Just wrapped up the Vercel PM loop for a senior IC PM role. It took about 7 weeks from first screen to offer. Sharing the full breakdown because I couldn't find a solid PM-specific thread anywhere.
Role context. The team I was interviewing for sat at the intersection of the platform and developer experience. A lot of the work is about helping developers go from zero to deployed in the smallest number of steps. Very product-led-growth adjacent.
Stages. Recruiter screen (30 min). Take-home product exercise. PM interview with hiring manager. Cross-functional interview. Exec interview.
Take-home exercise. I was given a vague prompt: propose a feature or improvement to Vercel's product for a specific developer segment. No prescribed format. I did a 4-page doc with a problem statement, user research I could access publicly (surveys, Reddit threads, changelog comments), a proposed solution, metrics to track, and risks. I spent about 4 real hours on it.
Key feedback later: they liked that I anchored on a specific user segment rather than trying to solve for all developers everywhere. And that I was honest about what I didn't know and how I'd validate it.
Interview questions that came up across sessions. Tell me about a product you shipped that didn't get the outcome you expected. What did you do after? How do you prioritize when every stakeholder thinks their thing is most important? Walk me through how you'd decide whether Vercel should build a specific feature vs. integrate with a third party. How do you think about developer experience as a metric? What would you actually measure? What's a product you use that you think is solving the wrong problem?
That last one got an interesting discussion. Be ready to defend your answer with real reasoning because they'll probe.
Overall vibe. More intellectually rigorous than most PM loops I've done. They're not checking boxes on a PM skills rubric, they're trying to see whether you think clearly about developer problems specifically. Knowing how developers actually use deployment tools mattered more than having a perfect CIRCLES framework answer.