you prioritize them?
- How do you prioritize in your current role?
- You are the PM for Facebook live what features would you prioritize?
- You are the PM for Facebook pages what features would you prioritize?
- You are the PM for Facebook posts what reactions should we add next?
What Are Prioritization And Trade
These terms often get used interchangeably when people talk about PM interviews, so well start by clarifying what we mean by prioritization and trade-off.
Analyzing trade-offs is key to the decision making process for PMs, and so questions that involve some consideration of trade-offs will come up throughout the interview process. You must be able to identify the downsides of your choices, and why they are outweighed by the advantages. For example, when answering metric definition questions, one aspect of your answer will be examining the weaknesses of your chosen metrics, or, for product strategy questions, the disadvantages of your solution.
Meanwhile, prioritization questions specifically center on trade-offs, frequently involving product features. For example: You are the PM for Instagram posts what features should we prioritize next? Questions like this test how well candidates can identify customer needs when it comes to picking the most important features and/or building out a product roadmap. Theyre all about trade-offs, hence why they are called trade-off questions in some interview formats, such as in the the .
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Common Behavioral Interview Questions
Google has compiled their own list of behavioral interview questions that their hiring managers use in interviews.
Lets go through them.
Describe your work process for ____.
While there are no wrong answers to this question, it can be used to gauge how your experience impacts your day-to-day life as a developer. A good answer dives into your workflow process, tools, and ability to work on a team.
Tell me about a time when you took a risk and failed.
This question provides insight into how you learn and approach difficulty. A good answer demonstrates honesty and active learning in the face of failure.
What is an accomplishment that youre proud of?
This question is used for building diverse teams. Google is looking for your specialties, sense of success, and your values in the long term. A good answer looks beyond the accomplishment and prods at what it means about you as a person.
What is the most complex thing you know a lot about? Teach me about it.
This question looks at your skills, communication skills, and ability to explain complexity to others. A good answer focuses less on information and more on the effectiveness of your teaching style.
If you join, how will you impact your team?
This question looks at your ability to fit with others in a structure. A good answer shows that you did research on Googles values. Top answers speak to Googles goals.
Tell me about an unstructured environment youve worked on.
What does being Googley mean to you?
What scares you?
Land Your Dream Job As A Software Engineer At Google
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Ux Engineer Interview Questions
What Does A Google Software Engineer Do
Working at Google is more difficult than its interviews. As a software engineer, youâll have much more responsibilities, and youâll work on, not limiting to, the following things:
- Write code
- Run Tests and debug failures
- Review peerâs code changes
- Read and write bug reports
- Debug the problems which arise in production
- Read and write design documents
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How To Test If Your Preparation Is Good Enough:
Leetcode is one platform that can give you a good insight into your preparation level. Try to achieve the below targets for at least 80% of the problems that you attempt:
- For Medium level problems, try to solve them within 20 minutes and in two attempts.
- For Hard level problems, try to solve them within 35 minutes and at max in three attempts.
If you are not achieving both of these for most of the problems, youll need a bit more practice. And if you are solving most of the problems in this 20/35 mins time frame, you are very likely to clear any company that you appear for, from the DS/ Algo standpoint.
How Is The Google Interview Different From Other Companies
Google isnt shy about sharing their hiring practices. In fact they have a whole page dedicated to exactly that.
The interview process begins with at least one phone screen and, if successful, a series of onsite interviews. The Google phone screen and onsite portions are fairly typical across the board of technical interviewing, but the process at Google is unique in a couple specific details:
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How Did I Crack Interviews Of Google Facebook Amazon And How You Could Do It Too
In this article, my aim is not to tell what questions I was asked as that might not help you a lot. Here Ill try to focus on how I prepared and what worked for me. You might want to try the same if you are targeting any FAANG or a similar company.
There are three main skill sets that all of these companies test the candidates on:
For each of these skill sets, Ill try to cover the below three aspects that would be important for your interviews:
What Does Google Look For In A Candidate
Cognitive ability. General cognitive ability refers to your problem-solving skills, abstract thinking, curiosity, and willingness to learn. Google looks for smart people who can think complexly about themselves, their teams, and their projects.
Googleyness. Like all organizations, Google has a specific company culture, and they look for candidates who mesh well with their values. Googles main focus is on people they care about inclusivity and the improvement of human life while remaining ethical. Google is known for small teams and a laidback environment to encourage creativity, innovation, and open communication.
Leadership skills. Google hires candidates with emergent leadership skills. For Google, leadership is the ability to step in and out of difficult problems when you are needed while promoting ethics and safety. Google also looks for those who empower others to self-organize and foster open communication.
Technical skills. Google hires candidates with the strongest coding abilities, and they assess technical skills mostly on conceptual understanding, not memorization. They assess coding skills on the following topics:
- Mathematics
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How To Prepare For Google Software Engineer Interview
Knowing what concepts to cover and dedicated practice are key to preparing for Googleâs software engineering interview. Hereâs what you must cover:
- Be familiar with at least one programming language and object-oriented programming concepts.
- Understand how different algorithms work and their complexities.
- Solve popular problems on hashmap, stack, queues, linked list, etc.
- Learn simple and discrete math problems like probability and statistics.
- Understand the concurrency, processes, and threads related to operating systems.
- System design questions that help you to showcase your problem-solving skills in real-world problems
Head over to the Learn and Problem pages to brush up on your basics and practice popular coding problems.
Practice With Yourself Or With Peers
A great way to practice answering prioritization questions is to interview yourself out loud. This may sound strange, but its an excellent way to improve the way you communicate your answers during an interview. Play the role of both the candidate and the interviewer, asking questions and answering them, just like two people would in an interview.
If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that’s a great option too. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with PM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process. You can also find peers to practice with on our new PM mock interview platform.
In addition to practicing by yourself, and with peers, it can be a huge advantage to do mock interviews with experienced PM interviewers.
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Automated Interviewing With Coding Challenges
Unlike the , where the initial assessment is a phone screen, Amazon expands this assessment to sometimes include a coding challenge.
Some interviewers prefer this method, as the performance anxiety of interacting with another person is absent, and the only requirement on your end is to write code that executes correctly and efficiently.
This is also positive for Amazon, as they do not need to expend resources on conducting 30-45 minute interviews with candidates. Furthermore, they can also expand their reach substantially, as this process is somewhat automated.
Oftentimes, these coding challenges are driven through an engine similar to that of HackerRank, where your code is automatically analyzed for syntactic correctness, efficiency, and correctness for the task at hand. This gives a better signal to the interviewee about how well they are performing during the interview itself.
While all of these coding assessments will have instructions, they will often mimic those of HackerRank insofar as actually using the same submission and judging criteria.
Therefore, it is most likely a good idea to play around with the HackerRank interface, practicing a few problems to ensure that you do not get tripped up on the interface itself. This way, you can then just focus on solving the problem.
How To Nail The Amazon Interview: A Practical Guide
Amazon is one of the top tech companies in the world. According to a , Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States and stands globally with an employee headcount of 566,000 as of 2018.
Working for a global company that serves millions of customers every day is an exhilarating prospect. Knowing that the code you write could have such a large impact can be quite enticing for many developers.
On top of that, Amazon enjoys many of the same perks that the big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, etc., enjoy. Numerous company benefits including the ability to work remotely and competitive salaries, among others are some of the reasons that may compel you to throw your hat into the ring.
If you are intrigued by what Amazon is offering, then youll need to be able to jump the Amazon Interview hurdle. Mastering this interview is the barrier that stands before you and working for one of the largest and most prestigious tech companies.
In this post, we are going to be outlining how to prepare for the Amazon technical interview. We will be highlighting some of the key differentiating factors for Amazon and how these compare to other, more standard technical interviews.
In this post, I will cover:
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How To Answer Prioritization Questions
A common mistake candidates make when answering prioritization questions is to provide an unstructured answer. In this next section, well walk through a step-by-step approach you can use to avoid that pitfall.
Here are the steps we suggest you take when answering a prioritization question:
Well break down these steps with an example answer in section 3, but first lets investigate the RICE framework.
Do Not Mess Up The End:
A Google interview generally takes 45 minutes to one hour. At the end of the interview you are usually asked if you have any questions that you would like to ask. It is not mandatory to ask questions, but doing so is alright.
Do not make the mistake of asking So how was my interview or how did I do. When they urge you to ask questions they usually mean questions pertaining to the company like how is the work environment, what are the work hours etc.
So you could think about the questions you would like to ask in advance so that during the interview your mind does not go completely blank. Remember the last few words that you say are going to create a lasting impression in the mind of the interviewer and therefore you should continue to have your wits about you even after the interview questions are asked.
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Tips For Practicing Coding Challenges
There is no shortcut or magic wand for practicing coding challenges. Here are some basic tips to guide you through the preparation stage.
Keep time in mind. The coding interview will be timed, so its important to prepare with that in mind. If you are used to preparing under a time constraint, it will be far less stressful during the actual interview.
Know your weak spots. As you prepare, take note of your weak spots. Everyone has them. Google has stated that they care about your thought process, so if you come up against a weak spot, talk through it. This will demonstrate your eagerness to improve.
Know the common pitfalls. There are three big pitfalls when it comes to a Google interview: not knowing the Big-O complexity of an algorithm, having no knowledge of Googles expectations, and not articulating your problem-solving process. Keep these pitfalls in mind as you work.
Articulate your process. Google wants to hear about your thought process. As you practice, get used to explaining why and what you are doing. Those with a clear sense of how they work stand out.
Behavioral interviews are often overlooked by software development candidates. In reality, this is the interview that sometimes will make or break you as a candidate. Google cares deeply about their values, so if you come unprepared for these questions, theyll notice it.
Keep Practicing Your Preferred Language
Mastery of your chosen language is essential to succeeding in Googles interview questions. Educatives Paths provide dozens of hands-on, in-browser practice problems to help finetune your coding skills.
Practicing for coding questions takes a lot of time, effort, and focus. Lets break down the top Google coding questions as well as actionable advice to prepare.
We will outline the top 15 coding questions to get you familiar with the kinds of questions expected of you. To see detailed answers, check out part 2 of this series,
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Do Not Believe Everything You Hear From People:
There are numerous people out there who are always willing to give you advice, whether or not you ask for it. Do not believe everything you hear. Sometimes people will tell you to prepare answers to the questions like
Where do you see yourself in twenty years
Why do you want to be a part of the Google family?
Dont bother yourself thinking about answers to questions like these.
The interviewer will be an experienced professional who will not waste time discussing things like this. So listen to the advice people are willing to give you but dont believe every word of it as if it were Gospel truth. Though their may be some open ended questions like what are some of your ideas for improving an existing Google product or What were some of the biggest technical challenges that you faced in your previous work place.
How To Prepare:
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