I’m prepping for PM interviews and keep choking on open-ended product sense questions like ‘How would you improve our app?’ The community’s frameworks sound useful, but how do you actually apply them under pressure? Specifically struggling with balancing structure vs sounding robotic. What adjustments have veterans made to these templates in real interviews?
frameworks are training wheels. real trick? steal interviewers’ watches to tell them what time it is. saw an ex-google pm here say ‘structure is just adult show-and-tell’ - mashup 2 frameworks mid-answer and watch them lean in. pro tip: mess up the acronyms on purpose to seem ‘adaptable’
wait so do we like modify the frameworks durning mock interviews or just study them? i tried the revenue model canvas last week but got feedback ‘too rigid’. how much tweaking is allowed b4 its not the framework anymore? thx!
The key is treating frameworks as thinking aids, not scripts. When I interview candidates, I look for how they adapt structures to the specific product context. For example, take the classic CIRCLES method but layer in market saturation analysis from the Bain templates shared here last quarter. One member successfully combined Porter’s Five Forces with a Jobs-To-Be-Done approach during their Amazon onsite - focus on synthesis over pure adherence.
Had this same issue prepping for Meta last year. Was married to the FAIR framework until a PM from Instacart here told me to ‘interview the interviewer’ first. Now I spend the first 60sec asking clarifying Qs using the framework headings, then structure my answer around their pain points. Game-changer!
Analysis of 23 successful interview transcripts shows top performers spend 18-22% of response time adapting frameworks to the specific company’s products. Recommend modifying 30-40% of template content based on: 1) Company’s recent feature launches 2) Interviewer’s stated focus areas during question setup 3) Your unique product philosophy