Company Research - [Product Manager Interview]

Article Highlights

• By researching your target company, you gain valuable insights into their culture, goals, and challenges, enabling you to position yourself as a strong candidate.

As you progress to later stages in the interview process, you’ll need to demonstrate a deeper understanding and interest in the company and the role. This will also help you evaluate whether this opportunity is right for you.

When doing company research for a PM role you should cover these topics:

• Company Mission
• Product Features
• Needs
• Product Vision
• Target Audience
• Valuation
• Leadership team
• Competition

Bonus:

• Positioning
• Business Objectives
• Future

Company Mission

The Company Mission can be easily found on the About Us or homepage. Mission statements can convey a company’s values, target customers, position, and how it manifests in the products they make.

Product Features

If the role is specific to a product or service (vs. business line) then you should know the 3 - 5 main features of the product. You can do so by performing a product trial, demo, watching a video, and if those are not possible, reading a white sheet.

User Needs

After determining the main features you’ll get a sense of the core user needs. Knowing the user needs will help you understand what problem it solves, why people will want to use it and what the product’s value proposition is.

Product Vision

The Product Vision is inspired and derived from the mission statement but is more specific to that product. For example, Gmail’s product vision would be Get More Done, Write Emails Fast, Send Better Emails; while Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Most products won’t explicitly state their vision however this can be deduced using good ol’ product sense from reading the product description.

Target Audience

This should be obvious if you’ve researched the mission and product vision. The Target Audience is a group of people defined by certain demographics and behavior who are most likely to be interested in the product.

Valuation

For publicly traded companies it’s a good idea to review how their stock is trending over the short-term (3 to 6 months), medium-term (6 months to 2 years) and long-term (>2 years). Each period will give you an indication of how well the company is performing. For example, companies whose stock is trending up and to the right for the last five years are a positive indicator. The key here is to see trends, not single points.

For private companies, you may be able to derive valuation from news on raises or press releases. Checking Crunchbase is a good source for this.

Leadership team

Every company will build a leadership team that drives the company’s success. As you progress deeper in the process their names and teams will likely be discussed so it’s good to know who the players are. The CEO and other executives will likely have done some form of press including business news media (think Bloomberg, Verge, CNBC), blogs, press releases and even their social channels like Twitter.

Competition

No need for a full SWOT analysis here but a cursory search for the company’s key competitors will give you insight into how they position themselves, the market they play in and what threats/advantages they hold.

Positioning

Product positioning is a key element in marketing a product and helps differentiate the product or service from the competition. Most products will have a primary and secondary audience.

Again, using product sense you can identify a product’s positioning. If that’s still not clear you can do so by answering the following question: For [group of users] that [need/want], [company/product] is a [category/solution] that uniquely solves this by [benefit].

Business Objectives

It’s a good idea to be aware of your target company’s business goals and objectives for this year. Goes without saying that business goals become strategy and then what everyone is working on achieving, so knowing this helps understand why the role is important to the company. For example, if you applied for a role at Apple in 2018 you’d likely need to discuss some aspects of privacy and security. Why? Well, if you followed any news on Apple and their CEO that year you’d hear him talk about privacy and security, all the time! So in an interview, you would raise or be prepared to discuss the topic of privacy and how important it is to you and to Apple customers.

You can identify a company’s business objectives by following their news — blogs, interviews with high-ranking people or even their shareholder calls. For private companies, this may not be as straightforward but generally, founders will communicate their business goals in promotional situations like their personal blogs or even their LinkedIn posts or tweets.

Future

When applying for a role you should not only be interested in the current state of the company but more importantly in its future, that’s where you’ll spend most of your time — in the future state — if things go to plan.

That’s why you should be thinking about how this role will grow? Where can this company be in 5 years? How is this industry changing?