I applied online. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2025
Interview
The recruiter was good, however the product sense interviewers (2 of them - one was interviewer and the other was observer) were bunch of inexperienced kids who were expecting a mold-cut answer. They did not have any followup questions, not teased out any section of the answer. And most of the time, they were very curt in their responses and their behavior was as if written off from the beginning of the interview. Not a good experience at all.
It is important for the folks on the other side of the table to be more humane and try to get the knowledge they are seeking. Just because you are not from FAANG company does not mean you do not deserve respect during the interview.
Went through recruiter screening and first case interview. Case interview was tough, relies on you having rehearsed a structure and practiced a lot (which I didn’t). Open ended, and very vague.
Advised that the process was 5+ weeks long. Lots of stages. Seems bloated and slow - not promising if you want to join a fast moving company.
Did the assesmsent first, it was straight forward, string parsing and authentication question, was very long, Make sure to understand the question properly before you start. It took about 40 mins to type my code out, didnt have a lot of time to debug afterwards
Recruiter is very clear about process. Interviewing is very time consuming. There are various phases. Screening is the first step and then you go into the interview cycle where various elements of the PM role are analyzed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About products I liked, the expectation was that I would be able to talk about them with a broad product sense.