My PM Interview Experience with Microsoft

When preparing for my interview at Microsoft as a Project/Product Manager I did a lot of reading online about other people’s experiences. I found them helpful and therefore will share my interview experience and the questions I was asked.

The First Interview
I attended an information session on campus about Microsoft I (obviously) decided to apply. After reviewing my resume I had an interview scheduled with a recruiter that would be at my school for a couple days. I think his name was Cyrus.

This interview I found pretty easy to be honest. There was a lot of emphasis on my past experience. Although I don’t remember everything I was asked, I do remember the following:

• Tell me about the project you’re most proud of
• What’s the best piece of software you’ve ever used? Why?
• What’s the worst piece of software you’ve ever used? What would you change? Why?
• Write a function that takes in a string and returns the number of words in the string. (I was free to use whatever language I wanted)

After the interview was over I was told I would hear back in a week or two if I made it onto the second round. I was fortunate enough to make it onto the second round and was invited out to Seattle. In my particular case I had a pending offer from Telus and so I needed to complete the process quicker then usual.

With just over a week until I had to get back to Telus (who were accommodating and gave me some extra time) and 4 exams in 6 days it didn’t leave me a lot of time. I wrote my 4th exam on Thursday morning and flew out to Seattle that afternoon. It was a lot of travel. I went from London, Ontario to Detroit to Seattle which took about 7 hours with the layover. From there it was another hour or so until I got off the plane and got my rental car (also covered by Microsoft).

I made my way to the hotel, checked in, and did a quick practice run to Microsoft’s campus to make sure I knew where I was going. It wasn’t more then 10 minutes away from my hotel. By this point it was about 1:30am local time; that was 4:30am for me. I set the hotel alarm clock as well as my blackberry’s and went to bed.

I got up around 7:00 for my interview which was scheduled for 8:15 that morning. Had a quick shower and shave, watched SportsCentre, went downstairs and had a quick breakfast and off I went. I got there about 8:00. I read a few reports where people got there early and were embarrassed to sign in that early. Don’t worry about it. In fact, get there a good half hour early as you’ll want time to play with the toys they have.

Once you check in they give you an ID badge, a card for lunch, and an envelope to file your expenses after the trip. Once you’re all checked in you are free to hang out anywhere. They have Rock Band set up, some candy and chips out… I’m sure there was water somewhere too. Personally I went straight for the Microsoft Surface. The wack-a-mole game seemed to be the crowd favourite for us.

Unfortunately I was there to interview, so I didn’t get to spend the whole day playing Rock Band

My recruiter came out to greet me. It seemed to me that her job was primarily to make sure any worries or doubts you have about Microsoft or moving to Redmond are answered and taken care of. For me, since I was coming from Canada, the worry was how the move would work. For the record, Microsoft has an entire department that will take care of the move should you choose to go out there. Another of my concerns was whether or not my girlfriend would be able to get out there as well. They were very accommodating.

Interview 1 – Chris Boyd
Chris was a project manager on MS Project. Specifically, with SharePoint. We walked the maze of hallways to his office. Everyone there has their own office – no cubicles that I saw.

Chris asked me to design a user interface for a task management program for tracking tasks related to any number of projects. After asking some clarifying questions, I sketched out my fairly standard design on the whiteboard. He asked some more clarifying questions, made me defend my design choices, and then asked me draw the database schema for that design.

After that I was asked to design what was essentially a job board for a rural area. As I worked my through it, it was revealed that the job board was going in a developing area where the people may have never used a computer before. In fact, they may not even know how to read or write.

Purdeep
After my interview with Chris I was passed just 3 offices down the hallway to Purdeep (I never did get his last name). This was probably my favourite interview of the day and also the one (not surprisingly) that I think went the best.

I was asked:

• Design an alarm clock for the blind
• Given a job queue with a priority assigned to each job, how would you execute the jobs? What if each job belonged to a group and you had 3 threads to process the job. What if there can only be one job from a group being executed at any one time?
• Describe what happens when a page is requested in your browser? Whats the difference between HTTP and HTTPS? How does SSL work?

As I mentioned, I had 4 exams just before flying out. One of them was information security in which we studied SSL in detail. I think I answered that question with more detail then he had any interest in hearing

Thomas
My next interview was with Thomas (I forget his last name). This was my lunch interview so we started by going to grab some lunch from the cafeteria there. For most of the time during lunch we just chatted away about various things. It was more me asking him questions than the other way around. After a while he asked me how I would improve the cafeteria. Once we finished lunch we went back to his office.

One the projects I had done in the past, a fantasy stock market on the Facebook platform seemed to especially interest him. We spent a good chunk of time discussing various aspects of this project. From there he asked some more questions about Facebook. He had me draw the Facebook UI on the board. We then discussed ways it could be improved and ways that Facebook could grow in the future. I had a ton of ideas here that I felt were solid answers to all his questions.

Now, I knew this was a critical point in the interview process at Microsoft. If you’re sent home after 3 interviews it’s a sign that you’re likely not getting the job this time around. When I was told I was heading to building 36 to meet with some sort of higher-up I was confident I was on the right track.

They had a campus shuttle come pick me up and bring me to my next interview. After checking in with reception and waiting in the lobby for about 20 minutes I was called back to reception and sent back to the recruitment building. Damn.

I had a quick debriefing with my recruiter and was on my way home. I wasn’t sure whether something came up where the person I was supposed to meet with couldn’t make it or if they had taken time while I waited to compare notes and decide that I wasn’t a fit for them right now I was too awesome to handle right now.

In the end I didn’t up receiving an offer. I have accepted another offer at Telus and am excited to start there in the future.

Hopefully this will help others interviewing at Microsoft in the future as so many other people’s reports helped me to prepare and know what to expect. Good luck!