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With billions of users across it's suite of products, few companies can compete with the sheer impact a product career at Microsoft can offer. Microsoft hires approximately 400 to 500 PMs per year across various offices in the United States however they receive thousands upon thousands of applications.
The main difference between the Product Manager and Program Manager roles is that Product Managers do not go as deep into technical requirements when defining the product roadmap and working with design & engineering. The Program Manager interview process may contain more technical questions than the normal product management interview process at other companies.
Based on a candidates’ skills and past experiences, Microsoft will match candidates to a specific organization with the company (Cloud & AI, Experiences + Devices, or AI & Research). All interviewers test for the same skills at Microsoft. That being said, since you will be matched with interviewers from a particular org, you may see more questions about the products the org works on.
Week 0
Submit your resume and get referrals.
Week 2
Phone interview covering a range of behavioral and technical questions.
Week 4
Four 45-60 minute onsite interviews with PMs, one senior PM, and one senior executive. Unlike most other companies, Microsoft’s onsite questions are mostly behavioral, though you will also get some product design, technical, strategy, and estimation questions. You may also meet a “stress interviewer” who’ll evaluate how well you work under stress. Finally, if you perform well, you may be invited to an “as appropriate” or “as-app” interview at the end of the day. Use this final interview to ask questions about Microsoft and your role, and to demonstrate your passion for the industry, product management, and Microsoft as a whole.
These are the classic, bread-and-butter PM interview questions. They ask you to design a new product that your company (whether real or fictitious) is launching. You’ll likely get several of these throughout your Microsoft interview process. The most important part of these questions is having a structured approach without explicitly using a framework. Spouting a memorized framework from one of the famous PM interview prep books will just make you look amateur or robotic.
Microsoft uses product design questions to see if PM candidates can think structurally and solve customer pain points.
These questions are less common but pretty hard. They involve “root-causing” a problem that you identified in the metrics for a hypothetical product. Sometimes these questions will ask how you respond to problems that arise while you’re leading the team to deliver a product. Think of them as, “something went wrong — how do you handle it?”
Microsoft wants to see how you will perform under pressure and "put out fires", something PMs have to do all the time.
These questions are the classic behavioral questions: asking you for a story about when you showed leadership, drive, teamwork, communication skills, and so on. They seem relatively easy, but being able to give an inspiring and exciting answer can really set you apart from the dozens of other candidates who gave generic answers.
Microsoft wants to know whether you will be a good fit on the team. Are your stories engaging, memorable, and filled with emotion? Have your life experiences prepared you for this job? Will you be a collaborative team player?
Microsoft is a company with a large offering of products, some more technical than others, like Azure for example. Microsoft technical questions generally fall into two buckets: coding and system design. While the level of difficulty in technical questions differs depending on the interviewer, org, and team, in general interviewers ask technical questions based on the candidates’ resume. In addition to general algorithmic questions usually asked of candidates, sometimes candidates will be asked infrastructure related questions as well.
While you don’t need to know how to code, you need to understand how technology (especially the tech your team uses) works under the hood. That way you'll be able to work effectively with engineers on your team.
You find a paradox in Uber vs. Lyft driver ratings. How?
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Created with the help of 15 current and former Microsoft Product Managers, including 8 Principal PMs and 3 GPM hiring managers
14 hours of video lessons
Microsoft Company Level Strategic Overview & Monthly Updated Most Common PM Interview Questions
Lifetime access
Tax deductible expense under continuous education category (USA)
In our Flagship Microsoft PM Interview course, you will start off by learning Microsoft’s Big-Picture 10-Year Strategy, based on our conversations with product leads from across the company, and tear down the roadmaps for Azure, Office, Teams, Dynamics, the Power Platform, GitHub, VSCode, Xbox, and more.
Then, we will give you a refresher on the art of interviewing covering everything from white-boarding to body language. We’ll go over what types of product, analytical, technical, and behavioral questions you are most likely to get asked at Microsoft and then walk you through the concrete things that Microsoft interviewers are taught to look for in your response for each question type. We’ll also show you tons of mock interview examples of 10 out of 10 answers with expert interviewer commentary along the way.
Finally, we will share a monthly updated list of interview questions that our team members and past customers have actually gotten during their recent Microsoft PM interviews. With this course, you can take luck out of the equation for getting your dream Product Manager job at Microsoft!
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