What are some best ways to prepare for a product architecture interview?
I recently got to an onsite round of a company for a backend engineer role (I have got no front-end experience so far) and they mentioned having a product architecture round which assesses how I can articulate user stories, come up with functional requirements and how I effectively collaborate with the tech lead of the team.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to prepare for such a round?
I found some helpful videos on YouTube and I would like to hear from the Taro community on what's the best way to prepare and approach such interviews and if you all have any personal tips/ways to structure how you tackle various things in such interviews.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 04 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
I resonate the most with the "Product Hybrid" Meta Staff Engineer archetype, so I have a lot of thoughts here on how you can prepare:
- Develop your product sense at work - If you're currently employed, this is easily the best way to prepare: Just do the work. Literally go to your product manager today and ask for a friendly 1 on 1 to pick their brain on how they come up with ideas, prioritize features within a broader product, and develop use-cases. We go way deeper into all this here: [Taro Top 10] Product Management For Engineers
- Build side projects - This is another hands-on way to develop your product intuition and ability to truly own new products end-to-end. I have published ~30 apps with 4 million+ users combined, responding to thousands upon thousands of user reviews and incorporating their feedback into the product. I have aced every "product architecture" style interview I have ever done, and that experience was tremendously helpful. Learn more here: [Taro Top 10] Building Impressive Side Projects
- Read product blogs - Find company blog posts written by product managers and go through those (ideally of your target companies). Some engineering blogs are more holistic (especially if they're written by front-end engineers) and will cover the kind of material you want here as well.
This is also the kind of interviews where mocks are super helpful. Check out Taro Networking.
Lastly, I highly recommend my system design series, which is really more of a product design series: System Design Masterclass: Taro Playlists
- 14 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
A big part of it will also be about asking the "right" questions, which navigate the discussion to something interesting.
The best way to prep for this is to have discussions with other (senior) engineers about a feature and how you'd approach it.
