Anduril · Primly Community

Anduril product manager interview questions, what they're actually testing

jordan_pm · 4 replies

Did the Anduril PM loop last quarter. Sharing the specific questions and what I think they're actually evaluating, because the role is unusual enough that generic PM prep doesn't quite cover it.

Anduril's PM function is more technical and more operator-facing than a typical B2C or SaaS PM role. The products are used by defense operators, government agencies, and military personnel. That context shapes every question.

Actual questions I got: Walk me through a product decision where you had to balance user needs against constraints you couldn't change. (Defense context: you often can't change regulations, security requirements, or procurement timelines.) How do you define success for a product that has no traditional engagement metrics? (The right answer here is NOT 'I'd track DAU.' Think mission effectiveness.) Tell me about a time you had to advocate for a capability that wasn't in the roadmap. What was your reasoning and what happened? How would you prioritize features for an operator who is in a high-stress, low-bandwidth environment? (This is a product design question embedded in a behavioral wrapper.) Describe a product you think is poorly designed for the context it's used in. (They want you to have opinions.)

One PM case question: they gave me a scenario about a sensor system with user complaints around false positives. Walk through how you'd diagnose the problem and what you'd change. This is very domain-specific. If you haven't thought about precision vs recall in a real-world, human-in-the-loop context, this will be hard to answer well.

What landed well in my case:

I framed success around operator outcomes, not product metrics. I talked about latency of decision-making, cognitive load, and failure modes rather than retention curves. The PM interviewer visibly responded better to that framing than when I defaulted to 'I'd run an A/B test.'

What didn't land: Starting any answer with 'so what I'd do is...' without first articulating the problem deeply. They want to know that you understand the domain before you jump to solutions.

4 replies

apm_aisha

The 'how do you define success without engagement metrics' question is fascinating. That's such a different frame than anything I've encountered in B2C PM interviews. Did you feel like your standard PM toolkit was useful or were you kind of rebuilding from scratch?

jordan_pm

Honestly, rebuilding is a fair description. The underlying skill of talking to users, prioritizing ruthlessly, thinking about failure modes, all of that transferred. But the surface vocabulary and the specific metrics I'd default to were mostly wrong for this context. Took me about two weeks of reading about defense acquisition and human factors to get calibrated.

pm_priya

The precision vs recall framing for a product case is actually a really elegant way to filter for PMs who understand their domain technically. You could answer it purely conceptually or you could engage with the actual math. They probably want the latter.

director_dee

Good breakdown. The PM role at defense tech companies is genuinely different. You're not optimizing a funnel. You're making tradeoffs where the downside is measured in operational failure, not churn. Candidates who don't internalize that struggle in the loop.