I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
Had two phone interviews and then an on-site interview day. The two phone interviews were a combination of design scenarios (ie. "If you were the product manager at Facebook for a new product in the x industry", where x is an industry that isn't known to be social) and personality type questions (ie. "Tell me about impact in your career."). The on-site interview varied from understanding the health of a web application (using metrics), situational questions (ie. "How would you determine how many new users we should expect to get tomorrow?" "If an important metric drops by 50% of expected value, what would you do?"), wire-framing a new product for mobile, questions about the future of social.
There were technical questions, but no algorithm questions, coding, or distributed system level design questions which was surprising given the nature of building/designing large scale web and mobile applications.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were no surprises, unexpected questions, or incredibly difficult questions. They wanted to know how much I knew about the things I knew, which is common in a tech interview.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Sep 2012
Interview
I was surprised and give high marks for a very well-run PM recruiting process at Facebook. I had a friend there get my resume to the PM recruiter, who called within a few days. The recruiter was extremely knowledgeable and conducted a rather in-depth screening interview himself that lasted 20-30 minutes. At the end of the interview he was very forward that I passed his smoke test and needed to get in for some on-site interviews. He was very communicative over the course of the next few days (first call was on Tuesday) and set up 2 interviews by the end of that week. He called the day before the interviews to prep me.
The first two on-site interviews with PMs were much more congenial and collaborative than other BigCo PM interviews I've had. I was impressed. The personality they're looking for shines through and it's obvious that they give a good amount of autonomy and power to their PMs. The internal recruiter took 10-15 minutes to give me a tour, chat about anything, and was very informative and warm.
The PM recruiting team communicated often to let me know where they were in the process, and I had a go-ahead for 2nd round interviews within a week. Again I was prepped a day before interviews. I had 4 interviews scheduled for my 2nd round, each about 45 minutes long. Questions ranged from product/feature design to mapping the flow of interactions between people and discussing needs/motivation to general industry knowledge and strategy. None of the interviewers were hostile or cold.
Although I was not given an offer, I was again surprised and quite happy that the recruiter reached out to offer feedback. He shared details of what I did well and what I could improve on by phone.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me an area you feel you're an expert in or have a lot of experience in that has a people interaction component. Map out (using a whiteboard) and discuss the relationships and flow of interaction between people in that area.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
One of the more appropriate interviews I've had for a gig. Articulate people and very focused, I got as far as the initial screen plus two interviews with staff. They are clearly looking for people with broad vision and a proven ability to execute, and given the small number of product managers (something like 60 for a staff of 4000), they are very choosy. Also, the process happened over the course of about 2-3 weeks and, in my case, it happened remotely as I was on the east coast of Canada. I was ultimately not successful,