What is the hiring process like for Product Managers at Nubank?

Written by: Daniela Grecco
Reviewed by: Marina Camillo

The career as Product Manager is now becoming even more popular, which is exciting news since we are now seeing a new generation of young professionals who are passionate about product development.

Product Managers usually come from one of these experiences: computer science, business strategy, or design/UX, but this is not a requirement.

Product Managers can come from diverse backgrounds since there isn’t a specific degree for it, and often people who are passionate about technology and have worked in roles that are close to it. 

Our Hiring Process is not only based on experience but also on the potential to be a good Product Manager. Therefore, we need to assess the candidate’s hard and soft skills through technical and behavioral interviews.

We’ve created a hiring process focused on that, but also allowing the candidate to have a good experience and to get to know more about Nubank and how we develop our products. Check below the step-by step: 

The first step is applying for a position on our careers page. There, you can import information straight from LinkedIn or upload your CV. We also ask you to answer some initial questions.

At this stage, our Talent Acquisition team is responsible to evaluate each application and for those who match the requirements, we invite them to the following selection step. 

How to prepare yourself for it? 

1. Make sure that your personal contact information is correct and updated. It’s very important to have an active email address for us to make contact with you. 
2. Even though it isn’t mandatory, it’s important to have an updated and complete LinkedIn profile, considering that this is a very usual tool in the Recruitment industry.
3. Ensure that your resumé is clear, objective and that it emphasizes your skills domain required by the position. Always double check for grammatical errors and inconsistencies.

Your first contact with us will be a remote interview with one of the Recruiters from the Talent Acquisition Team. We expect to get to know more about your career path and achievements, but we are also looking for signals of behavior that would add to our culture and fit with our Nubank Principles (link here). 

Consider this an informal conversation, in which we can create a bond not only for this open position but also for future opportunities.

Be prepared, take your time to organize your questions and a structure to introduce yourself to the interviewer, and, if possible, try to be in a quiet and comfortable place for you.

Besides, we also want to introduce you to our challenges and the timeline of the hiring process, answer your questions and align expectations. One of our principles is to be transparent, and this drives a lot of our interactions during the whole process. 

How to prepare yourself for it? 

1. Try to be in a quiet and comfortable place. Avoid noise and distractions, but also don’t worry about unpredictable situations during the conversation, like the doorbell ring. These things can happen and we won’t penalize you for them. 
2. Prepare yourself, take your time to get to know the company, and read some materials and job descriptions. Bring any questions that you might have. 
3. Be objective during your presentations, always paying attention if you are following a chronological line and emphasizing the more relevant details. 
4. Time management: don’t forget that it is not a long interview and there is an agenda to be covered. So your presentation should not take the whole time of it, the interviewer always wants to ask you some more questions. 
5. Be transparent about your career moment and motivations. 

The purpose of this stage is to understand how the candidate thinks and makes decisions in a product role. In these cases, the candidate is challenged with a product problem and walks us through the product development cycle — from the strategy definition to the implementation. 

We put the candidate in a situation where we ask them to make decisions about the implementation of a new product without giving much context or data.

The case is very helpful to give us an idea of how a candidate would behave and perform when facing a situation that is similar to the ones we experience at Nubank.

The right candidate typically communicates clearly and concisely, can make decisions in uncertain scenarios, and has a good understanding of product fundamentals, such as building an MVP and  how to measure success.

How to prepare yourself for it? 

You will receive material to guide you through the structure and expectations of each live case in advance, so you can take some time to study it at home. We don’t expect you to prepare any presentation or material, but to reflect and be prepared for the cases, being able to make good time management and following the structure. 

The final stage is an interview with a Senior PM from the Chapter that is also focused on behaviors and technical experience. When talking to candidates, we try to understand their future role and how well they could interact with their teams (including analysts, developers, designers, and other stakeholders). For more senior profiles, we like to delve deeper into the candidate’s leadership experience and strategic thinking.

For Technical Product Manager, we also have an extra interview called Technical Assessment to deep dive into their technical domain of Platforms or Data. Is an interview format, but with a technical interviewer to talk about specific attributes of this role. 

Another principle of Nubank is that we love feedback, and that wouldn’t be different for our candidates. Once you’ve been through all the interview loops, we want to give you clear and transparent feedback if you were not approved this time.

We will always send you feedback emails but opening up the possibility of scheduling a feedback session with the Recruiter to discuss more about your performance. We believe this is a great moment also for you to share your own experience and feedback of the process. 

In case of being approved in the whole process, we are pleased to extend a job offer at the final stage! If the candidate accepts it, we arrange all the details for the starting date and the onboarding — an immersion in our culture, business, and technology.

Gabriela Rojas, a Product Manager at Nubank says that:

“Good product managers excel in three different aspects. They are good listeners and have enough empathy to understand customers’ needs deeply. They are great communicators and can efficiently encapsulate those needs in a vision for the product while adapting their speech to different stakeholders. And finally, they bring focus to the team, which means PMs set clear goals (and link those goals to the business), keep the team’s work prioritized, and are constantly measuring products’ impact.”

Nubank has an ambitious vision: to be the most influential financial services company in the world. We want to do that by building great products that empower people by removing complexity from their lives. If you want to join this mission and feel that our principles and culture fit with you, check out our Product Manager positions.