I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Wise (London, England) in Oct 2022
Interview
The interviewer told me that they are looking for a person with a UX/UI background and in order not to lose their and my time they decided to skip the HR interview part and start with the product interview. Usually when companies look for a PM with a tech or UX/UI background they specifically mention it in the job posting like “Product manager (tech)” or “Product manager (UX/UI). Wise didn’t mention it.
It seemed like they already made a decision not to continue with me before the interview. The interviewer asked only one question about the UX metric and dug deep)) The interviewer didn’t let me move to another example and wanted to know like every little detail. Also, the interviewer wanted to know every detail about the prototype testing, like “how did you become sure that your prototype testing was successful? “How do you calculate it? I told them that we as a PO don’t do prototype testing by ourselves, our designers are responsible for that. We just participate in tests, analyze customer behavior and etc. Test result calculation and etc is on product designers. The interviewer I guess didn’t like that answer)) I didn’t understand why it mattered that much if you are hiring a product manager, not a designer. They are many more interesting questions to validate a product manager’s skills ✌🏾
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1) Tell me about yourself
2) Tell me about a time when you made a change that moved UX metric
3) How do you decide which design option is the best? (If designer prepared several options)
4) How do you test your prototypes?
5) How do you decide that the prototype testing was successful and you should take that design into development?
6) Why you’d like to work at Wise
Stage 1 Recruiter / Talent Screen, Stage 2 Hiring Manager + Engineering Lead. Stage 1 was pretty straightforward. Stage 2, half the interview was to talk about a theoretical problem and the second on something I had worked on. the interview felt poorly structured, and the engineer on the call was rude and off putting - poor people skills.
I then received an automated email saying I did not progress, which is fair but candidates deserve actual feedback, not a generic email. You've invested time to speak to me, you should have the time to write candidate feedback - or don't hire!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Ignoring stakeholder alignment what is a complex, technical project you've worked on.
Overall the interview process is quite nice the people are quite nice however, the way they treat candidates is quite bad when you do not succeed or are not shortlisted. They will ghost you, or pretend to have another meeting and cancel the meeting, or make you wait for weeks until they make up their mind.
The company’s vision and culture seems great but the way they treat candidates can be improved.
Interviewer was disengaged. Didn't have a great experience. She also wasn't paying attention to what I said and I kept having to repeat myself. I did not get a follow up interview.