Why We Don’t Interview Product Managers Anymore
Job interviews are mostly nonsense. According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of “The Best places to work”, 80% of people lie during their interviews — so if that's the case, the information you’re hearing is likely fiction, or at best, inspired by real-world events. On top of that, there are now huge volumes of research from academic circles, as well as popular journals like Harvard Business Review, INC.com, and Forbes — all pointing to a simple fact. Job interviews mean you hire the best actor on the day — not the best candidate.
So we don’t do them.
Instead, we audition product managers (and Designers too for that matter) in the same way actors are auditioned for a movie. In our specially designed auditions, product managers perform real-world exercises to assess how they think about problems in an environment where nobody from the company knows anything about their experience, their background, or their formal education.