Microsoft Program Manager Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 4 days)

There were two stages for PM.

First round was a 30 min on-campus interview which was very open-ended (ie design a better hospital information system and explain how you would roll it out to customers). It felt very short since the usual first round coding interviews I'd had were an hour, and Msft didn't ask me any coding questions.

Second round was really fun, since Msft flew me up to Seattle for 3 days and encouraged me to explore the city all at their expense. I had a full-day interview on the second day, which consisted of five people for about an hour or so each with a lunch break, which I had with my third interviewer.
First, my recruiter met with me to explain the schedule for the day and revealed which team I'd be interviewing with (he also said that you only interview with one team, and that team decides whether they want you or not).
Then I had my interviews, which included a wide variety of questions, such as:
- feature/spec design (ie how would you design some status-sharing/link-sharing system and what features would it have)
- business strategy (ie failure analysis of Msft Kin and what you would do differently without hindsight to avoid such failure)
- engineering design (ie how would you design/change twitter to allow a user who wants to see language translations of his feed, and what if he uses a third-party twitter client on his phone)
- people/customer questions (ie how would you resolve a hard conflict between you and a key engineer on your team, how would you juggle between competing customer demands, engineering constraints, time commitments, etc other dimensions)
- technical questions (ie client/server questions re: PBX, spin-lock code)

I enjoyed the interview questions for their variety and were a nice break from just algorithmic/coding questions like my other interviews. I also appreciated the technical questions, which removed my initial worry about losing a chance to solve engineering problems.
The interviewers had a variety of backgrounds and always left about five minutes for me to ask them any questions, and the people on the team I interviewed with all seemed very cool.
Between interviews, my previous interviewer would converse with my next interviewer for a minute to "prep" him/her, so I'm guessing that if your first three interviews go very well, by the fourth one your interviewer's impression of you has been compounded positively three times before even meeting you.
By the fourth interviewer, I was getting a strong hint that they had already decided to give me an offer (since I was not done interviewing, I was surprised when they implied it), so when I heard back a week later it was more of a confirmation.
Msft also put together a sight-seeing package and restaurant recommendations, all of which they either cover on-spot or reimburse you for later. This is great if location is a factor in your decision, as it was for me.

Then the same recruiter worked with me as before to explain all the details of the offer, and there was very good communication (fast email responses, hour-long phone calls, etc).

Overall an enjoyable experience!