I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
I received an email from a recruiter. From there we setup a pre-screening phone call. That seemed to go well and I received a phone interview with another product manager. I felt that I did poorly on that but I ended up getting an offer to come onsite, which was a great experience. They brought a group of twelve other candidates on site. We stayed at a nice hotel in San Francisco. The night before the interview we got to go out to dinner with group of current APM's, really great to talk with all of them. The next day I had 5 back to back interview with a lunch break, with different managers and engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Product Design, Distributed Systems, Cultural, some programming
Smooth process starting with a 45-minute on-campus screen in their local office and then a second-round on-site interview in the NYC office. First round interview primarily evaluated product skills. Second round included a wide range of back-to-back interviews including technical, product, and fit questions as well as a non-evaluative lunch.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you describe a database to a third grader?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
I was a Software Engineering Intern the previous summer. I chose to convert to an Associate Product Manager for full-time.
They made me jump through many hoops. 2 phone interviews, 2 onsite interviews, lunch, a 3 page essay and a final interview with Brian Rakowski (VP of Android in charge of the APM program). There are even more interviews if you're not converting from an internship.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions spanned estimation, analytical and product. Gave me the same vibe as consulting interviews in the context of tech. Some sample questions (not asked in my interview but same flavor):
- Estimate the revenue of XYZ company
- Estimate the bandwidth needed if you built an optical fiber connection to a colony on Mars
- Here's a data set. Something changed and here's the new data set. Explain what happened.
- How would you improve XYZ Google product
- What's your favorite product? How can you improve it?
- How would you got about building a startup that does XYZ
- Given unlimited resources, how you fix XYZ company
- What's wrong with XYZ? If you were the CEO, how would you fix it?