PM interviews are changing

Product manager interviews at some artificial intelligence companies are moving from whiteboards to live building tests. Aakash Gupta reported in a July 19, 2025 essay that a senior Google product manager candidate in India was asked to build a working feature prototype in 45 minutes with artificial intelligence prototyping tools instead of doing a standard product design exercise. He wrote that Google was testing the format in its India offices and that hiring managers in United States offices told him it was not yet a standard domestic process. The tools in that account included Cursor, Replit, and v0, which let non-engineers turn prompts into rough software the way slide software turns notes into a deck. Gupta wrote that the interview measures whether a candidate can turn a product idea into something usable under time pressure, not just talk through frameworks. That lines up with how product work is changing inside artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic said in a December 2025 study of its own staff that it surveyed 132 engineers and researchers, conducted 53 interviews, and found that Claude use was changing how software work gets done inside the company. Anthropic’s public hiring materials also show what companies are screening for alongside tool use. Its careers page says the company wants people who “do the simple thing that works,” and describes Anthropic as a “high-trust, low-ego organization,” which puts culture and judgment alongside technical skill in interviews. The company has also published rules for candidates’ use of artificial intelligence during hiring. Anthropic says using Claude for interview preparation is encouraged, but using Claude during assessments is not allowed unless the company explicitly permits it. Interview design is shifting because older tests are easier for models to solve. In a February 2026 engineering post, Anthropic said more than 1,000 candidates had completed one of its technical evaluations, but newer Claude models kept forcing the company to redesign the test because the models could solve earlier versions too well under the same time limits. Google’s public careers material does not describe a standard live prototyping round for product managers. Its careers site instead offers broad preparation guidance and recruiting events, which means the reported Cursor-style session appears to be based on candidate and recruiter accounts rather than a published company-wide policy. (careersonair.withgoogle.com) That leaves candidates preparing for two interviews at once: the old one about prioritization, metrics, and tradeoffs, and a newer one about whether they can ship a first draft with artificial intelligence tools in a single sitting. The companies adopting these tests are not asking product managers to become full-time engineers, but they are asking for proof that ideas can become working software fast.