Netflix Product Manager Interview Guide

The Netflix PM interview loop typically goes through these stages:  

1: Application screen

2: Recruiter phone screen

3: Hiring manager screen

4: Culture fit screen 

5: Take-home assignment (loop dependent)

6: Onsite or virtual loop, 4-5 interviews

7: Presentation (loop dependent)

8: Debrief and decision

9: Offer and compensation

Netflix doesn’t publish official round names so we’re going by what candidates and coaches use colloquially. While the entire process takes anywhere between 3-6 weeks, the most unpredictable internal stuff can throw a wrench in the timeline.

Instead of having a team matching phase at the end of the interview like most companies, Netflix reads your application against a specific opening. A match to this gets you into the loop. Netflix historically asks for 5-8 YOE in a product or a related business area but hasn’t officially released a leveling ladder.  We suggest you go by the title on the posting you’re applying to.

If you’re in the application stage, we recommend reading Crafting the ultimate personal story to land Product Management Jobs.

This 30 minute call will cover your background and whether your experience maps to what they’re looking for in a PM. Some candidates said their recruiter was already checking for culture fit this early in the loop.

Expect straightforward questions like:

• Tell me about a product you’ve owned end-to-end. What kind of revenue impact did you drive?
• What product are you most excited to work on at Netflix?
• Are you interviewing anywhere else? What’s your timeline like?

Comp expectations can come up in this call and it helps to know that Netflix has published that their philosophy is personal top-of-market cash for the role and location.

Use this call to confirm what your remaining rounds will be. What the recruiter says will trump any guide, including this one.

This round is a video screen that lasts 45-60 minutes. The interviewer is the hiring manager for the role, and can be a director or VP of product.

The conversation typically touches upon four things:

• Depth of your past projects
• Product sense
• Incidents of feedback and conflict 
• How you fit into Netflix’s Culture 

For the product sense portion, the HM will likely stay loyal to their day-to-day and base the discussion on a problem they're currently having. They’re primarily focused on reading how you exercise judgement around issues you’re unfamiliar with. You should clearly demonstrate to them that you can think on your feet and work from the context you're given instead of always relying on a playbook.

Recently, candidates have been asked:

• Tell me about a time you used data to align with a teammate.
• What are your thoughts on building a native social networking feature so users can share their recommendations or what they’re currently watching?
• Tell me about the most complex problem you’ve solved.

You can face culture screen questions in a stand alone round that's 45 minutes long or see them interspersed in other screens or the onsite rounds. The stand alone round will be led by an HR business partner and in other rounds, they’re typically present in the panel.

The culture memo is the only public document behind this round and has context in plenty. We suggest that you read the current version because we've heard it's been rewritten more than once.

The memo is organized/built around four principles: Dream Team, People Over Process, Uncomfortably Exciting, and Great and Always Better. Currently, it lists Selflessness, Judgment, Candor, Creativity, Courage, Inclusion, Curiosity and Resilience as the traits of a Dream Team person.

These are pretty much the theme of this round. Every reported question asks for a story that demonstrates at least one of these.

Be familiar with some phrases from the memo that our coaches use as shorthand:

• Context not control: you as a leader give people the information to decide for themselves instead of micromanaging/ approving each decision. 
• Informed captain: the one person who owns a given decision. 
• Farming for dissent: setting out to collect disagreeing opinions instead of waiting to see whether anybody objects 
• Disagree and commit: backing a decision you argued against once it’s been made. 

Across the whole round, giving and receiving direct feedback is pretty much the main signal. The memo describes candor as an “everyday habit, like brushing your teeth”.

Take the time to write down some of your honest opinions on the following reported questions:

• How do you give feedback to a colleague who’s not performing so well?
• Have you ever gotten feedback so severe it hurt the working relationship?
• Did you read our culture memo? What did you think of it? 

To better understand what Netflix prioritizes in a people management/ Leadership discussion w.r.t culture, head over to our Netflix Engineering Manager interview guide.

Some loops include a take home assignment that covers everything to do with product, from design to strategy. Most candidates say they had to do this before they were invited to the onsite.

What's being tested here is how you approach an unfamiliar problem so they won’t focus too much on domain depth. While some prompts are reportedly Netflix related, some are agnostic to product/company. Our coaches say Netflix does this intentionally to remove the advantage that some candidates may have by already being in the streaming business.

The assignment connects back to the rest of the loop by becoming a 1 hour presentation that you’ll have to give at the onsite.

Reported prompts:

• Redesign an airport layover.
• What would your priorities be as the CEO of Uber?
• What's the most creative feature you could build for a Netflix product?

We have some mixed reviews on if you can rely on AI for this assignment. Just check with your recruiter. Guessing about this is not a risk you should be taking.

The interviews can be virtual or in person and the whole loop can take 1-2 days. Expect 4-5 interviews, each an hour long. 

Structure of the onsite

Some candidates say they sat through four distinct interviews:

1. collaboration round with a senior PM, 
2. an engineering collaboration screen, 
3. a product sense round, and 
4. a conversation about cross-functional stakeholders

Some candidates say they sat through a giant block that covered product sense, metrics & experimentation, strategy and culture without separating them.

We suggest that you use the four way split to cover ground and bucket your prep.

Themes of the onsite questions

Regardless of what format your onsite is, the questions can be bucketed into these themes:

• Designing or improving a user's experience
• Reasoning about an experiment. A/B testing is usually their default so you should be comfortable with inferring results and proposing relevant tests. 
• Stories that show you can work autonomously. Stories about feedback and conflict where you treat conflict as a conversation instead of something that you have to win.
• A conversation about engineering trade-offs. As a PM, you typically won't face a coding portion.

How Netflix evaluates PM candidates

Based on the themes of the questions, evaluation will be across collaboration, moving from ambiguity to clarity, conflict resolution, and metrics & execution.

Our coaches have said that they’ve built custom scoring sheets for certain openings so any rubric breakdown you’ve read might not entirely apply to you.

Interviewers will likely push back on your answer or challenge you to see how you handle disagreement. They can do this by introducing new data or by rejecting a hypothesis of yours. You should pay close attention to what your interviewer is suggesting or probing you for. 

In the debrief, the discussion among the interviewers will be on whether a weakness is coachable (e.g. stakeholder management skills) or not, like a lack of ability to think at scale.

Candidate reported questions from the Netflix PM loop:

1. Collaboration and behavioral questions:

• What kind of conflicts do you have with your EMs or designers?
• Who has been your most demanding stakeholder? 
• Have you ever used member data to override someone’s proposal?

1. Engineering questions:

• How do you weigh tech debt against new features?
• What has your experience been working with an engineer that joined your team from a different business/product experience?
• What do the engineers on your past teams have to say about working with you? 

1. Product questions:

• As a PM, what would you do to enhance recommendations?
• How would you clean up a cluttered Continue Watching row?
• Netflix games have a low adoption rate. What would you do to increase it?
• How do you improve homepage discovery for a user who browses for a long time but then gives up?

1. Testing and Estimation questions:  

• If you’re setting up user level randomization, how would you account for household level interference?
• How would you design an A/B test to decide if we should replace the static title cards with auto playing video previews for the home screen?
• What do you think is the total number of hours watched on Netflix in North America over the last weekend?

1. Cross-functional questions:

• Have you ever disagreed with a data scientist over their interpretation of a test result?
• What kind of disagreements have you had with designers? 
• Have you ever had to go through legal hoops while launching a new product?

Advice from Prepfully coaches for the Onsite Loop

• This can come off as really basic but we'd be remiss if we didn't address it as an interview coaching platform. Don't jump to features before diagnosing the problem.
• For product sense questions don't wait for the interviewer to set the direction, take charge. You are more than welcome to ask them some clarifying questions or even validate your direction/ hypothesis.
• Don't be hell-bent on making a call with complete information. A lot of decisions at Netflix have to run on partial evidence, so exercise your judgment and be willing to defend it.

Where this round exists, you present the work you've already done, either the take home or a prompt that the recruiter sent after the phone screen. The interviewers who'll attend this are usually a mixed panel from different crafts drawn from across the team.

Depending on the team, it can be:

• 1 hour presentation that opens the onsite with 45 minute 1:1s with interviewers
• 1 hour round with 4-6 interviewers who will ask you questions at the end of the presentation

The panel will challenge your trade-offs and the points you've made and will expect that you defend it without becoming rigid or defensive. Then again, you shouldn't immediately drop a suggestion you've made simply because someone senior has disagreed.

Interviewers from each round will form the hiring committee to discuss your performance in each round. They’ll have to reach a unanimous decision on whether they want to hire you or not. Our coaches say it is possible that a single unresolved concern from any interviewer can stall you.

Their culture memo mentions the Keeper Test which is the standard a manager is expected to apply to someone who's already on the team. This is a little perspective into the kind of person they'd want to hire too. 

The Keeper Test has to answer two questions:

• If this person wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?
• Knowing everything I know today, would I hire them again?

In the meantime you can fully expect that the recruiters will tell you the team is debriefing or finalizing their feedback.

Since the published philosophy is a personal top-of-market, treat these numbers and levels as directional. The following figures are in USD:

• PM: $316.9k
• Senior PM: $538.3k 
• Lead PM: $693k
• Director: $1.06M

View Netflix PM compensation data on Levels.fyi