Product Interview Pro-Tip

The most important thing you can do to prepare for a product interview is to use the product.

Don’t believe me? Think about the issue from a behavioral psychology standpoint.

Let’s look at the following scenario: Pretend I’m your interviewer. I work as a data scientist at LinkedIn and I spend over eight hours a day thinking about how to grow and improve messaging between users. I run A/B tests, measure growth benchmarks, test different designs, run thousands of SQL queries and analyses, and have now been pulled into an interview.

What is expected of the data science candidate here?

Given that my coworkers are smart and approachable, and I am able to bounce some good ideas on InMail and other LinkedIn messaging features off them, a future ideal candidate should also have these qualities.

Is it a realistic expectation that the data science candidate in front of me has thought about LinkedIn messaging as much as my coworkers have? Probably not.

As an interviewer, I judge candidates against all the other people I have interviewed, as well as the data scientists that I work with.

Whenever you are interviewed, remember that your interviewer is testing you on knowledge you don’t have because you have never worked at their company! In order to catch up, you need to do as much product research as possible.

How to “use” the product

Here, we might say, “But I already use LinkedIn all the time! I’ll ace the interview.”

However, thinking about the product as a person who works at the company is very different from thinking about it at as a user who interacts with it regularly. While I may use LinkedIn to browse articles and connect with other professionals, I don’t use it in a way that I am mindful of which LinkedIn features have the potential for growth in Q3. It’s the difference between using a calculator and knowing the laws of arithmetic.

Understanding a company’s product from a business perspective is imperative to connecting with employees in technical and product discussions during the interview.

Some ways to do this would be to guide our thinking with a few questions.

For example, with LinkedIn, we can brainstorm:

The faster we start treating an interview like a business consultation, the better prepared we’ll be for a product interview.

The faster you begin thinking like someone who already works there, the more likely you’ll be seen as a great candidate and future co-worker.

Do your research and solve the same problems they are solving.