What influenced you and your career choice?
Probably only my close friends know that I graduated from the specialty "tourism" and worked at the Domodedovo airport at the check-in counter, selling tickets. Once they complained about me and fined me for coming in green sneakers - not allowed. This influenced my life: I realized that I no longer want to work in such bureaucratic organizations. I decided to go where I can wear green shoes: I switched to marketing.
I was involved in the sale of banners on the site, including on Odnoklassniki, media planning. A friend of the owner of an advertising agency and his classmate turned out to be Albert Popov, the creator of Odnoklassniki. I have always worked well and have been hardworking. Albert noticed this and invited me to the team.
From that moment my career in IT began. I worked in Odnoklassniki for 10 years and met my husband. He subsequently won the green card - this brought me to the USA, we moved together. I got a job at Fasten in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was engaged in ridesharing, they worked in two cities: Boston and Austin. They also had an office in Austin, I somehow went on a business trip and fell in love with this city, I decided to definitely return. She returned three years later.
I worked in the BitClave team - there was a boom in cryptocurrency. Then this boom subsided a little, the company was not as prosperous as it would have been, and we were laid off. It was a very powerful kick to change something. At that time I lived in California, I was left alone with my child - we parted with my husband. And here I am without work, with a child, in Silicon Valley - the most expensive place in the world. Realized that something clearly needed to be done, and moved to Austin, Texas. I'm happy that it happened and I'm here.
How long did you look for a job in America?
I never had a desire to move to the USA, everything was going very well at Mail.ru - at that time I worked in Odnoklassniki. I had a great project, a great team, I was working on the Gifts application. It's just that my husband really wanted to move, so I thought: okay, I'll be a good wife, I'll move with him. I was so confident that I did nothing to find a job.
I never looked for anything in Russia: hunters, recruiters came to me, offers constantly fell. Because the project is quite well-known, and the Russian market is very small, everyone knows each other. I wasn’t sweating, I thought that I’ll come to the USA now, it will be the same. But upon arrival it broke off very much. The US market is completely different, I was not ready at all, and at first it knocked me down a little.
It didn't take me long to find my first job. Although it was predicted that I would search for it for six months, because this is a normal search term. But we have no money for six months of living in America. With you - 15 thousand dollars for a family of two adults and a small two-year-old child. We moved to the suburbs of New York, with very modest expenses, it took us 3 thousand dollars a month. I calculated that with the minimum cost of living in the United States, I should find a job in 4 months - this is the maximum. We have money for 5 months, otherwise everything needs to be cut.
I found a job after 2 months. This is very fast, everyone said - it doesn't happen. Networking helped.
By a lucky coincidence, guys from Russia also found me: Fasten is a startup with Russian roots. We worked with one of the founders 7-8 years ago, doing a comedy show in Krasnodar: Odnoklassniki was a sponsor, I worked in marketing. The founder of Fasten told me: Anh, I remember you, we worked great with you. We are just looking for a product for the project, come to us. I went through all the stages of the interview, completed the assignment, and after 2 months we moved to Boston. So networking is always and everywhere, it's very important.
How to look for a job in America?
The first is networking and friends of friends. This works best. All projects, except the last one - Zello , I found thanks to networking.
We met Vasily from BitClave at Starta , a startup accelerator in New York. While living there, I went to all the meetups wherever possible. In the accelerator, Vasily started the project with his guys. We met, and after a year and a half he found me and said: Anh, we are just launching an ICO, come work with us. And I moved.
Large companies like Facebook and Google hardly take people off the street. If you just send your resume, the likelihood that they will read it tends to zero. I tried, sent - nobody answered. As soon as I found a girl who works on Facebook, and she referred my resume, the recruiter wrote it instantly. Therefore, the number one rule in the US is to ask someone who already works for the company works better than any site.
Second: Linkedin . If you are looking for a job in America - this is a must, there should always be a well-completed profile, of course, in English. Many sites like Russian job boards: Indeed , AngelList - a site for startups, it is good to look for work in small companies, also Hired ,Glassdoor . AngelList worked well for me, there were many good interviews, I found my last company Zello with his help.
What didn't work for me for sure is Monsters . It's probably not good for tech companies, but if you're looking for a job in the restaurant business, for example. In my opinion, it is the most popular in the US, but too broad: it comes with a lot of spam and irrelevant offers.
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As someone wrote in the comments to my article , the success of an interview and getting an offer in the United States depends on 30% on the resume, 30% on technical skills, and 30% on cultural fit. I have very little experience in interviewing in Russia. They came to me with a proposal, it was worth talking to the founder or CEO, and everything was fine. In the USA, I went through a billion stages, here they look at cultural fit - how much you fit the team at all. This is the first difference.
You can really be a very cool specialist, smart, sensible, but if they see that a person will not join the team - sorry, we cannot take him. The reason is that the market in the United States is gigantic, here, on the one hand, there are many proposals, on the other, there are many candidates. In large companies, such as Facebook, Google, there are thousands of candidates for a job, so they choose the ideal one for themselves.
When I worked in Russia, everyone said: a good person, everything is great. There are downsides - well, nothing, take it, train it, adapt it. Not so in the USA. Here you should already be the perfect candidate - trained, fit, and projects can afford to choose.
The second thing that is very different from Russian interviews is the transparency of the process. In the USA, all questions are known in advance, you can go to Glassdoor, drive in: an interview with Facebook, or Google, or any other company, and see what questions are asked. In general, books have been written on large companies. For instance:
- Cracking the PM Interview
- The Product Manager Interview: 164 Actual Questions and Answers
- Decode and conquer
The books were written 10 years ago, and they still work. No tricky questions, as I remember in Russia: “Let's cheerlendim! Let's think of something to see if a person is resourceful, how he reacts to stress. " No, all questions are known in advance. This is done in order to avoid discrimination - everyone should have equal rights to success. If you choose different questions for everyone, you can ask one difficult one, the other an easy one. And everyone must be given equal opportunities to show their abilities.
This is both good and bad. It's good that you can prepare. Bad - what you oweprepare, and very seriously. Because they look not only at your knowledge, but also at your communication skills and self-presentation skills. It reminds me of an exam at an institute: you have to go cool, tell everything beautifully. It probably won't work spontaneously. You really need to prepare, spend a lot of time.
Where to look for questions?
- The PM interview
- Product Management Exercises
- Interviewing Product Managers (Reddit)
- Glassdoor
- Product jobs interview guides (ProductHired)
Are there any difficulties with the English language? How to pump it to the required level?
If in Russia a person thinks that he has good English - in fact, this is not so. What we teach in school, in courses, anywhere is not the English that people actually communicate in. America has a billion different accents. Moving from state to state - from New York to Texas, from Texas to California - you may hear speech that is completely incomprehensible to you.
I listened to TED lectures, I had a native teacher, I studied with him for a very long time, freely communicated with those who have good speech. Therefore, I thought that everything was fine with English. But when I moved to the USA and went to the bank in Brooklyn to make a card for myself, an aunt approached me, whom I did not understand at all.
She talks about finances, cards, money. Everything is not clear. She says, "You need to hire a translator." I answer: "I don't need a translator, I have good English." She says: "No, you don't understand, you need an interpreter." She wrote to me on a piece of paper, because I had never heard such English. This is the language that people speak on the street.
What I started doing: Listening to live interviews from different people. Not TED speakers with a delivered speech, but ordinary people. When they come up on the street, they poke a microphone and ask them to speak. I really missed that. Of course - watch movies exclusively in English. Because some actors speak well, some are incomprehensible to me. It probably took a year to improve listening.
Of course, I advise you to practice the language in advance, before moving, to challenge yourself with incomprehensible accents. Watch Texas movies, cowboy movies. Hear the people from India speak English. If you are going to work in IT, 99% chance that you will work with people from India. Listen, get used to this accent.
How are test items different in America and in Russia?
I was only given test tests in the US in Russian companies. This is not accepted in purely American companies. Because you can present the solved task: "You have wasted my time, I did something for you, please pay." In America, everyone values ​​time, and the test usually takes a very long time. When I did the test tasks, it took me a day, two, three.
And then - you send the document. Any letter in America is considered an official document. If something happens, I can say: "You know, I made this document for this company, I was not paid, my idea was used, here is a letter." And the court will most likely be on my side. Maybe in some other areas they are exiled - I'm talking about the product. For example, maybe a solution to a math exercise is not intellectual property. When a product works, it describes projects, ideas, implementation - in theory, this can already be patented.
As it happens: test tasks are given directly at the interview. You have 30 minutes to implement the idea, paint, tell - online. There is no opportunity to sit, think, change your mind 10 times, remake - nothing like that. You come and solve some problem right away.
I like it, this approach saves time, and plus shows not only the ability to google or ask your friends how to solve this problem, but real skills, how you know how to act in an emergency. Because when you have a problem at work, you don't have one or two days to think. If people are accustomed to “let's go tomorrow or in a week, I need to think about it”, then this method does not work here. It's called problem solving.
By the way, there is a big difference between products in the USA and Russia: in Russia, people often communicate in chats, using letters. 80% of US products communicate verbally. Therefore, test tasks are an occasion to test your communication skills: how clearly you can describe a train of thought.
It is very difficult, I still practice. We gather with products from different countries of the world, solve problems online, and they give feedback on the structure of speech. Here it is not very clear, here you were not clear, here we did not understand your idea. In America, of course, there are chats too, we use them, but if anything, there are always some rallies, presentations, calls, calls, calls. I probably have more than 50% of my time making calls with developers. Therefore, at the interview they test your speaking and articulation skills.
How to improve your communication and presentation skills?
Toastmasters - there is such a program, available all over the world, now it is being conducted online. Previously, it was held offline, people got together, showed each other presentations, gave comments, which could be improved. You can just go to the site and write a request that you want to join the group. There are many groups, you can google the top most active ones.
I practice at StellarPeers - this is a site for the practice of products from large companies, here they solve design questions: "design a YouTube for astronauts, solve the problem with fake news on Facebook." There may be questions about execution: "define a goal for Instagram Stories, what will you do if you have dropped such and such a metric." There are 30 minutes to answer this question, then you and the interlocutor change places, and as an interviewer you listen to him and give feedback.
Now I'm not looking for an active job and I am doing it just for practice, once a week to train my brains. It's cool that you look from two sides: as a candidate and an interviewer. It's very cool to assess the level of those with whom you compete. Let's say you see that this candidate is very strong, perhaps I should tighten the structure of my speech, or offer more creative ideas, or narrow the audience - because otherwise my audience is too wide.
You will also learn all sorts of tools. Previously, training took place offline, and you could draw diagrams on a board or a piece of paper - now everything is online. I learned, for example, about a pencil that transmits your notes to the screen when you write in a regular notebook. It is called Neo SmartPen N2. I asked the girl who drew for them why she didn’t use any programs. She replied that the "connection" between the brain and the hand is much stronger. Therefore, if you have a difficult task and a difficult brain process, writing by hand is much more useful.
What tools people use is very useful to observe. Because in fact, you are direct competitors.
More resources for mock interview training:
How to negotiate money with employers?
Any US salary can be found on Glassdoor. This is generally a very cool resource for understanding the market. If you drive in, for example, Senior Product Manager, Texas, Austin, you will roughly understand what my salary is. Income is highly dependent on the city. Usually, when recruiters call, they immediately ask for a plug. Of course, if it's not Facebook: I think Facebook can sometimes dictate its terms. Large companies and start-ups ask for a fork, and you have to say: "my salary is from 120 to 150 thousand dollars." Do not lower and exceed the plug.
If you lower the fork, the recruiter thinks why you are so cheap, if you exceed it - the question is, do you know how to evaluate your abilities, it seems that you are too hungry. Therefore, for a certain role in the city and the company, everything is roughly known. For your US salary check out Glassdoor.
As for negotiations: in the offer there are also a bunch of other benefit rewards: stocks, promotions, insurance, training compensation, reimbursement for the purchase of a laptop and any other equipment, a relocation package, sign-on bonus - when you are given money for what you have signed offer. It turns out a rather large document, and the salary is only part of it. Therefore, when an offer arrives, it makes sense to bargain - in the USA it is considered good form. Even if the conditions seem great, just show that you know your worth, that you are confident in yourself. Bargaining must be reasoned, within the bounds of decency. There is no need to ask for a salary 3 times more or an insane amount of shares. Write: “I did a study, for the requirements that you put forward, it seems to me that the salary should be 10% more, and I need to move with my family,your $ 5,000 compensation will not cover the travel expenses, I want $ 10,000. " Be specific in numbers, Americans love this specificity: I want + 10%, I want +10,000, not "any".
In the United States, by the way, income is most often annual, excluding taxes, and this must also be understood. When they say: “a salary of 100 thousand dollars,” I will pay tax on this 100 thousand, and everything will not be so rosy. Or there is an hourly salary. Here you may be asked what is the annual salary and what is the hourly salary. At first, the hourly rate was very embarrassing for me, because I work not for an hour, but all day. It needs to be calculated separately. I calculated mine through some kind of calculators: I took the annual one, divided it by the number of hours, how much I would work without taking into account the vacation, and added a little.
Is it possible to find work remotely from Russia in the States?
I know it's not that hard for engineers to find remote work. From the experience of my engineering friends: they were in Russia, interviewed, received an offer, made an H1B visa and moved to the United States. Now, this will probably be a little more difficult, because Trump has tightened the requirements.
When it comes to product managers, this is more complicated. Honestly, I have not seen examples of a product being in Russia receiving an H1B visa. There are several reasons.
First: language and cultural characteristics. Products, in contrast to developers, need to be able to communicate almost at the level of native, to have good communication skills. It is extremely difficult to get them in Russia if you have not lived somewhere abroad.
Second: understanding the market and users. If you work in the American market, you should know your user well and share his pain. And if you have never been here and have never lived, then you do not understand what the American people are suffering about.
And of course, there is a lot of competition here, there are a lot of American product managers. There is no point in taking risks, paying for a visa, and then a person comes and gets lost, because the English language is not so good, the market does not understand, the developers are afraid of it, because they cannot smooth out conflicts, solve problems.
It's easier with developers, there are no requirements for them in terms of cultural fit, communication skills, understanding of users. You just need to have a sufficient level of English to communicate with the product, write good code and be cultured - not a rude person.
[I confirm this 100% by our practice. For 10 years we have helped hundreds of developers and technicians move to different countries. There were only a few product managers - A.I.]
In which companies to look for work?
I think we should look at Russian startups. I doubt that American startups will want to transport a person from Russia, it is really necessary to have unique knowledge that is not in America. And Russian companies can test their experience, they know the Russian market, they know, for example, that Mail.ru is a good strong company. When I got a job here and said that I work at Mail.ru, the largest IT company in Europe, they asked me: "were you the owner?" So American recruiters sometimes do not know what is happening outside the United States and ask stupid questions.
Russian founders can check the background, call Russia and ask them to tell about a person if he is really as good as he describes himself. Plus cultural peculiarities, mentality - Russians understand it. The Russian people have many advantages over the Americans. I would hire Russians, because I know that they are more responsible, more honest, they will not hang noodles. Americans talk a lot about themselves all the time, and you’ll think whether this is true or not. All are beautiful in words, but in reality they are not. I understand a Russian person, he can be modest, it is not so cool to sell himself, but I know that his skills are much stronger. Maybe this is the logic, which is why Russian startups are interested in Russian specialists.
What is the interviewer's experience of hiring?
I hired both in Russia and in America, I interviewed both developers and product managers.
I do not attend developer interviews in the United States to test technical skills, this is not my area of ​​expertise. I check how this person fits the team, the company - cultural fit, how similar our processes are.
What I ask is: “Tell us how you usually work with a product manager, about your work process? Tell us about the ideal process where you will feel very good? How do you resolve conflicts? Tell us about any conflict with the product. " These are behavioral questions, the most popular type of question in the USA. They ask about the past experience in order to transfer it to the future.
For example, questions about conflict cannot be answered that the boss is bad. What do I want to hear as a product? That the engineer had his own idea, the manager had his own, there was a conflict of interest. What did the engineer do? He didn’t say that he wouldn’t solve the problem because “the product manager sucks”. I want to hear that he found good arguments. For example, technically it is a very difficult project, he analyzed past experience, convinced the product manager that his solution would work, and he agreed. As a result, we launched a feature that brought in a million users. I would like to hear about conflict resolution, not head-on collision. No one will take a person who will humiliate the product, because he is less tech-savvy. There are very popular questions about the strengths and weaknesses, about the loyalty of the company: why do you want to work with us. They want to hear the wrong thing herethat the company has the highest salary, and that the product and tasks are interesting, it will be interesting to solve user problems. It doesn't matter if this question is asked to product managers or developers, it is important that there is loyalty.
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- SAR (or STAR) — behavioral questions
- CIRCLE — product design questions
- HEART — success metrics (Google framework)
- AARRR — success metrics (startups)
- RICE ( ICE) — prioritization
- PURSUIT
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First tip: of course, learn the language right now. Not only read books and listen to TED lectures, but learn the language of real people, which is spoken in the country.
Second: study the country or even the city, state where you are going to go for bureaucratic nuances. This will greatly help you not to get lost upon arrival, not to get depressed. Each place has its own characteristics: how to rent an apartment, how to open a bank card, how to change a driver's license. There are a lot of nuances - it's better to know them in advance.
My third advice: look for friends or friends of friends where you want to move, ask to introduce you. If you have some familiar people, it will be much easier to adapt. If you are driving, choose a place where you have a couple of acquaintances who will help you with advice and can share your pain.
And the last thing: moving is always an update. Be open to new experiences, be ready to learn, accept new people and new processes.
[I noticed this when I was in the States: I saw a lot of engineers, and was incredibly surprised how motivated they were to meet with me. At the meeting, they were glad that they had met a person from Russia with a similar culture. Apparently, many lacked this. Therefore, advice in order to make acquaintances in advance is very practical - A.I.]
What other useful things can you read / see for products?
Career books:
Channels on YouTube:
- Linda rainier
- PM Lesson
- Product School
- Webinar with Fernando Delgado (Google, Yahoo)
- Lewis C. Lin channel (the author of the book 'The Product Manager Interview: 164 Actual Questions and Answers')
Watch the full recording of my webinar here .
G-mate's next guest will be Denis , Staff Android Engineer at Lyft who lives and works in San Francisco. He has changed 5 countries in 8 years of his development career and will tell you if it was worth it.