The 1st round was a call with the recruiter. This person sounded very annoyed and uninterested. While answering one of her questions she actually interrupted me, cutting me off, saying my answer was fine as is. Yup, you read that right. Then she stopped the interview short, which is always a bad sign, and said she didn’t have time for my questions. I was stunned. So I was even more stunned when I got an invite for an interview with the hiring manager the next week. I did my due diligence and checked out the hiring manager on LinkedIn and saw that, while not coming from a product background, this person had gotten several certificates, which made me think they knew what they were doing. I now think certificates are useless. Anyway, I spoke with the hiring manager who seemed to be stuck in a closet and had a hard time with the actual interview: reading off a script, not allowing time for detailed answers, and not really understanding the basic SDLC questions I was asking. It became clear that they didn’t know any real Agile process or how to do proper documentation. She then said I had to do an assignment. I need to start charging a contract rate for these. She said “don’t spend a lot of time on it”. Right, so 4 hours of my personal time it is. The assignment was obviously asking candidates to solve a real problem Deque was having: very specific questions with jargon that only applied to the company. The “PRD” that was provided in the assignment was so awful I had a hard time reading through it. This was one of the most un-product management product management assignments I have ever seen. In the end, I was sent a generic email because apparently I fixed their problem and was no longer needed. Considering that they only use GitHub (not a good thing) instead of JIRA and Confluence proves this is not a modern, viable organization.