The goal of what started as a little writeup and ended up as a full post is to explain when you probably want to pause, and when you probably want to brainstorm out loud instead.

I recommend pausing for questions where the answer is subjectively based on your life, and brainstorming out loud when answers are making a claim about what’s objectively right.

When to pause

By pausing, I mean politely asking your interviewer for some time, thinking of a sensible answer, and then starting. For example, I might reply to a question saying “That’s an excellent question! I’d like to take 20 seconds to structure my answer. Is that OK?”

Example questions based on your life would be questions like “What qualities does your ideal boss have?” or anything from the “Tell me about a time you…” family. These are based on your life experience, and the interviewer is in no position to argue with what you’ve experienced in your life.

The goal in pausing is to allow you time to think of an excellent, structured answer, which you might not be able to do if you start talking right away. If a great answer occurs to you right away, by all means skip the pause.

When to brainstorm out loud

By brainstorming, I mean sharing multiple possible answers out loud as you think of them, explaining to the interviewer why each is good or bad, and then selecting one response. This is similar to what happens in your head during a pause, but you’re showing that process to the interviewer in this case.

An example questions that forces you to make claim about what’s right would be “What quality is most important in a product manager?” Unlike the previous question, the interviewer can absolutely disagree with you here. Other questions, like “Design a better elevator for the blind”, still force you to make a claim about what’s right – there are many good answers to these design questions, but on some level your answer has to clearly be right for other people, not just yourself.

If you make a claim about what’s right, and it doesn’t make sense to the interviewer, they’ll usually think less of you. This is why you brainstorm out loud. If you walk the interviewer through your thought process, two great things happen.

First, by showing the interviewer the logic behind how you’re thinking, they’re less likely to disagree with your eventual answer. For example, if someone asks me “What quality is most important in a product manager?” and strongly believes the answer is “user empathy”, than if I simply state “prioritization”, the interviewer is less likely to agree with the answer. However, if I instead said “There are a lot of key qualities that initially come to mind, so I’m going to brainstorm a few and then pick one”, then in the process of my exploring those options the interviewer would see why prioritization is so important to me relative to other goals.

Second, you can show useful skills along the way by brainstorming. By giving a good out-loud brainstorm, I can demonstrate creativity and an ability to think about trade-offs, which are great qualities for most tech jobs.

It’s great to read about how to do product manager interviews better, but few things will help you improve more quickly than practice interviewing with people who understand how product management interviews work.

If you’re looking to get feedback on how to improve, I offer a live course in how to improve your interviewing as well as one-off mock interviews with extensive feedback, but to put feedback into action you’ll need to practice. Below are three of my favorite resources for finding product management interview practice partners. In all cases, it’s conventional to spend half the time interviewing your practice partner, and half the time having your practice partner interview you.

StellarPeers

This free site consistently has active PM job search candidates looking for practice partners, and is the first place I recommend you look for practice partners. There is a short post-signup delay while your profile is manually approved, but otherwise it’s pretty pain-free. Several of my clients have had positive experiences with the site and none have reported it being negative.

As of November 2018, this is my highest recommendation for where to look for practice partners: it’s free and has good activity.

Product Management HQ

PMHQ is a paid (I’m not affiliated) Slack community for product managers and PM job seekers. The cost to join, as of November 2018, was a one-time fee of $25.

This community mainly focuses on PMs who already have jobs, and covers a lot of topics about getting better as a PM. However, there are chat rooms for resume review, job openings, and practice interview partners. Generally, this is an active place to find practice partners, but it can be slow at times. Several of my clients have had positive experiences with the site, but a few have complained of low activity in terms of practice partners.

PM Interview Practice Partner Community

Lewis Lin is a career coach who’s written a lot of great material on how to improve at PM interviews, specifically focused on large ultra-competitive companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This extremely active Slack community includes many people looking for practice interviews in the specific formats those large companies focus on. I’ve had a few clients report positive experiences with finding practice partners here, and none complain of any issues.

Recording yourself

If you’re not already giving yourself feedback, start here. Many people practice questions out loud, but don’t systematically examine their answers, which is a mistake because you can’t both give a great answer and give a great self-critique at the same time. Record your answer using your phone, watch it right away, and figure out areas to improve.

Tracking your job search is incredibly important to succeeding. I try to avoid sending people to this page without attempting to convince them first, so if you’re curious why this matters, please get in touch with me and I’d be happy to share why.

I made this tracker when I was raising venture capital for a startup in 2014, modified it for my own job search in 2016, and have shared it with dozens of people since then.

Here’s my job tracker spreadsheet: 

Please make a copy of it and make it your own! If you have any feedback on how to improve it, I’d be happy to modify it to help out the other people who use it in the future.

Updated November 2018.

Once you’re convinced that informational interviewing is an important part of your job search, the natural next question is how to get informational interviews. An informational interview starts with reaching out and asking for one, and unless you have a personal connection, reaching out usually starts with finding an email address.

Please note many of these tools have very broad permissions to access your data, so you might want to turn off their Chrome extensions when you’re not actively using them.

Here are the tools I recommend using to find their email addresses, so you can reach out and make a personal connection before applying:

Tools I’ve personally had positive experiences with:

• Top recommendation: Findthat.email has a great success rate and, unlike ContactOut, doesn’t require that you use a work email address as of November 2018. I’d check this one out first, and only if you use up your free credits try another service.
• ContactOut is a very useful Chrome extension that gives you email addresses for most people when you’re browsing their LinkedIn profile. I’ve had fantastic results with this service, but they don’t support free accounts for common email domains like @gmail.com, so you’ll want to use a work email you have access to or a personal domain (like @yourname.com), or if you have neither get a friend’s help for the login setup and email confirmation.
• hunter.io is a bit harder to use well, but doesn’t have the same possibly privacy concerns as some other tools on this list. With a free account, you can check what a company’s email format is from the home page, and then you can use their email verifier to see if your guess has a high chance of being correct.

Tools I haven’t tried yet, but have seen mentioned positively at least 3 times:

• Nymeria is another option – I’m not sure if it starts as free or $9/month, but I’ll be checking this out in the future if I run out of other options. Many of these tools are trying to sell to sales teams or recruiters, so the price is very high after the free trial, but their lowest plan is very affordable.
• Interseller is targeted at sales teams, so they have a weeklong free trial for finding emails, but after that the lowest price is $50/month.
• RocketReach has been highly recommended to me, but only has 5 free lookups per month, and the lowest paid plan costs $49/month.
• Rapportive was one of the best tools for finding emails before it was acquired and changed by LinkedIn. Now, you can’t enter email addresses directly, but if you have the plugin installed and enter an address in Gmail, it will populate a picture/data if the email address is known to LinkedIn. So, by addressing a Gmail message to a few guesses in a row, you can try to find an address.
• Mailtester is a free tool for helping confirm your guesses at someone’s email address, but doesn’t help you tell what to guess.

As a final note, the best tools to find contact information change rapidly, so if one of these isn’t working for you, or you find a great alternative of your own, please let me know and I’ll update the list!

Informational interviewing is one of the most powerful ways to succeed in career selection and job searching, and your first impression for those informational interviews is often made through an email introduction. This post is a comprehensive guide on how to make excellent forwardable introductions, which should start things off on the right foot with your interviewee and make the friend who connected you happy to make more introductions.

Like most recommendations in the Unusually Difficult Guide to Job Searching, the strategy below takes more effort than most job seekers commit, and has many more successful outcomes than doing things less thoughtfully.

Read on for a definition of a forwardable introduction. Or, skip to:

• Bad and good examples of a how to request an introduction
• The most important things to make sure you do when writing one
• Ways to improve once you’ve mastered the basics

What is a forwardable introduction?

As you network to learn more about the job you want and increase your chance of getting it, you’ll often face a scenario.

Your friend, who I’ll call “Friend Freddie”, knows someone you want to talk with, who I’ll call “Knowledgable Katie.” A forwardable introduction is an email you send Freddie to pass along to Katie. To succeed, that email needs to convince Freddie to send it to Katie, and it also needs to convince Katie to talk with you.

Bad and good examples of how to request an introduction

Bad: ask for an introduction

This bad example is only one email, which is almost always worse than the two we see in the good example.

To: Freddie
Subject: Intro to Katie

Hi Freddie, great running into you on Friday! Could you introduce me to Katie like we talked about?

Thanks a lot!
Matt

Good: make the introduction yourself

To follow the recommended tactic, send two emails, one after the other. Draft both emails before sending either, then send them both a few seconds apart.

The first email is to Freddie, giving him context and thanking him for helping you out.

To: Freddie
Subject: Intro to Katie

Hi Freddie, great running into you on Friday! I appreciate your offer to introduce me to your friend Katie. I think I could learn a lot about product management from her, and she used to work at Company X, which I’m starting to interview for now.

To make this as easy as possible for you, I’m now sending you a forwardable introductory email addressed to Katie. If you feel it’s good enough to send along, great; otherwise, let me know and I’ll make some edits.

Thanks a lot!
Matt

The second email is sent to Freddie, but meant to be forwarded to Katie without him making major changes. It doesn’t directly address Freddie at any point.

To: Freddie
Subject: Katie, about your product management experience

Hi Katie, I’m Matt, a friend of Freddie’s. When I asked him about the best product managers he knew, you were the first person he thought of. I’m applying for product management roles now, and I’d appreciate the chance to meet you, learn about your experience, and ask you some questions about Company X, where I’m now interviewing. I’d also be happy to help you out in whatever way I can, especially if I can help you find people to fill any open roles on your team.

I imagine you’re very busy, so if you’d like to let me know what neighborhood is most convenient for you, I can pick a place and meet you there. I’m available 5PM or later Tuesday, 7AM-9AM Wednesday, or anytime Saturday. If you’re willing to meet, what time and neighborhood would be best for you?

Thanks for considering,
Matt

The most important things to make sure you do

The most important thing you can do is make the whole process easy for Friend Freddie and Knowledgeable Katie. Think about how much work they have to do if you send the “bad” email:

• Freddie’s got to take time to compose an email explaining to Katie who you are and why you want to talk with her.
• Katie has to try and figure out who you are; consider whether she wants to talk with you at all; select where and when to propose talking; and decide if she wants to meet, have a video chat, or have a call.

Since this informational interview isn’t the most important thing in Freddie’s or Katie’s life, thinking through those challenges will take them a while (if they don’t just ignore the request), and Freddie probably will not want to make more intros for you in the future.

In contrast, if you look at the “good” example above, you’ll see that all Freddie has to do is forward along the second email, and Katie has everything she needs to accept a time and place without thinking much.

So, if you do nothing else:

Send two emails. One gives your Friend Freddie an explanation and thanks him, the other tells Knowledgeable Katie why you want to talk with her, and suggests how and when you’ll talk.

Give Freddie enough context to be able to send an email to Katie within a minute. If he feels like he has to edit your forwardable email, you could have made it easier.

Give Katie enough context to be able to book a meeting with you after receiving the first email. She shouldn’t have to ask Freddie who you are, ask you what you want to talk about, or propose times and places.

Ways to improve once you’ve mastered the basics

Make sure to convey a compliment. When emailing Knowledgeable Katie, convey something nice that Friend Freddie said about her when you proposed the meeting. This makes Freddie feel positive about enhancing the relationship with Katie, and is flattering for Katie. I often ask the Freddies in my life for people to connect with by asking questions like “who’s the most persistent salesperson you know?” or “who knows healthcare startups best among your friends?”, so the compliment is built into the request.

Include a link to your profile in the first sentence. There’s a big difference between “Hi, I’m Matt.” and “Hi, I’m Matt.” Including a link to your LinkedIn profile or website allows Katie to learn more about your background easily.

Offer to help Katie in a specific way. Make the meeting easier to accept by showing you’re willing to help her. “Happy to help with anything you need” can seem insincere, so suggest a specific possible need like finding candidates for vacant roles on her team or introducing her to someone in your network with similar interests.

Choose which kind of meeting you ask for deliberately. High-commitment meetings like in-person breakfast have a lower chance of being accepted, but you might be able to build a better relationship than a phone call. When choosing between in-person meal, in-person coffee, video chat, and phone call, consider how much you’d value this relationship with Katie and what she’s likely to accept based on the strength of her relationship with Freddie.

At the end of your email to Katie, thank her for considering. It’s lower-pressure and more respectful to thank someone for considering speaking with you than to assume they’re going to do it.

Final request

If you have any tactics for sending forwardable introductions that work well which I’m missing here, please let me know! I’ll add them to this guide and credit you for your help.

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