Questions to ask your interviewer. Which PM are you?

I spent several years with Amazon leading a large product management team. Had dozens of interviews (and often got offers) with several other technology companies over the years. I think there are a few critical questions everyone should ask if they're interviewing for a PM (or similar) role. 1- Ask about what the PM’s day is like. One of the most important distinctions is what kind of PM team it is. In my opinion there are broadly 3 types; the strategy/business PM (what does the customer need? How does this fit/shape our company strategy? What does this translate into in terms of business requirements? The type that writes BRDs), the architecture/tech strategy PM (often called the TPM). I like to call TPMs the kings/queens of aha moments when they’re working with the first type of PMs. e.g. Aha, we can do that if we tap into the payment platform and run a greedy algorithm because their data is structured in X way and what we need is Y. Finally the roadmap PM (ok let me break this into sprints and make sure the factory is working without critics failures). Everyone usually does a mix of all 3 but with very different weights. 2- Ask about who owns the product P&Ls and/or top-line metrics. Who owns budgets (very different from who spends them) and owns top line/bottom line responsibility pretty much determines 80% of the “actual product ownership” no matter what any company tells you. Some exceptions exist at certain places in google, AWS, etc but they’re rare and they eventually converge as well over time. 3- Ask about reporting lines. If the PM team reports to engineering then it very well could become a sprint managing group of Jira/spreadsheet masters. If they report to some marketing functions they could become more fluff than product. This one you gotta use to complement the rest of the data points to form a picture. Hope this is helpful to anyone and fosters a good discussion about PM paths. I am @byadham on Twitter feel free to ask me anything