The following are exercises for product positions.

Title: Technical Work Experience

Objective: You will be asked to pick a product (or feature) that you took from concept to public launch (preferably a technology-based product) and discuss this process with your interviewer.
Candidate Prep: As a product manager for a highly technical offering, it is important that you demonstrate your ability to collaborate cross-functionally, prepare and deliver on a roadmap, and negotiate between ideal-case product scenarios and external constraints. Keep in mind that you will be asked to discuss the technical aspect of the product, as well.

Title: Ops and Tools Takehome Exercise: MySQL Migration

Objective: One of the most important things we can do to drive adoption is to make database migrations frictionless. In this exercise, you will migrate a single table from MySQL to CockroachDB and describe how this process can be improved. This entire exercise should take under an hour. You will also be asked to suggest improvements to this function and write user stories to explain it.
Candidate Prep: In addition to the migration you will perform, think about how you evaluate areas of improvement, drive messaging, and ensure that expectations are aligned with reality for a product or feature.

Objective: Pick any feature from a B2B company and write a one page messaging framework about it. This should at least include: a positioning statement, target audience, elevator pitch, and three messaging pillars. You can read more about messaging frameworks on Google. (Here’s an example from Salesforce to get you started).
Candidate Prep: In addition to traditional product management responsibilities, Cockroach Labs PMs are also responsible for positioning their features and producing raw content that can be leveraged by marketing and sales to help promote those enhancements. This exercise is meant to help us understand how PMs think about audiences, differentiation, and value creation.

Objective: You will be asked to discuss product management basics and your favorite B2B product.
Candidate Prep: This exercise will gauge your excitement for product management and core competencies in the field. To prepare for this conversation, think about the product management discipline holistically and the role it plays in the products and services we use every day.

Objective: You will be presented with a spreadsheet containing fictional telemetry and tasked with navigating and visualizing the data to understand adoption rates.
Candidate Prep: This exercise will help us understand how you use data to tell a story. Feel free to ask any questions that better prepare you to present all necessary information to your audience.

Objective: Be prepared to talk about two customer requests: one that made it onto the roadmap and one that did not. You will discuss how you made those decisions and managed the customer expectations either directly or indirectly through sales or some other team.
Candidate Prep:
- Part 1: Discuss a time when a customer came to you with a feature request and you solved their underlying problem in a different way than they had originally requested.
- Part 2: Tell me about a time when you said no to an important customer.

Objective: In this interview, you will be assessed on your ability to understand complex features, break out high-level user stories, and test them both personally and with end-users.
Candidate Prep:
- Part 1: You will brainstorm 2-3 user stories for a feature with the interviewer (the feature will be provided onsite and the user stories should include the persona, the need, and the motivation). You will walk through how you, as a product manager, would create a testing environment for confirming that the user stories were implemented properly and what areas you think would pay special attention to.
- Part 2: How would you get customer feedback for this effort in order to increase the chance that it solves the original pain point? At what points during the product development cycle would you get this feedback? How would you collect this feedback in a way that was helpful to engineers?