How to successfully pass an interview for Technical Product Manager at Tinkoff? Personal experience

Part 1: Interview Process

The interview process at Tinkoff depends on the position you are applying for. As a rule, it consists of several sections where your hard skills are tested and then interviews with teams.

First, they compile your full questionnaire – in my case, they checked technical, product and managerial knowledge. Then this questionnaire is sent to teams that are looking for specialists, and if the team is satisfied with everything and they are interested in you, only then do they schedule a meeting.

This is not convenient from the candidate’s point of view, but from the company’s point of view, in my opinion, it is justified. The company cannot waste the time of department and team managers on every response; candidates’ resumes differ from real skills, so it is most likely impossible to structure the process in a large company differently.

Thanks to the article I mentioned at the beginning, I was ready for this.

Stage 0. Summary and response

On January 28, Kamilla Samokhina, author of the Product channel fit telegram channel and Product Lead at Tinkoff, invited subscribers to send their resume, and she would respond with feedback and “refer” for the vacancy they liked. I thought this was my chance, updated my resume and sent it to her. Camilla had no questions about it, she clarified the vacancies that were interesting to me and sent my resume to the HR department.

And already on February 1, HR specialist Camilla contacted me and we agreed on a call.

Stage 1. Call with HR

On February 2, we called her on Telegram. The conversation took 25 minutes, during which HR asked about my experience, the reasons for the response, and also clarified expectations for the grade and salary. I told about everything, noted that I was applying for the Senior level and outlined my expectations. After which Camilla spoke a little about the upcoming stages, we agreed on the date and time of the first interview and that was the end of our pleasant conversation 🙂

What’s interesting is that right up until the offer, there was never any talk about salary expectations. And all questions, coordination of meetings, feedback on sections were in correspondence.

Stage 2. Section on System Design

To prepare for this stage, I “diagonally” read the book “System Design. Preparing for a difficult interview,” but the online interviews on System Design on YouTube turned out to be the most useful. Thanks to them, I realized that they would expect me to provide an algorithm for solving such problems.

On February 5, an interview on System Design took place. I was interviewed by developer/team lead Nikolai from the HR department, who is testing knowledge in this section. We called via video, opened a board in Miro, Nikolai talked about the task, and for a whole hour I was engaged in architectural design.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal the task, but in essence it was quite simple. A small system, 2 user groups, several services with their own business logic, a couple of databases and one message broker. However, since it was the first time in my life that I had such an interview, I was nervous and stopped and hesitated several times. In an hour I didn’t have time to reach scaling and fault tolerance.

The interviewing developer had free time and for about 15 minutes after the interview we discussed the results and feedback. The designed architecture was viable, but the main disadvantage was precisely that we did not have time to work out scaling and fault tolerance. He advised me to broaden my horizons and read “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann.

The next day, HR sent the treasured “Based on the results of the interviews, we had positive impressions”, feedback on the results of the section and agreed on the date and time of the next section.

Stage 3. Product Cases Section

To prepare for this stage, I read the book “Cracking the PM interview” or in Russian “Career of an IT project manager. How to get a job at a leading technology company.” The book is very general, it tells you who a product manager is and what he does in different companies, but it helped me get into the right frame of mind.

On February 14 (Valentine’s Day, yes) an interview took place, Alexander, product manager of the Tinkoff Investments mobile application, spoke with me. The communication turned out to be very comfortable, in a dialogue format. I didn’t immediately understand all the questions, but in such cases he asked a leading question and I quickly grasped what he was talking about. Only once did I get very stupid and get into a mental dead end. I managed to solve all the flights in less than an hour, so for another 10-15 minutes we talked with Alexander about the company, its product and the responsibilities of the technical product.

During the section, we examined several cases and questions about them. For example, we discussed one of the features in the mobile banking application. Alexander showed a screenshot, asked how the feature should work, how to evaluate its effectiveness, user satisfaction, and also how you can influence the conversion rate – from those who saw it to those who used it. Overall, there were the usual grocery issues. If you have experience in launching, monitoring and analyzing product features, and try to create products for users, you will not have any problems with this section.

The next day, HR sent positive feedback and we agreed on the date for the next section.

Stage 4. Section on Management

This section came as a surprise to me; I couldn’t find a description on the website, so I asked HR to send the information. Fortunately, her message made everything clear:

In preparation, I re-read the DevOps Guide. And once again I was convinced that I much prefer the book “Accelerate! The Science of DevOps: How to Create and Scale High-Performance Digital Organizations,” which I read last year.

The interview took place on February 26, Alexander spoke with me, if I’m not mistaken, from the Core team of one of the business lines. At the section, we discussed several issues regarding the interaction of development teams, as well as several difficult situations related to delivery deadlines, technical debt and a non-working product. In fact, in this section, I found real experience in planning and leading development teams more useful than theoretical knowledge of DevOps.

As a result, HR sent the results of all sections to the teams and a couple of days later returned with feedback that 3 of them wanted to get to know me.

Stage 5. Team introduction section

HR sent me descriptions for all 3 vacancies:

• Technical product to the Mobile AI team (secretary)

• Technical product manager at the Basic Mobile Technologies Platform – fronts

• Technical product manager at Tinkoff Mobile

And she asked which teams I was ready to talk to. I wanted to get to know everyone, all the vacancies met my expectations and we agreed on 3 final interviews.

As a result, I only communicated with two teams – the team of secretary Oleg and the DevPlatform team. Both meetings were an hour long, where the teams asked questions for the first 40 minutes, and for the remaining time I had the opportunity to ask my own.

With the first command we did not find a “connection”. I was very nervous, went off topic and asked questions several times because I didn’t understand what the leader meant. As a result, there was a feeling that the guys were making a cool product, but I wasn’t a good fit for them and our communication wasn’t working out well.

But I liked everything with the second team. The guys talked about the team, the platform and the problems they solve. They asked some difficult questions and learned about my motivation and aspirations. And as a result, I got the feeling that I can work well with these people, the product is interesting to me and, most importantly, I can bring benefit to them.

As a result, the first team continued the search. The Tinkoff Mobile team rescheduled the meeting several times, then stopped the search. And the DevPlatform team was ready to move towards the offer, which I was very happy about.

Stage 6. Offer

A couple of days later, HR sent me a form that I had to fill out for the HR department to agree on all the details. I filled out everything and waited for approval.

A week later, we had an offer meeting – a call with HR and the managers with whom I spoke at the final interview. HR spoke in great detail about the proposed conditions, possible income for the first and second years, performance review, annual bonus, social package and other company bonuses.

The salary offer turned out to be a little lower than I wanted, but it was quite marketable and corresponded to my internal “fork”. Therefore, I accepted it immediately at the offer meeting. And in a couple of days it will be my first working day at Tinkoff.

Part 2. Conclusions and advice

What advice would I give to candidates based on the results of the completed stages:

1. Be prepared that an interview at Tinkoff is not quick. It took me 1.5 months from response to offer. If I were looking for a job here and now, I would not have gotten this position;

2. If there is an opportunity to respond not on HeadHunter/the official website, take advantage of it. From the experience of hiring for my teams, I know that a CV submitted out of turn will be looked at with greater likelihood and attention;

3. Try to keep your resume as short as possible. My 7 years of experience fit on one A4 sheet, and there is enough information there to draw preliminary conclusions;

4. Train a story about yourself. You will have to tell it several times and each interviewer should understand as accurately as possible what you are talking about – what you can do, what you have been doing, what you are striving for;

5. Look on the website or ask HR for information on how to prepare for each stage. And get ready. Interviews and their tasks are often different from real work, and being able to pass them is a separate skill. About the same as solving the Unified State Exam;

6. Reflect on your experience. What projects did you do well, where could you have done better, record your conclusions. During interviews, you will share examples from the past. And even if the experience was negative, but you drew the right conclusions from it, this will be an additional plus in the eyes of the interviewer;

7. Be honest. Your goal is to demonstrate your real skills and knowledge, and not to guess the answer that the interviewer is waiting for. Yes, you want to receive an offer, but most likely, even if you are rejected, nothing critical will happen;

8. Don't worry 🙂 For most of us, work is the main part of life. Therefore, be yourself, communicate openly and find the company and team that you really like.