Course Hero Product Manager Interview Questions
& Process

The process was super organized and the recruiter really helped me get ready. The interviews felt more like conversations, like they were actually interested in getting to know me. I liked them a lot.

The interview process started with a recruiter phone screen, followed by a video interview with the hiring manager. Then, there was a group panel presentation, and finally, a series of 1:1 and panel interviews with various partners like Design and Engineering for the onsite round. It's a pretty standard process without any case homework on their product. Before the onsite, they don't really vet deep product management skills, mostly focusing on your background. The onsite was scheduled efficiently, but the panelists can be a bit quirky and hold some resentment towards candidates from traditional Product Management backgrounds in big companies. Most of their PMs are promoted internally or come from smaller companies. They haven't hired many people recently, and definitely not from FAANG. You really need to know their product well because it's super important to them. If you understand cheap monetization tactics like paywalls and AB experimentation, you'll do well because this team struggles to think beyond small improvements. Don't ask if their product just encourages cheating, unlike competitors like Quizlet who innovate on learning fundamentals. Their values are a big deal, so expect a whole session on how you learn and handle conflict. A surprisingly large amount of their behavioral questions focus on conflict resolution and failures, which seems to reflect the internal culture at Course Hero.

I applied online in Nov 2015. Then a recruiter called me in Jan 2016 for an initial screen where they asked about my experience and explained the team structure. About a week and a half later, I spoke with the hiring manager, who asked similar questions. Next, I got a take-home product exercise asking me to prioritize three ideas: Structured Data, redesigning the customer acquisition page, and a free trial. On Feb 8, I went onsite, presented my exercise, and met the team. A few days later, they told me I wasn't hired. Funny enough, I saw they implemented some of my exact ideas later on.