Zynga Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Zynga (Bengaluru) in May 2019.

Interview

After 2 round with HR they will give you the Practical test. After practical test is passed they will proceed to next round. Mostly Management is out from india. they will have video call for an interview. They will take 6-7 round with each department Head. Overall experience is good.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Zynga (New York, NY (US)) in January 2020.

Interview

The interview panel was a data analyst. Who asked questions mainly from Google. Who never had any clue on statistics and ML . Also they given lengthy process of SQL and Python . I feel it is a waste of time. If the make it the expectations crisp and clear . Overall experience was not great.

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga.

Interview

A lot of interviews and intense. Several PMs are involved in the interview process with the main focus being around data. It's a mix of previous experience with some specific case studies/problems that you have to solve during the interview.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga in October 2019.

Interview

Recruiter reached out to schedule 45 minute first round interview at a conference since they saw my resume in conference's resume database. They never responded (>1 month) with moving on to next round nor a rejection.

Coding question was on a laptop with paper notepad available. It was difficult to explain my code during the interview since it wasn't a shared coding environment, just one laptop. My interviewer was across from me, so they couldn't follow my code easily.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA (US)).

Interview

The onsite portion of the interview was one of the most chaotic/unprofessional I have ever witnessed. One day prior to the interview, Zynga asked to move up the onsite by 30 mins. Sure, no biggie. When I got there, the person I was supposed to "ask for" wasn't even there. One of their digital artists had to sub in as a "day of coordinator". I waited in the dining area well past my start time, because the interview room I was scheduled to be in was never actually booked. Once they found a different/open room, we begun. I was then transferred to another interview room, where I sat for at least 15 minutes before anyone showed up. Next, I had a video interview in that same room. Again, whoever was supposed to block off that room failed to do so, and as a result, two separate times during the interview someone walked in thinking they had reserved the room. Zynga was nice enough to order me lunch, which I then ate by myself in the interview room. Once again, I was left waiting for someone to arrive. For the last interview, I was again moved to a different room (3rd one of the day). After locking me down on numbers and essentially telling me I'd receive an offer after the chaotic day--no offer. Probably for the best.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Zynga (Austin, TX (US)).

Interview

Contacted by a recruiter, completed a screening interview with them, two phone interviews, and an on-site interview (four 30-45 minute one-on-one interviews).

Overall a fast process, but the last interviewer asked me why I would consider the job, because they viewed it as being "below the current level" of my work. Got the impression that they didn't really know what they were looking for for the role.

Application

I applied in-person. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Zynga in February 2019.

Interview

The interview process was ok but the so-called lead recruiter was rude. Never replied the interview result back to the candidate. One of those gave bad rep to the recruiter world.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Zynga in January 2019.

Interview

Interview initiated through LinkedIn recruiter and first step was HR email/conversation and then followed by Technical Phone Screen. Recruiter never sent me the feedback after technical phone screen even after repeatedly following up for days. Shows negligence from recruiting team or seems like they do not care.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA (US)) in January 2019.

Interview

The interviewer (HR coordinator) called on time, asked some basic questions about my background, and when asked questions about the role she didn't know to answer and kept saying I should ask them in my next interview with the hiring manager because she knows the role better. She said I'll get an answer in the following week and then ghosted - even though I sent a follow-up email, I never heard from her until this day.

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA (US)).

Interview

Interview process was lengthy. Had a very standard behavioral first interview with a couple case questions in September, then was given a case study presentation to complete. The third round is an onsite interview in November (!!!). For the most part, everyone was nice. My negative experience comes from 1. The amount of effort and time they require for the entire process and 2. The way they conduct their final interviews.

As for point 1, I spent hours on the case study (15+). This amount of work was 100% not worth it. I spent another 5-10 hours improving it for the final round, only to not be able to even finish presenting during the final round because I was interrupted by so many questions. Also, they take an incredibly long amount of time getting back to you after the case study round, and the final rounds are super days that happen about a month after you get it.

2. The final round. I cannot believe the amount of time that was spent showing off the place, when only 4 out of 20 final-round candidates were going to be given offers. I thought it was incredibly unprofessional that they waited until we were physically in San Francisco to tell us that fact, also. What company limits their options like that, especially when the role is so essential to what they do. The interview took place from 8am to 8pm, with half the day spent listening to presentations, going out to meals, and more "selling points" of the company. As for the interviews, I had some nonsensically specific questions. I prepared for weeks for this interview, only to be asked things like "Teach me something," or "Your DAUs are down 35%. Your installs are down 5%, and your long-term users are down 10%. What's the exact cause of this specific % loss in DAUs." I spent hours playing their games, yet was never once asked how I would improve them. Most interviews started with "which games do you play," and that was the extent of them asking about my gaming knowledge. The rest were about specific KPIs that I had no idea about because I am in college and have not encountered those in my classes or previous internships.

I had one interviewer who was dreadful, the rest (3/4) were very nice. This bad interviewer ended my interview 20 min early (in a 45 total min interview), after asking me the weirdest questions I've ever gotten. One question asked what I would do if people didn't agree with my ideas. I said well I'd show them the data, and she said there is no data (huh???). Next, I said well I'd try to have a civil discussion about why I thought that was the right idea and hopefully my coworkers would back me up. If not, it probably wasn't a good idea. Then, she said well, the answer was that you can use "VIP" testers to test the game and your feature. I was so confused lol, how in the world was I supposed to know about these VIP things. Also, wouldn't getting their feedback be an example of getting data on the feature? The last thing she did was she misunderstood all of my questions and even was condescending in how she answered them. I asked her a question about her experience in PM, and she took that as me not knowing what PM is, and proceeded to write on her laptop presumably to note that I asked her a bad question and don't know what the role is.

Overall, this company has amazing perks and some good employees, but it is still clearly recovering from the times when it was losing money and had terrible culture. The interview process needs to be completely restructured and all interviewers (bar maybe 1) should be retrained.

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Zynga (San Francisco, CA (US)) in November 2018.

Interview

Out of all the new grad PM roles I interviewed for, this was one of the more difficult interview processes. The first step is a phone screen with a product manager (I did not have a call with a recruiter surprisingly). In the phone interview, you're asked standard PM metric questions and troubleshooting questions (e.g., DAU for a game is down x% how do you begin to figure out what happened, what is the most important metric for a new game vs for an older game). After the phone interview, a week passed and I was given a case assignment to complete. The assignment was to make a presentation answering a set of product questions related to mobile games and Zynga in particular (e.g., what makes a successful free to play game, how is this certain Zynga game achieving its goal of xyz ). After I submitted my assignment I didn't hear back for around 2 weeks.

After two weeks I received an invitation to interview onsite on November 30th. Apparently there was already another onsite/superday held a few weeks before. I was surprised that the onsite interview took up an entire day. While other companies' PM/RPM/APM interviews were three 1:1s that took up about half a day, Zynga's onsite consisted of breakfast, a presentation by the recruiting team about the details of the RPM program, lunch, then four 1:1s and a presentation to senior heads of product. After the interviews, we received a tour of the company and then a happy hour/dinner. The 1:1s covered behavioral, product design, troubleshooting, and metric-based questions. I interviewed with around 8 tech companies for new grad PM roles and personally found that Zynga's questions were among some of the most non-conventional/hard (because many were mobile games-specific which is pretty niche). After the interview process, I heard back within a week.

Some tips for the interview: I think that because the interview questions were hard/unconventional, this meant that the interviewers weren't looking for you to answer every question perfectly (whereas other companies with easier questions are). I definitely didn't think I did spectacularly and still received an offer. Also I think the presentation to senior heads of product played a much bigger role than the recruiter led on.

Overall, Zynga does a good job at selling the role, program, and company to you. While the onsite was long and tiring, it was very well planned out and you could tell that the recruiting team put a lot of effort into it. I ultimately chose Zynga over a two other companies with new grad PM roles because I personally wanted to be a PM at a consumer product company over an enterprise software company. In addition, the RPM role at Zynga seemed to promise a lot of responsibility and ownership while some larger, "flashier," companies did not.