Microsoft PM New Grad Interview Experience
I received an offer from Microsoft for their New Grad PM class last November, so I figured that I’d share my interview experience to help other people in the process since many people have DMed me on LinkedIn for interview advice.
Interview Round 1: Phone call on Microsoft Teams (30 mins)
The first round was a mix of behavioral and technical questions. The interview was pretty relaxed, it was surprisingly with a Software Engineer and not a PM, but you can have your first-round with either of those, so YMMV. He asked me a couple of questions regarding my resume and past experiences, and then asked a coding question, specifically “How do you convert Excel column names into numbers?” The first round screen usually revolves around the interviewee’s resume so I was surprised to get a coding question, but I was able to answer it convincingly.
A week after my first round, I got an email inviting me for the virtual second and final round interview that took place two weeks later.
Final Round Interview: Video Interview on Microsoft Teams (45 x 4 mins)
The final round interview was a virtual interview on Microsoft Teams with check-in at 7:20 AM Pacific Time (!!!) and my interviews were held from 8 AM to 11:45 AM. I missed a great opportunity to visit the Microsoft campus in person in Redmond, Washington due to the pandemic, but I had a great experience talking to all my interviewers, the recruiters, and seeing other interviewees at the event.
First Interview:
My first interview in the final round was with a PM lead who is now going to be my future manager (!!!), and both of us instantly hit it off as we had common interests such as the same music taste and both of us support Manchester United. He helped me calm my nerves and we had a great initial chat since it was very early in the morning for both of us, and then he followed up with some behavioral and product questions.
The behavioral questions were very insightful and forced me to reflect on previous internship and project experiences. The product questions were similar to the usual favorites such as “What is your favorite product, and how would you improve it?” I answered the product questions by talking about Spotify and how I could improve it by implementing more social features into the platform as I listed out my ideas, cut them through prioritization, and then finally summarized them.
Second Interview:
My second interview was with the manager of my first interviewer, who was also a Manchester United fan, which allowed me to form a connection with her. She proceeded to ask me a lot of behavioral questions, including a lot from my past experiences, again forcing me to reflect deeply on the lessons I learned through my college years and how I have changed since then. She also explained the PM role at Microsoft to me very clearly and elaborated on what they usually look for in PMs, which helped me better understand how to approach her questions and the subsequent interviews.
Third Interview:
My third interview started similarly to the first two interviews, with introductions and behavioral questions to help me ease into the interview. The interviewer then asked me one product design question and then one scenario-based question. The product design question asked me to create a COVID tracing app specifically for buses (so that we only focus on a narrow target audience to simplify things). I answered the question with the CIRCLES framework and laid out my thought process step-by-step by identifying the customers (bus passengers and their different personas, and bus drivers) and their needs, and ending with a list of features that were the most important for the MVP.
The scenario-based question put me in a position where I was the PM at an e-commerce platform where bots had accounted for 40% of purchases made on a certain Black Friday that caused some servers to fail. My job was to identify the problem and suggest solutions, which I answered by prioritizing the identification of the problem according to the location of the servers, then addressing the security system to make it harder for bots to make purchases, and eventually to increase server space as a last resort.
P.S: CIRCLES = Comprehend the situation; identify the customer; report the customer’s needs; cut, through prioritization; list solutions; evaluate tradeoffs, and summarize your recommendation.
Fourth Interview:
The fourth and final interview is called an as-appropriate interview and apparently only given to the interviewee if 2 of the first 3 interviewers liked the candidate. The final interview is always with a senior member of the team, and mine was with a Principal PM who had worked at Microsoft for 25 years. The final interviewer also tends to have veto power over your candidacy, so I approached the final interview as a boss battle at the end of a lengthy video game.
The interviewer asked me a few behavioral questions based on my past experiences, and then we spent the remainder of the interview going through a product design question where I had to design an internal tool to monitor the supply chain of products inside Microsoft. Again, I utilized the CIRCLES framework and laid out the ideas that I had regarding how the product should look, and the interviewer seemed to really like my response. At the end of the interview, I asked the interviewer a few insightful questions to pick his brain about his time at Microsoft and the products he worked on.
Final Thoughts:
After my final round of interviews, I emailed the recruiters and thanked them for helping me throughout the process as I patiently waited for them to reach out to me. I finally heard back 9 days later with the amazing news that the team had decided to extend an offer to me. I was also provided the opportunity to talk to my future manager who fully convinced me to join the team and I signed my offer a few days later.
The resources I used to prepare for the interview process consisted of the books Cracking the PM Interview, Decode and Conquer, and the interview preparation platform Exponent and their YouTube channel. Additionally, mock interviews helped me a lot to get honest feedback and improve my interviewing skills. I also utilized Glassdoor, and articles such as this one to understand the interview process at Microsoft. These different resources helped me understand different approaches and frameworks for PM interviews and eventually helped me land a dream role.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower people around the world and hence, they look for product managers who can empathize with the customer and identify their needs before jumping to a solution. This mission is one of the biggest reasons why I decided to join Microsoft as I want to learn how to develop products for people around the world, who have various needs and use cases. Microsoft also invented the product manager role, so I couldn’t think of a better place to start my product management career than the place that started it all.
I cannot wait to get started at Microsoft and work on products that millions of people will use!
Microsoft PM New Grad Interview Experience was originally published in The Aspiring Product Manager on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.