Just wrapped up my Instacart PM interview process for a senior PM role. Didn't get the offer (they went with someone with more marketplace-specific experience) but I want to write this up because the loop was genuinely interesting and I learned a lot.
Instacart's PM interview has a pretty specific flavor. They're a marketplace company, so they care a lot about two-sided dynamics. Most of the questions had a 'shopper AND customer AND retailer' dimension baked in. If you design a feature that benefits customers but hurts shopper economics, they'll push on that.
Questions I got:
Product design: Design a feature to improve the shopper experience on the Instacart app. I went with a route optimization tool inside the app for shoppers doing store pick. They drilled hard on metrics: how would you measure if this actually helped? What's the primary metric and what are the guardrails?
Strategy: How would you think about Instacart expanding into prepared meals? They wanted a framework for evaluating adjacencies: supply side, demand side, operational complexity, competitive dynamics. Felt like a mini case.
Analytical: You notice that order cancellation rate has gone up 8% month-over-month. Walk me through how you'd diagnose this. Classic root cause question. I used a segmentation-first approach: which user type is cancelling more, which category, which time of day, which geography. They seemed to like the structured breakdown.
Execution / behavioral: Tell me about a product you shipped that had an unexpected negative outcome. What did you do?
One thing nobody warned me about: The panel included someone from the data science team who asked me very specific questions about statistical significance on A/B tests. Know your p-values and sample sizes. That part caught me off-guard.