Whether you’re looking to improve your PM interviewing skills or seeking to become a better PM, one of the best ways to learn is from more experienced PMs who have previously been in your shoes.
As such, many of UWPM’s events and projects aim to help foster the product community at UW and connect students with experienced PMs — namely, our networking and flagship events and our podcast. Keep an eye on our Instagram and join our Discord to not miss any announcements :)
This edition will feature Frank Lapinski, a PM at Microsoft, who was also previously featured on our podcast episode in January. Continue reading to learn about his experiences working as a PM intern versus working as a full-time early-career PM in Big Tech and his tips on tackling a common yet challenging product interview question. Many thanks to Frank for being our guest writer and featuring on this week’s newsletter!
🗓 Upcoming Events:
UW PM Live Case Studies 👥 — Thursday Bi-weekly 6-7 PM:
This interactive initiative is your ticket to dive deep into real-world product management scenarios and interview situations, designed to immerse participants in small engaging group discussions and unveil cutting-edge topics and strategies in product management
The next session will take place on Feb 29th. Keep an eye on our Instagram for when signups for the next session come out :)
📍E7 IDEAs Clinic (in-person cohort), Microsoft Teams (online cohort)
Revamp Resume Session 🧑💻:
Trying to transition into PM from SWE? Join our Revamp Resume Session! This event will walk you through how to transform your SWE resume into a Product resume with a real example of how a student successfully did so. We’ll also share valuable tips on creating a Product resume that will stand out. Follow our Instagram to know when signups come out!
📍Location & Date TBD
🎙️ Podcast Update:
Check out the latest episode we’ve posted!
In this episode, we talk to Frank Lapinski, a PM at Microsoft (who’s featured on this newsletter!), about his journey into product management coming from a non-tech background.
📰 Tech News:
Google and Samsung have released Quick Share, Android’s version of AirDrop.
The Apple Vision Pro was launched.
🔍 Product Opportunities:
Product opportunities for Spring 2024 are still rolling out! Check out some of the top opportunities on our radar:
Match Group Product Manager Internship
Microsoft Technical Program Manager Internship
1Password Product & Ops Internship
Signify Product Management Internship (8 months)
Dayforce Product Manager Internship (8 months)
Keep checking your target companies for info-sessions and opportunities. Good luck!
🚨 Intern Vs. Full-Time Early Career PM Experience
Hi folks, Frank Lapinski here (technical product manager with a non-tech background @ Microsoft; product management recruiting coach — if you need help reach out to me via text (+1-475-221-1445), email, LinkedIn, or this form). I'll be your guest writer for this week and will be focusing on the differences between being a product management intern in big tech and what it's like being a full-time early-in-career PM.
The scope and responsibilities you have as a product manager shift and change especially as you go from an intern to a full time product manager. As an intern, you're generally considered to be more of a temporary part of a team with the chance of returning. Usually, this means you'll be given work that can easily be handed off to another PM or picked up again the next year (by you or another intern). Your project will usually have a clear goal with relatively small scope and checkpoints along the way to ensure you don't get lost in the sauce. It's a great way to get the foundations of PM down with guardrails.
However, due to the limited time frame you're at the company, the work will likely be a bit of a grind. Since you have ~3 months for all of your work, you'll have to fit in learning your product, driving progress on your project, and potentially recruiting outside of work if you're looking to receive multiple offers. From my own internship, this definitely made it a lot more stressful but still a good experience. You'll also have the benefit of having a lot of intern events so even if your work may be a bit of a grind, your expectations are lower and you should try to enjoy the internship both in and out of work. This does depend on the company culture however, so keep that in mind as well.
In comparison, as you transition to an early-in-career PM for your full-time job, you will usually have dedicated time just for ramping up and learning your product. Since you're on the team for the long haul, this will also allow you to have deeper specialization in feature areas and non-feature areas (think supportability, security, compliance, etc. for non-feature areas; the stuff that doesn't mean you have to build a feature outright). Due to this, you'll also have a chance to start driving your own initiatives. During my summer internship, I wrote a spec and did some customer interviews while trying my best to understand what my product did. Now as a full-time PM, I have seven or more different projects going on at one time with some related to features and many others related to the non-feature areas I mentioned above that keep my product going.
As you transition into a full-time product manager, you'll end up juggling a lot more balls than an intern and also learning that deadlines change quite a lot depending on the different initiatives and issues that pop up. Balancing this is one of the challenges you'll go through and likely face many times in your career. Making peace with it early is essential to being able to tell what fires need to be put out and which can be left to burn.
No matter if you're an intern or a full timer, you will still be doing core PM work though. That means you'll still be understanding customer problems, defining clear solutions, and driving clarity wherever you can.
As for how to prepare yourself for both roles, I encourage you to really spend the time digging in both as an intern and full-time Product Manager in those first few weeks. Don't just read docs or jump into the project and expect to learn along the way. Spend some time trying to get experience with the product and make sure to talk with as many folks as you can who build your product. It's better to spend the time building tangible experience and a network of people to rely on before you have seven projects on hand.
📙 Resource of the Week:
If you're currently trying to break into or are in the process of recruiting for product management (technical background or not), I'd love to help you succeed in that journey every step of the way. I've worked with 80+ students, helping them land interviews and product roles with Microsoft, Duolingo, Palo Alto Networks, PayPal, US News, and more. If you need help with your resume, interview assignments, interview prep, or just starting to plan your product management journey, I'm here to help. You can read through the solutions I offer here.
If you'd like to talk more with me about my coaching, text me at +1 (475) 221-1445, email me at nontechnicalpm@gmail.com, LinkedIn message me here, or sign up via this form.
You can find some testimonials and more information on my site here.
🧑💻 Thinking Like a PM:
In this last segment, we will leave you off with an activity to practice your analytical minds. One of the most common types of product interview questions are root cause analysis questions. Typically, you have some sort of shift in key metric to your product (i.e. MAU, Watchtime, etc.) and your interviewer roleplays as an engineer or data scientist. It's up to you to find out the root cause of the issue (or as close as you can get). One such example might be "Facebook likes are down 10%. Tell me why."
Right off the bat, you should break down that sentence. Is this Facebook classic or Facebook lite? Is this for a certain type of post on Facebook or the whole platform? Once you have an idea of the product/feature at hand, you should also slice into what is meant by likes. Is it any type of reaction or just likes? Do certain users have likes that are counted more heavily?
Once you have the foundations of what you're measuring, you should contextualize how the feature is used. What's the flow to reach this portion of the product? Who is the product important for?
After breaking this down, you'll want to create some hypotheses and ask questions to validate them. If you think the problem was caused by a bug, you would want to ask about the recent technical changes made in the backend in addition to changes to any products or tools related to the "like" feature. If your hypothesis is wrong, then you should go back to the drawing board and try again. No matter what, you want to try to drive clarity to see what's going on in this scenario. Proving what is and isn't going on is incredibly helpful for building more and more specific hypotheses. Some good angles to look build into your hypotheses include:
How global is this issue? (i.e. USA or EMEA region or all versions of the product)
Legal issues (i.e. regulation, high profile lawsuit)
Updates to the product
New features (i.e. cannabilization)
Competitors
Pricing
Internal update to how a metric is calculated
Internal update to a related feature
Support ticket trends
Telemetry trends
Trends in key metrics and related metrics
What you really are trying to do is diagnose the following three questions:
Where could this issue have happened?
If these issues occurred here, why might that be?
What else could it be?
I encourage you to work as hard as possible to disprove your hypothesis and dig down until you can't keep asking why! (I also would encourage you to think about specs this way as well. My blog includes a great example here.)
Either your interviewer will stop you or you may come to a natural stopping point. Afterwards, you'll likely want to summarize your findings, provide where you think the issue is, and good next steps to validate this hypothesis (i.e. who to talk to, how to validate said hypothesis with data, etc.).
Feel free to reply with your answers!
📌 Join our Discord Community
Want to connect with other students such as yourself interested in Product? Join our Discord Community, Invite Link Here. Use our Discord Community to connect with other students and alumni to learn more about different opportunities in Product, practice mock interviews + resume critiques and more!
👋 Feel free to reach out
Thanks for following us along this journey! We hope you learned something from this edition of the newsletter. Feel free to drop a line to introduce yourself and reach out if you have any questions.
Until next time,
- UWPM Team
 | A guest post by
|