Technical questions assess your ability to work with engineering teams and understand technical constraints. While you don't need to code, you should understand system design, APIs, and technical trade-offs.
Design a system to calculate the similarity between two users based on their viewing habits and explain how you would validate its effectiveness.
Design an algorithm that automatically generates subtitles for movies based on dialogue and context.
Propose improvements to Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to enhance content discovery and user satisfaction.
Explain Airbnb’s business model to a five‑year‑old.
What happens when you type in www.google.com and hit enter?
What’s the difference between SQL and NoSQL? When would you use one over the other?
Design an algorithm that predicts how much money a given user will have invested in Robinhood (i.e. the total value of all their financial holdings on the app) one year from now.
How would you implement a max-heap? How would that differ from a min-heap?
How does a “pub‑sub” architecture work? How would you implement it?
How would you explain options trading to a 5-year-old?
How does Robinhood make money?
Explain to my grandma why she should invest in crypto and how she should get started.
You are the PM of a video streaming platform. You log in one day and notice that monetization metrics have dropped by 80% overnight. What would you do?
Explain collaborative filtering to a five-year-old.
Teach me about SQL versus NoSQL databases. In which situations should I pick either one?
Design a travel feature for Facebook.
You are the PM of a video streaming platform. You log in one day and notice that monetization metrics have dropped by 80% overnight. What would you do?
What is a DAG? How would you represent a DAG in memory?
What are the main differences between Java and JavaScript?
How does [a product made by the team you're interviewing for] work? Explain it to me as if I'm an average person, not a techie.
Tell me how you’d build an AWS service that can detect fraudulent credit card transactions.
Tell me how you'd design the backend for a musicstreaming service like Amazon Music.
How do you think Amazon’s logistics and supply chain are so efficient? What is the “secret sauce,” if any?
How do you think Siri parses and acts on user input offline?
What is a DAG? How would you represent a DAG in memory?
What are the main differences between Java and JavaScript?
How does [a product made by the team you're interviewing for] work? Explain it to me as if I'm an average person, not a techie.
Explain TCP and IP to a five-year-old. How about UDP?
How does end-toend encryption work?
Explain DNS to a five-year-old. Now explain it to a professional product manager.
If Gmail is taking a long time to load, what do you think could be the problem?
Sundar Pichai has asked you to brief him on a new technology or industry trend that you think could reshape the tech industry. Pick a technology or trend and explain how it works, why you're bullish on it, and how Google could use it.
Practice technical interview questions for PM interviews. Prepare for system design, API discussions, and technical trade-off questions. Practice these questions to prepare for PM interviews at Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other top tech companies. Each question includes expert answers verified by FAANG product managers and community solutions.