Metaman in  
Technical Program Manager  

Acing the Meta TPM Interview

I commented this somewhere else, but making a post in case it's helpful to others. This post will go over what the Meta Reality Labs TPM Interview will generally go over and what the loops look like.


High level interview rounds

  • 1 technical screen followed by 5 interview loops

The technical screen will focus on your experience and ask you a variety of program management, conflict resolution, prioritization, system design, etc. However, 99% of the time, this focuses on your resume and experience, so be prepared to talk about your experience. More on that later.

The 5 interview loops (onsite interview) will focus on 5 areas:

  1. Technical - expect questions from your own experience/resume, and be prepared to talk through how how you set up the project (scoping, design, challenges, tradeoffs, etc) and delivered results. No coding involved.
  2. Solution Design - expect a system design-like question outside your area of expertise. Very common to be experience related, AR/VR related, etc, but this could literally be anything the interviewer chooses that would be considered out of domain for you. The goal is to gauge how the candidate works with ambiguity and ensuring you have a methodical approach to problem solving.
  3. Program Management - pretty straightforward, but checking your approach in setting up and managing an e2e program, including prioritization, mitigating risks, etc. Standard stuff
  4. Partnerships - How well do you work with other teams, keep stakeholders aligned, resolve conflicts, rally the team towards a common goal, etc
  5. 5. Behavioral - Do you have empathy, can you resolve conflict well, can you operate in ambiguity, and can you handle uncomfortable situations well when several parties don't agree.


So that's a nutshell of the interview loop. In terms of preparation, I highly recommend you do the following:

  1. Annotate your resume and experience, and be able to create narratives that speak to your experience, which you can use in any of the above interviews. You can use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to help with this, or the CAR method (Context, Action, Result) if it's more simple
  2. After you create narratives, find some common questions and have someone, literally anyone, ask you those questions and mock interview. This will be critical to being successful in the actual interview, as sometimes people think they know how to answer, but they actually speak their answer outloud, it's sloppy. Be concise and practice communicating your narratives and experience.
  3. If you have some $$ for a legit interview coach, definitely worth it if you're not very familiar with interviewing. I've helped numerous folks land offers at FAANG across QA, TPM, PM, and SDET. But I don't really have much bandwidth for that at the moment except friends and family.


That's a wrap :) Hope this helps.

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helluvaguyProduct Manager  
If it helps, I had tremendous help in behavioral interviews with this deck https://9to5cards.com/product/the-behavioral-interview-deck/
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