Twitter APM Interview Cheat Sheet

Product Sense

Twitter prides itself on being a product-focused company, and its PM interviews reflect that. In addition to the usual design questions, Twitter interviews also feature product case studies that ask you to walk through everything from user groups to pain points to feature ideas.

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As politics has taken over the internet, Twitter has reaffirmed its values of honesty, healthy conversations, and responsibility. “Twitter is not a business — it’s a service with a business that keeps it going.” Don’t expect Twitter to love growth-hacking or “breaking things.” Focus instead on empathizing with users and serving the public good.

Your Product Sense Interviewer is looking to see:

• Can you put yourself in the user’s shoes and empathize with their mental and emotional needs?
• Do you think about both the creator and audience experience?
• Can you understand the unintended consequences your design decisions might have, and avoid negative externalities on society?

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Example Twitter Product Sense Questions:

• Design an app to help students prepare for standardized tests. Use this whiteboard.
• How would you improve polls on Twitter?
• Propose a new advertising format for Twitter.
• You’ve just invented a laptop that has a staggering 72 hours of battery life, compared to the usual 12 or so. How would you launch it?

Strategy

Your role as a Twitter PM will mostly focus on building things, but being able to zoom out and see how your work fits into the bigger picture is still very important. Twitter has nowhere near as many PMs as the FAANG titans, so each Twitter PM is responsible for a lot of corporate strategy.

Your Strategy interviewer will be looking for:

• Do you understand the news and journalism ecosystem (fake news, the death of local media, echo chambers, polarization, etc.)?
• Can you think quantitatively and use data to support your decisions?
• Do you understand some of the less-famous parts of Twitter, such as the advertising or developer tools?
• Do you understand consumer psychology?

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Example Twitter Strategy Questions:

• How many physical newspapers are sold every day?
• What do other social networks do to foster healthy conversation? What can Twitter learn from them?
• Google wants to build a food delivery business. What do you think of the idea?
• What should Twitter do about algorithmically-generated fake video and audio clips?

Behavioral

Empathy. Responsibility. Diversity. Perspective. Support. Truth. Transparency. Uplifting. Health.

These are just a few of the words that Twitter employees use to describe the company’s culture and values. Twitter focuses much more on the human element than the average tech company, and they want to see how you would contribute to that.

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Twitter likes to say that your team is your team, even outside of work. Think about how you could add to the Twitter community and how you’d support your colleagues.

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Expect a lot of questions that are about culture, either implicitly or explicitly, but don’t forget that you’ll get a lot of the classic leadership and teamwork questions too.

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Your Behavioral interviewer will be looking for:

• Which Twitter values resonate the most with you?
• Can you use your position at Twitter as an opportunity to more deeply empathize with people around the world (and at Twitter HQ)?
• Can you lift other people up?
• Can you work collaboratively and inspire your team to achieve great things?

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Example Twitter Behavioral Questions:

• Tell me about a time when you mentored someone.
• Tell me about a time when you had to account for diverse perspectives on your team and your product ended up becoming stronger.
• Tell me about a time when your intuition led you one way, but metrics led you another way. What did you do?
• How did you partner with cross-functional teams on a recent project? Which relationship was the trickiest to manage?