People often ask me about my story and my journey in tech, so I thought I’d answer some of the most commonly-asked questions here.
The APM program is fantastic. The gist is that brand-new product managers do two one-year rotations on vastly different teams around Google (and around the world!) After two years, APMs usually auto-promote to full-fledged Google PMs.
A few things that set the APM program apart:
You might also like my blog post about how to prep for the Google APM interview!
For my first rotation, I was on Google Doodles. Our team is a creative bunch, with a lot of engineers and artists. Now I work on Chromebook hardware, managing our portfolio of AMD devices.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think I do nothing but run to meetings, send emails, and write Google Docs.
In a sense I do – those are the tools of the trade. But bigger picture, my work breaks down into strategy and execution.
Strategy involves deciding what we’re going to build. I work with marketers, engineers, UI/UX designers, and my team leads to come up with ideas about what our product’s next steps are. I’m currently on Google Doodles, so this involves figuring out how Doodles can, for instance, bring delight to more users. Sometimes the seeds of these ideas come from my team lead or various folks inside the team, but other times I’ll do a lot of brainstorming and pitch an idea to my manager and team lead. Google is very bottom-up, so if you have an idea you can get resources and time to work on it if you can pitch it well.
Execution involves getting the thing built. The core insight here is that you have to clear the way for the engineers to build the product as best they can. This means figuring out what’s blocking our engineers and getting it cleared out of the way. For instance, if there’s a debate among UI people about the color of a button, I talk to them and get an agreement reached so that my engineer doesn’t have to worry about that. I also handle a lot of the bureaucracy, such as getting approval from privacy and legal. This way, the engineers can focus on what they do best – developing software – and not the other stuff. (Why the focus on engineers? No matter how great your plans are, they’re useless unless your engineers can build it out. Engineers are essential.)
I interned as a PM at Microsoft before working at Google. I can’t say I’m an expert at Microsoft, but I’ll share a few of my broad insights.
Google is pretty bottom-up in that even a junior PM can propose an idea and run with it if it gets approval. That said, you have to align your ideas with what higher-ups are worrying about – if you can align your idea with higher-ups’ pain points, you can often get approval. I’ve talked to more senior PMs who say that, as long as you can convince engineers to work on your project, you often don’t even need to ask for a higher-up’s permission. So even junior PMs can think about strategy. At Microsoft, I found that higher-up PMs tend to think of what the product will be (strategy) and delegate the design of individual components to more junior PMs. Microsoft PMs do a lot of execution (from my admittedly limited experience), while Google PMs get more of a mix of strategy and execution. Microsoft higher-ups own the solution, while Google higher-ups own the problems.
Another big difference is how PMs interact with engineers. Microsoft is PM-centric in that PMs make a lot of decisions. At Microsoft, I’d work with business and legal and engineering to come up with a 20-plus page product specification that laid out everything from each word on the page to detailed mockups to accessibility and security considerations. Then we’d hand off the completed “spec” to the engineers, who would go implement it without much further interaction with us. At Google, product specs are one or two pages and highlight the gist of the idea. The details are hashed out by other folks: engineers have to decide on and implement the technical design, UI people make the mocks, and so on. Microsoft PMs decide exactly what the product will be, while Google PMs decide the “big idea” and clear the way for others to hash out the details.
Again, these are sweeping generalizations based on my limited experience. There’s no substitute for working somewhere!
The best way to get started is to read the official APM website, which has details about the program, application instructions, and tips from current and former APMs.
I’ve written an article with some advice from my point of view – but it doesn’t represent the viewpoint of Google and just represents what I think.
There’s a full-time APM role, for which applications open in early August and usually run till the end of September. There’s also a summer internship, for which applications open in mid-September and usually run till the end of October. It’s best if you’re a US citizen, but some APMs are EU or Canadian citizens, and I think it’s fine as long as you can get work authorization. (Ask a recruiter, though, since I haven’t had to deal with citizenship questions myself!)
If your college has an information session about anything Google, I strongly recommend going! You’ll get a much better understanding of Google, APM, and interview questions from the official source.
Read the official APM site for full details, but I believe you have to have work authorization for the US or EU in order to become an APM – the program doesn’t offer work visa sponsorship. Try talking to a Google recruiter if you have other questions.
(Because I get a lot of questions about this, I want to be explicit: Indian citizens can’t apply for the APM program unless you already have US or EU work authorization. Check out some other PM jobs we’ve compiled, instead.)
I’d recommend reading my article about how to prep for PM interviews.
The top books I think you should read include:
Hard to say. Most of the APMs I know have CS degrees, but several did entirely different majors. But everyone has done a considerable amount of software engineering or product management in the past, even if that’s just hacking on side projects or taking project-based CS classes. (This is just my best guess – ask a Google recruiter if you want to know for sure.)
If you ask me, having a strong technical background is important if you want to become a product manager. But you should also be able to explain tech concepts (like how the cloud works, for instance) and know trends in the tech industry. Check out my book Swipe to Unlock if you’d like to learn more about this.
I’ll mention a couple key skills:
Google does tend to take a lot of APMs – and candidates for all jobs in general – from big-name schools. But several of my fellow APMs have gone to schools with less name recognition, and they’ve thrived nonetheless.
The key: it’s not so much about school as name branding. Which markers of success do you carry? This could be going to a great university, sure, but it could also be working at a well-known company, winning a prestigious fellowship, getting into a startup incubator, etc.
But all those things usually require you to have some kind of brand marker already, so if you didn’t go to a top school it might feel like a vicious cycle where you don’t have the branding to get into the programs that would give you better branding.
I think there are two ways around this:
Sorry, I’m only allowed to refer people I’ve personally worked with in the past.
I’ve always loved teaching, so I served as a TA on CS50, Harvard’s intro computer science course. I purposely chose to teach the least advanced recitations, and it was amazing seeing the diversity of people who were taking the class not to major in CS but rather to gain a better understanding of technology. Many of my students – an aspiring engineer, a future lawyer, a political analyst, several pre-medical students – never planned to code for their day job, but they wanted a deeper understanding of how tech worked because they knew it would be crucial for their careers.
The problem was that CS50 is an intense course and requires a lot of coding. The endless, difficult problem sets were not a good fit for many students – why spend 10 hours building a web server from scratch when all you wanted to know was how the cloud worked? (And besides, CS50 never really did teach how the cloud worked.)
I realized that many people want to – and should! – understand the basics of technology, like the apps they use every day or emerging tech that could be useful for their job, but a CS class is not the best way to learn it.
When I met my coauthors Adi and Parth at Microsoft, I noticed we shared a passion for teaching and had found that CS education does a poor job teaching non-experts the fundamentals of tech that would be useful for their everyday lives. And there were no books on Amazon that properly taught tech to non-exerts: most were either “how to use an iPhone, for grandmas” or “how to code a machine learning model”, with nothing falling in the sweet spot in between.
That’s why we decided to write Swipe to Unlock. We wanted to explain tech to non-experts by breaking down the stories they might have heard on the news: ransomware scares, the “cloud” that all these businesses are adopting, how fake news might have spread on Facebook, and so on.
Cold-messaging on LinkedIn can work… if you do it right. Most people don’t.
I get dozens of messages a week asking for “a quick phone call”. Many people in competitive jobs do. The key, in my mind, is to tailor your message to the person you’re trying to talk to. Just browse their LinkedIn page. If you can talk about how your experiences relate to theirs (e.g. I worked at the same company as you, I’m also really interested in educational technology, etc.), that shows that you did your research and are genuinely interested in this person, not just their role. If you want 15 minutes of someone’s time, I’d recommend spending 15 minutes to craft a nice personalized message. That will help you stand out from the sea of copy-pasted “jump on a call” messages that people get.
A lot of colleges and bootcamps offer product management classes, and many books teach you some concepts that are useful for product management, but the best way to learn about the field is to do it.
A few ways you can exercise your product management muscle:
(You’ll notice that I do all of these things! They are great ways to keep your skills sharp, even if you’re already a PM.)
Many people suggest reading websites like Product Hunt, but nobody’s ever gotten hired for reading a lot on the internet. Build your own product instead!
Email your question to neelmehta@alumni.harvard.edu and I’ll try to add it to this page if it’s a common question.
My co-authors Parth and Adi have their own FAQ, which cover some other questions you may be interested in.
I’ll trade you my thoughts for yours. Read my book, Swipe to Unlock, leave a review on Amazon saying what you liked about it, and message me a screenshot of your review on LinkedIn. Then I’ll find some time to chat with you.
Disclaimer: everything in this FAQ is based solely on my personal experience and doesn’t represent Google’s opinions. All view expressed here are my own. If you want the official answer to these questions, ask a Google recruiter!