Answer Product Sense Interview Questions Like A Pro

in this video i'm going to tell you how to answer product sense interview questions [Music] product sense interview questions are questions like how would you improve an airport experience or design a great gas station or how would you improve spotify these questions test your ability to brainstorm be creative and to empathize with users and their pain points and they're some of the most fun interview questions because you get to kind of play and dance with your interviewer in this video i'm going to break down the main steps that i want to hear in your product sense interview answer if you want to be effective um that said there is no one framework that will define a successful answer to this question and so that's important to keep in mind what i don't want you to do after watching this video is just repeat back the formula what's better is to kind of customize and craft the framework that makes the most sense for answering that question and for answering that particular instance of that question for yourself based on the framework that you might hear in this video as well as other example videos that you can watch the description below now let's talk about some of the main steps the things of what i want to hear in a product sense interview question and kind of how the format of it will go first users we always want to start with the users let's take the example of designing and improving a library for example who are the users of the library are they the children are they the parents are they community members who want to get involved and by identifying and enumerating the users that are potential users of this product and experience we can then talk about their pain points the next step um now again in these interview questions what i don't want you to do is just pick a user out of the big gate instead what's better is to think through all the users that could be potential users enumerate them to your interviewer talk about the nuances of each and then maybe select a few that you want to focus on or target in the next stage and so now stage two of this interview you'll be talking about pain points and so this pain point discussion often happens in reference to these users so for example if it's kids maybe libraries are boring or if it's parents maybe libraries are still boring for the parents um and there's nothing for them to do while their kids are there and so you can think through the different pain points of the users the different experiences another case could be someone who wants to find a book and a pain point is finding the book um and so you can think through okay like you know maybe your college student is going to the library and they're going there to do research and what's the biggest pain point of research well they cannot find the material that they need to find in order to be effective and so now you can kind of have a nuanced discussion about the different pain points that are involved highlighting which aspects are maybe more severe pain points are more important to address than talking about the nuances of each of those and so again we're having a diversion conversation where we're talking about the different pain points next we can start to actually brainstorm ideas and so now you know our goal is to improve the library experience we've talked about some users we talked about some pain points let's say it's for kids and let's say it's that's boring um and now we want to talk actually about okay like what are some ideas of how to improve this experience and so this is the part for diversion thinking and in the description below we'll link to a video that kind of uh includes how to actually brainstorm some of these ideas and how to have that moonshot thinking um but for now what i just recommend is taking the pain points and really leveraging those to come up with these insights and these creative ideas so for instance what if we put you know like games that help you find the book in the store or in the library or we could talk about um opportunities for bringing the library into the digital space and so maybe on ipads or on some of these devices that children use we can have library-like experiences that teach children how to use them and that kind of stuff um and then lastly maybe there's like a social component to libraries that's sort of missing and you know the king libraries and community spaces and so maybe making more uh rich like and adding in some of the digital like technology to make fun interactive exhibits almost like uh kids museums sort of in libraries where there's maybe ipads on display you can browse through learn facts and kind of get bite-sized information that might be more appropriate and so these are just some ideas that i came up with right now um those aren't really super fleshed out and in the interview you'll have more time to flush them out and just make sure that as you go through the interview you're always kind of bubbling back up to the users and the pain points because that's your goal um that's what you're trying to address and so now we've come up with some ideas i mean usually it's helpful to enumerate a few and then you can communicate to your interviewer hey i want to drill in on this idea like this is the idea i want to go for it and in this stage it's really helpful to articulate a vision my vision is that libraries are never going to be boring we're getting rid of boring libraries and they're going to be like exciting places for kids to come to you that kind of vision is really compelling and exciting because it's clear it's concise and it's compelling it has a kind of oof to it and the recommendation for you and your interview is always to include something in your interview about midway through where you're really putting in an idea and you're really pitching the idea it's the uber for x or you know it's libraries are never going to be boring again um that can really compel an interviewer to understand how you know how to think about product development but also how to articulate the value of products to people and to persuade others on your team to kind of be compelled by these product ideas and so next we want to talk about features so what are the specific components of this product experience that are going to be relevant for the product to be successful and this is kind of where you get in with the interviewer you kind of play back and forth so for instance i might talk more about that ipad idea about the idea of like kind of making museum stand experiences in the library and we talk more about how we build it what it would look like some of the trade-offs involved with it and you can kind of get into the nitty-gritty there the the danger of talking about features and when you start talking about features with your interviewer always keep that vision in mind and always keep those users and the sort of pain points in mind so when i'm evaluating if i should launch this feature or not launch this feature and when i sort of talk to my interviewer about it it's really really important to remember and to articulate hey our goal here is to make libraries not boring we really want to target this pain point so if it does not satisfy that criteria we shouldn't prioritize it or we should prioritize prioritize things relative to that criteria and then sort of as you get toward the end of the interviewer your interviewer may ask you how you measure success and so you can talk more about metrics that you might use so we might have a score that kids give of like how much they like the library we might also look at retention metrics of how frequently they come back to the library or they want to come back to the library of an engagement on the features and the things that we've built like are they actually playing with them and using it all these sorts of things will be really helpful indicators of whether or not what we did was successful and whether or not we accomplished our vision and then lastly my recommendation is always to talk about pitfalls what did we miss in this discussion or what are some metrics that we maybe didn't evaluate that we should evaluate as we think about launching this project um and so there's always a healthy discussion to have around trade-offs at the end now i sort of sped through the product sense interview and how to go about answering it but at a high level that's sort of what you need to go through talk about users talk about their pain points you can talk about some ideas that you have in relation to that and then articulate your vision talk about those features that you want to prioritize measure success and then of course talk about pitfalls um throughout the interview the interviews will change dramatically and it's hard to articulate exactly what the interviews are like because there's a lot of back and forth with the interviewer as well if you want to see examples exponent has launched tons of examples on youtube you can check them out in the description below you can also check out hundreds more videos of actual answers from top tier tech company product manager is actually asking uh the ones who actually asked the questions we asked them some questions uh back to see how they'd answer them and so you can check out all of that at tryexponent.com to see our courses questions uh peer-to-peer mock interview platform and more but i hope this video was helpful and at least getting your foot started on what is a product sense interview question and the general structure for how to go about answering them um good luck with your upcoming product management interview you

Channel: Exponent

Views: 60,611

Keywords: yt:cc=on

Id: WE0KeryvpXE

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022