Mock Product Manager Interview: Improve WhatsApp (Google PM)

I'm Steven from p.m. lesson I'm here with Sue shot Sushil earth why are you going ahead and introduce yourself to everyone yeah hey everyone my name is a shot I'm the current computer science student studying at Columbia University I'm gonna be joining Google as a product manager intern for the upcoming summer over the past years I've had a good amount of product experience worked at a start-up called help tap in the bay area for three months worked at Microsoft as a PM intern for three months so have a good amount of experience in the space and interviewing and generally working across different product groups so I'm really excited to kind of share um participate in this live session right now awesome cool and it's great that you got the Google offer and you're really excited to join and I'm sure you did really great things during your interview tool and that so it'll be great for everyone listening in to kind of hear from that experience I'm generally just to give the audience a sense of what we're doing here we're doing a p.m. lesson live mock interview where I interview folks and we use it as an educational session I'm going to interview sue shot and then give him some feedback after so you can get a sense of that mr. Trump obviously has been doing great job interviews congratulations to Sean and so it'll be a great opportunity to see how sue Sean also thinks through these kinds of questions cool well see how the team any questions or comments before we jump in no I'm I'm ready to get it it started all right cool so the first question that I wanted to ask you was if you were the product manager for whatsapp how would you improve what's up got it um before we go ahead have a few clarifying questions I'd like to ask number one are there any specific goals we're thinking about when it comes to improving what's that like ever you thinking about improving user acquisition user engagement monetization or is that something you'd like to define um I would like you to define it but if I had to lean somewhere with the opportunities that you listed I would say that monetization is not one of our current goals right now we're still in the phase of growing and getting a user engagement got it um the second question I had was is there any specific customer segment that we're interested in targeting or it's not something you'd like to get for me to define this wall I would like you to define the target segment for improving whatsapp whatsapp is obviously clearly a very global company in product so I would like to see you know maybe how you think about it and I'm happy to nudge you in the right direction throughout the interview sounds great um so to get started the first thing I'd like to kind of think about is what are the possible goals week it's the goal that we're gonna set here so um right now I'm thinking about a few things one is like how do we improve user acquisition like how do we onboard more new users onto the platform is there any customer segment that were maybe not targeting is there something we could improve in our product to make it easier for users to get on the second goal I'm thinking about is user engagement that is there's a lot of users that are already on whatsapp I think there's about a billion off Li a billion users right now in the platform the question is how do we make sure those users are having a better user experience how do we make sure they're spending more time on the platform sending more of the starting more of their conversations through whatsapp um so between these two I think I am more interested in focusing on the user engagement piece just because I think whatsapp already as such a big marketer and I think the focus right now should be really to dial down and create a much more positive user experience um for people already in the platform like how do we think about specific customer segments at night moment might not be using the platform as well as we'd like or them they're not be spending as much time on the platform like how do we spread them that user experience for them does that sound good yep that sounds great so we're gonna focus on user engagement for the purpose of this question and in terms of how to improve that as our goal right yeah um so the next thing I'd like to do is maybe think of a few potential customer segments so if you could give me a moment or two to kind of what's that my ideas and then go from there cool sounds good and again for those who are just joining in thanks for coming on to the session you're more than encouraged to comment and give thoughts to give reactions it helps us as we go through the interview so if you are watching please please do comment and kind of chime in and you can even ask Sushant follow-up questions on my behalf to Sushant if you'd like and that's a great way to practice your product management interview so you are strongly strongly encouraged I see the four of you are currently watching in to to kind of participate and I think some more will trickle in as the session goes on got it on so do you have a few customer segments in mind right now um the first one I'm thinking about or children generally like elementary school to junior high children um where parents often want to restrict their child's usage so that they can only maybe message a few people from a specific doesn't maybe period there's often a tendency for their they want like a more like essentially a child version of whatsapp where they can kind of restrict the number of hours they could use it they could restrict who they could send messages to while they're at school just to make sure that they're not getting distracted and spending too much time texting and I'm not focusing on school so I think that's one potential cite segment to think about second segment I'm thinking about is elderly people um so for them often the big issue but a lot of these messaging platforms is they often don't know how to interpret a lot of messages especially with these new forms of text like emojis um it's often hard for them to understand what exactly the other person is conveying and they often don't know what is the best way to respond for them texting might not feel like a very natural way of communicating like it is like conversations are so there's this gap that they currently face in terms of how they communicate and they want to overcome that barrier um the third audience of thinking about is Millennials people typically um in your young early 20s um what we noticed is that a lot of these people tend to use applications like snap snapchat messenger and they or iMessage and they like that because they can kind of express themselves a lot better there's more opportunities to send gifts there's more opportunities to be more fun and creative with how you express yourself and that kind of feature might be a bit lacking that converts some of these other platforms um the last segment I'm thinking about or like police officers for them communicating with one another in a very secure way is very important ensuring your messages are encrypted they want a quick an easy way to kind of alert each other about potential crimes status updates um and really they want something that's easy for them to use on their mobile phone so I think I definitely see some potential for police officers here to use whatsapp as their go-to form of communication um with that in mind um the segment that I'm kind of the most interested in right now is going to be elderly people and um the reason for that is I think that with a lot of these other target audiences like Millennials I think that um they're already on an existing Facebook product um a lot of them are already using whatsapp they're relatively are using whatsapp and showing good engagement signs but I think elderly people are this huge a gap that still exists and for them a lot of them I feel like I'm on boarded onto the platform but there's still this gap that there's this huge gap that prevents them from engaging with it properly because there's still this jump let's huge learning curve that exists between the generation so they often don't know how to communicate in in the same way that a lot of other people of the other demographics do they don't know how to text effectively it or not interpret text in the same way so I think there's a lot of potential here in terms of improving engagement for this specific customer segment compared to the others so with that in mind with our focus on elderly people I'm gonna go ahead and maybe think about what are some of the big pain points that they face um and go from there almost there's something you'd like to add or if you'd like to change my course of action no sounds like we enumerated some options which is great um we identified kind of the various aspects of each and we're going ahead with picking the elderly segment so we're focusing on specifically that segment but customer segments in terms of how we're gonna think about improving what's up and cool sounds great um let's yeah let's dive a little bit deeper into elderly into the elderly population segment and yeah I'd love for you also kind of tell me a little bit more about some ideas you have in a product vision that you have how we would improve it or what what kind of uh what is the vision of this improvement is it a feature you know regardless of whether it's a feature our product I'd like to just see kind of your probably division thinking here yeah sure um I feel free to take your time to think if you need some time yeah so before I get started with the product vision I think one of the things that I like to do is kind of really take a deeper look into kind of look for the most critical team points and I think that'll help us create a more informed division so I'm great if you'd like to give a few seconds and we'll just like right down so my thoughts and you go from there great or this so I'm for my understanding the first pain point I'd like to think about is more often than not a lot of elderly people struggle on how to interpret a message look they struggle to understand what what does the messages tone say about how the other person is feeling for instance if their child is emailing them maybe they're concerned but the person might they might not be aware of that um so that's something that's very important especially when there's all these emojis and then there's all these um new like short form ways of communicating um like oh they might not understand a lot of these acronyms or the ways that the way that younger people a younger audience communicates over text so um I think one of the things I'd like to think about is how do we help them understand these texts or getting it better understand the text that they're receiving much better the second thing is they might often struggle on figuring out how to waste for them to express themselves um so basically here what I mean is like they might have something that they intend to say but they might not know what is the best way to express that um the third pinpoint I'd like to think about is remembering important conversation details um and storing that information so let's say that um an elderly person gets a request from the shed that they should come over let's say next upcoming week because they're having a housewarming party or because they're having some kind of event more often than not when they're in undated with all these requests for them it might be hard for them to figure out how does it what's the best way to organize it and it's very tedious and they might fail to remember some information there so that's a huge pain point I've noticed that elderly people face in terms of managing um their conversations so with these pain points in mind um I'd like to kind of consider the product vision I'm kind of thinking about here is building um a beautiful like conversationalist system that kind of looks through these texts and it informs them hey here's what I think your son is feeling I think he's a bit concerned and then it comes up with some really smart suggestions on things to say that so that the elderly person could just tap on one of the suggestions immediately send a text um so basically they do yeah beyond this conversational interface is to be able to understand their text much better being able to communicate with just tap apps and knowing what is the best way to express themselves and it also might just take some information details like about important conversation details and kind of store that on to their calendar or keep them updated about that and use the interactive reminders so that they don't forget important information that comes out of these conversations so in short the goal behind what I'm proposing here is basically um in essence to communicate the goal the product vision here is to break down the barrier that exists in textual communication for elderly people so it feels as natural as having a conversation um does that sound good yeah so overall I mean you know it sounds like we're understanding the pain points of expressing themselves understanding conversational details and and storing that information in a great way and then also kind of the pain points that can I see within your audiences um I'm curious if you feel and you know and in great product vision I understand it and we're gonna we're gonna dive into that a little bit deeper in just a moment but I'm just curious like you know the on the pain point of younger audiences and older audiences not understanding each other just a part of you feel like you know that's kind of by design like younger people use acronyms and emojis to kind of avoid being understood by their parents or to invent a new language and and how do you feel like that plays into kind of the product that you're describing right now does that make sense that question makes sense yeah I'm just really clarify you're saying that um a lot of younger people like to use this kind of emojis and acronyms kind of to be a bit more ambiguous and the way to communicate yeah and they also just like they don't want it like if you think of children um you don't want to be seen by your parents like you don't want your parents to understand you you kind of want to like be on a platform like Instagram and not have your parents around or not have older people around and it's sort of like a there's sort of a maybe a tension between these two generations in terms of younger people don't like it when older people are kind of like polluting the space and I'm just curious like how you see this you know like younger audiences might continue to use confusing acronyms that your algorithm or your assistant may not be able to decipher easily because younger people keep using these new trends and new terms and do you see like any resistance from the younger audiences to being understood by the older audiences in this platformer I just would love for your thoughts on that it doesn't really secure product vision yeah um so with respect to that the reason I kind of came with this more informed vision was that because um I felt that when you're thinking of whatsapp the kind of the intention behind it is not necessarily to kind of have this type of conversations with you kind of basically kind of communicate in that in a way that you're you in a way you wouldn't messenger or snapchat where you try to be ambiguous I think the whole intention is to kind of have with the more natural conversation you're not going there to have like it's not a place where you often have that same sort of playful conversation type that you have on messenger if you notice like that's not the emphasis that the company is trying to create there and I think when you look at the broader goal in the platform that's not what what I felt was um that the company is trying to advance so kind of time to the broader vision of whatsapp I felt that this would be in line but in terms of answering your question heads on like how would we kind of deal with that when children do you want to be ambiguous and not reveal um your intentions I think in that kid is um basically if if um we're kind of struggling to basically if the tone of the conversation made me relax a degree of seriousness then in that case we could kind of have a way of like maybe in that case we could have the assistant um not not like proposed to like interpret a message in a certain way and maybe you could just propose some like fun responses back and maybe you could try to recipe or get that playfulness back so in a way we could kind of look at the tone of the conversation engage like what sort of information we should lay out so if it seems like they're deliberately trying to be ambiguous instead of trying to interpret the message we could be like here are some fun responses back so maybe you could like show them some ifs or maybe you could send some emojis back so they could bring some that playfulness the young audience hasn't kind of communicate in the same way back and forth so um that's one way of approaching this issue cool great answer to kind of an off out there questions so it's something we're gonna you know tie back to the broader vision of whatsapp which is that the point of whatsapp isn't really as much about this kind of Instagram II like teenager kind of social sphere that's isolated from older adults and and also just like you know being able to connect across generations seems like a really cool value problem yeah I want to get into the product itself in this this conversational system that you're suggesting and I want to kind of hammer out like what that actually looks like can you take us through maybe a user journey of what using that conversational assistant might look like yeah for sure um if you could give me a second or so I'll just like write down some thoughts on like how it kind of envisioned this journey and then walk you through it great sounds good yeah and again for those of you watching this is a p.m. lesson com live mock interview I am here I'm Steven and I'm interviewing si-xiong si-xiong got the Google offer so we are kind of learning from his perspective on how to go through these PM interviews I'm taking notes on will be giving feedback towards the end of the session as well you are more than welcome slash encouraged to chime in I'm specifically doing posting some comments in the comments below you can post some follow-up questions for su Sean and I'll ask them Anuj already has posted one so that thank you niche for doing that and you're encouraged to react in to kind of play along in this experience as we go through it and yeah and and we hope that this is a educational and helpful tool for you as you go through your pee on interviews yeah um so I kind of have an idea of how this user flows and it looks like um so this is gonna be number one if they decide to opt in to use this feature so when we first launched this feature we're gonna ask elderly people are you interested in opting in and if they do hopped in here's what the flow looks like let's say they go onto whatsapp and they have a list of conversations um then they go into one of their conversations and then let's say they receive the text they go into one of their new conversations where they receive the text and then the text pops up but this conversational interface would be like this system will be like an overlay on top so it'll be in the top right corner and they'll be able once they get the text and look in and decipher the text and be like like let's say um the child asks there's the child of the elderly friend asked have you did you have you been eating what how's everything going with you then the conversational system that's on the top right or it's like I think your kid might be a bit concerned for you based on its past few texts and then they said them they get an idea and then of what what exactly their kid is feeling then they're like here are some suggestions to share some suggestions on things you could say to cheer them up and also keep them aware of what you're doing so it'll be like they'll have a good response like yes I did or like I did eat and things are going well and then maybe it'll give a suggestion for like a happy gift to Sandra yeah have to kind of emoji the sense that they can warm up the other person's mood so in essence um that's the first piece the second piece is also like when something important pops up it's like hey Dad I want you to be here at 5:00 p.m. next week we're having apart we're having a party for the kids um in that case it'll be like the consistent will pop on the top right corner just as it always does it'll be like this it looks like it looks like should I store this event on your calendar and then the person could just simply click yes accept it and it gets integrated with their calendar and all those relevant details get think so when that event comes all that information is saved so basically how I envisioned this is it's not going to be um this a system is kind of gonna be like a pop up on the top right corner of the tip where it doesn't really like interfere with the text em it's gonna be like a small segmented out area so it doesn't interfere with reading the text um but it just kind of comes up with these interactive suggestions and also gives them recommendations on what text to send incentives things just ask them if there's any important information they'd like to store gotcha cool and thank you that's a really clear picture calendar option seems really awesome um I have a couple for questions and then I want to get towards the end of the interviews we can ask them what questions were asked in the comments yes to give you sense of time so interesting ideas my first reaction and I'm curious how you feel the platform can mitigate this is that we're talking about older adults who may not be able to use these devices as effectively as under adults already we've already identified that that's kind of one of the pain points right now and that we're introducing new features and new things into the chat conversation um how are you and a balance this as a PM of introducing new features versus confusing the interface even more for an already confused audience yeah um so the idea behind this entire um this entire life feature was I think basically the way we're thinking about it is we're going from having conversations with typing let's say before you have to type it out like 20 to 30 characters to convey your message to now what we're doing is we're essentially allowing them to get away with taps to communicate how they're feeling so with smarter suggestions so I think in theory what we the trade off here is we're time decreasing a bit of the screen real estate for like understanding the messages but in the benefit we're giving to them is now they're able to communicate with taps they're able to communicate with fewer with fewer clicks and they're able to kind of decipher more complicated message as so I think although we're adding another layer on top of it and you might be decreasing the screen real-estate from the actual messages I think the game here of being able to communicate a few caps and being able to kind of overcome that language barrier overcomes that so that was something I was thinking about when I first proposed ins feature but I think this is one of those cases were the additional feature kind of certainly does benefit the downside of having another layer onto your product but you guys I just think it greatly simplifies how much effort and the amount of user friction required the amount of friction in communicating right um I have one follow-up question and then we're gonna get it to the audience comments and questions so audience please comment away with any follow-up questions that you may have my last question on what trade-offs do you see in this kind of area and I know you've written a blog post for p.m. lesson about trade-offs and about how they're really important if you an interview so I'm sure you've already thought of some but I'd love to hear your perspective on some trade-offs or some pitfalls that might appear when designing a feature like this yeah so the first thing is a lot of conversational interfaces are really clunky like number one they might not know how to give a good suggestion on to a given textual response which is which often leads to like they're very poor experiences I'm sure a lot of people have had this for Alexa or Google home where they ask it a question and it's like I don't know how to respond to that those type of scenarios can pop up in a lot which could frustrate elderly people so that's number one number two it is interpreting the message in a wrong way for example if this conversational interface like kind of proposes that um it says that you're the person you're talking to is actually sad whether or not that completely changes the direction of the conversation and it could actually reach some wrong information which could hurt you so that's something we have to be really cautious about and we should only make those suggestions when we're really confident and we have enough data to statistically be very confident that we can kind of gauge someone's emotions we shouldn't be making those suggestions blindly um so those are two big pitfalls um another one that comes to mind is um I think I think when it comes to like suggesting responses um maybe now people are starting to converse in their way that's like not very natural or they might not be saying things that they might have not otherwise said just for the sake of convenience um maybe are suggestions that surfaced up or not things that I'm the person who intended to say but just for the sake of saving time they might just default to those kind of responses which kind of changes the trajectory of the conversation maybe people feel find that their conversations with elderly people or not as natural and organic as they once were so that's another potential pitfall I see with this idea Chacho quote um okay overall excellent job with this interview we're gonna kick it to feedback soon and I'm gonna kind of walk through some feedback while also asking you some follow-up questions we have three file questions from our audience right now so I just want to kind of shoot them at you and I hope you're ready for the whole audience to interview you and you're doing a great job so I think it'll be great to get your perspective and so the first the first question that Alex lead brought up that I think is a really good question to follow up right now is how will you deal with these pitfalls that you just raised so there are some initial maybe ideas we don't get into too much but just in maybe a minute or so how would you address some of the major pitfalls that you just identified yeah um so so let's go with the first one right when we can't come up with a good response to a question like um when that's not happening how might we kind of surface off better suggestions um and that is I think one option might just need to literally be like um literally literally kind of maybe maybe help maybe like instead of in that case instead of like coming up with responses or coming up with that maybe we could like maybe we could try to like come up with like a suggestion I'm like telling them to start typing um our prompting to start typing something and then we could go from seeing what they're typing we make suggestions based on that so I think in that case the solution might be to nudge them to start the conversation and you're like hey you're just be like your person X wants you to respond and then while they're typing the response we can kind of gauge what they're looking at and from that we can kind of formulate suggestions so that works in the addressing pitfall number one in cases where we can't prompt them as to what to respond situation number two where we can gates the toner we can't simplify the message or we can't gauge what the other person is feeling um and we might make a wrong suggestion in that case I'd say the default behavior is really we shouldn't be suggesting this emotion piece almost for really confident like we shouldn't say angry or sad unless there's a really high degree of confidence as to the emotion and as far as interpreting the messages I think regarding that piece I think we could do a few things number one is we could offer multiple potential interpretations of the message and let the person figure it out themselves like hey here's what we think they might be seen here two options and then let the person decipher for themselves or number two is in that case we we might just be better off just again nudging them and not really offering any kind of message there so that's kind of a weird address one of those pitfalls head heads on gotcha cool um great answer to that question I and I'll just kind of start shining in alongside you Susan as we go through these and the audience can is also starting to asking audience feel free to ask questions just generally for advice or this can kind of be a little bit of a Q&A session as well with me and see Shawn to answer those questions um I think that's a great perspective I think one area that I would definitely emphasize is I really like that point about if you're suggesting something like an emotion or if you're doing something that's that heavy weight you really want to be positive that that's the right experience and you want to give an escape hatch to users to get out of that experience so let's say that it's wrong that users can turn that off you can just say like X like this is wrong or like don't show me this again this is really annoying because any time that we try to kind of guess that a user's intentions we just want to be really really confident about it and I think that but I think the second piece of this is which is just really important for your product overall is the clarity and they're like not confusing the users is really important design principle for this product so being sure that we can focus on that and you know reduce clutter on the page as much as possible when they make these decisions I think that's a good one of these kind of goal posts that you can use to decide how to prioritize or how to make decisions on these products or features cool so there was a couple other questions so a new task the question what would a Northstar metric be before improving engagement for these elderly people let's say with this product so what does maybe a Northstar metric or a metric that you think is really important that you would double down and look at for this product and we can do it quickly it doesn't have to be a perfect answer because I know we're we're kind of following up really quickly after yeah um so I think obviously the goal here is to improve engagement in that sense we're thinking of how do we get people to send more messages receive more message add more accommodation I think the actions are really invested in your number of messages sent number of messages I've received and the session time that the user is kind of like how long is it how much how much time these are spending on the platform so with that in mind I think a few interesting I think a good Northstar message might be to send is I guess we could look at number of conversations per day or even number of messages sent because if this product is doing its full right that means there should be having more connotations I mean there should be more messages being sent because they can understand conversations better it's easier for them to send message send messages so I think that those two metrics would be pretty important to look at us for it's an art story goes but obviously even when there are some flaws to that um because let's say if they are understanding the conversation better maybe they're able to kind of closed off conversations a lot quicker so maybe um if we do focuses on number of messages sent maybe because there's less ambiguous you know they can have quick good conversation so that's just something to keep track of like if our product is really achieving its goal maybe they can accomplish conversation for watch like yours so there's something to keep in mind with making that oh yeah I think that's a great start and I think you know we could talk we could do a whole interview question just on the metrics for this product so you know it's a great question on each end and we'll we would love to do more on that but I think that's just a sensor flavor how you go about it I also post it in the comments below a link to sushi on some blog post so go ahead and check it out it's all about trade-offs and how to use them for a very tactical level in your PM interview and I think it's a great read I'm gonna keep going through some of these questions rush me I think I answered your question a little bit earlier but feel free to clarify if I didn't uncork we have a quote so encore has a last question and let's do this as the last interview question before I do some feedback and then we can jump into a casual FAQ kind of session um or Q&A session um caressable suggestions change from person to person depending on who with whom you are talking to you will it customize for your different friends yeah um I think the natural response here is it should naturally adapt to different people because the type of conversations you have with a friend is very different to conversations you have with their son which is very different technologies things you have with your grandchild like I'd actually think it should be adaptive and if her product is really doing a good job I think the way it analyzes conversations for each one of those people should allow it to make more personalized recommendations for a user but I think when we're looking at v1 obviously when you're first launching this product I think that might not be possible in the initial version just cuz um I think the first point is to just get the basic functionality out there and then VP so I think this is something that you want they bring out a couple months or unless v2 or a later iteration of the product well yep I think it's totally the right answer and it should totally be customized and precise especially in the messaging platform um all right well um thank you so much again for doing this I'm gonna jump in the feedback you're still not free yet and just give you some thoughts overall I just wanted to say you totally crushed that I was a great set of answers and I thought you really thought through it really well so excellent job and great example to the audience on what a great PM interview looks like and how to go about thinking about that um so I'm gonna go through kind of the interview chronologically and highlight areas that I thought you did really well and in areas where I thought that we may have been able to spend more time or improve that particular answer in the very beginning this is a really small thing but we enumerated kind of the list of segments that you're considering children seniors encrypted messages etc and one piece of advice for all PM interviewees is that enumerate ins is really helpful and you did go through the enumeration of the options but especially on a thing like a phone call interview it helps to do something called a triangle method where do you kind of say two options in the beginning you can say my options are one children to seniors three encrypted messages and then you go through all of them and then at the end you say in summary my options were one two and three and you say them again and the reason this is really effective on a phone interview is because it's so hard to really process what the interviewee is saying that it's really important redundant if you were in an actual session with me you might have written those down on a whiteboard and kind of gone through and then I would say that one area of a suggestion for all people watching and I think you know it's generally gonna be hard to do but I would recommend picking user segments or double-double downing on user segments that you know well already so if you do have a grandfather or like you know and senior person that you're close with that's good and that's a great user segment that you know um and if you don't it might be helpful and you think you might use that in an interview it might be helpful to read a little bit about the easier segment to understand their needs understand kind of a little bit more about them and otherwise we get to like sometimes in these questions and I think we didn't do it here but sometimes in these questions where we talk about elderly people or children we gets a very kind of like stereotypical views of them as users and there are still a lot of different kinds of people a lot of different kinds of ages elderly people is a very you could be talking about 80 plus or 60 plus or you know who knows what segments you're actually talking about so I think understanding those users 10 minutes if you realize that you're picking them a lot is really important and there are resources and books online and platforms that are currently targeted to those audiences that you might want to look into when I think the reason I say this is one of the key insights is that elderly people don't like being called elderly people or like it's kind of like there were many times in history where products tried to release products that were like blank for seniors or blank for you know older adults and it ended up being a flop because who wants to buy that like who wants to go into a grocery store and buy a product that like says that you're a senior and so it's kind of a user empathy piece but overall I thought this is great and I think that um you know it ended up being that the product we suggested sounded like a product that even I would be down to use like it sounded like the product could end up targeting a wider demographic so I thought that was really great I love that you did the pain points I tried to push you a little bit towards the product vision earlier and you were like no no I want to do the picking points first awesome like totally steer the interview the way that you feel like it should go on obviously they gave you more pressure and maybe you could change it but like you know make sure you really follow the p.m. lesson structure which is like user segments pain points brainstorming solutions giving a product that vision that actually stuck with me and then moving forward so I thought that was awesome and the product vision was great a product vision of kind of assistance giving me this assistant in your chat assistants are very popular nowadays of course but targeting a specific user segment I thought made it a novel concept and made it a new concept that was really great I think that in general I love that you tied things back to a broader vision of whatsapp when I asked that follow-up question and I think just in general kind of one recommendation is that I felt like again since we didn't define the user segment as well we don't know the user segment as well we weren't able to to develop features that were very specifically targeted to that user segment so if we can do it over again I think one of the big piece of advice is really understanding that segment more and totally get that like in an interview you can't go and do user interviews and customer segments interviews but just a thought that you might have you a little bit more context might have helped make this it even a better interview lastly I thought that you addressed the trade-offs very well I think the failure thing is really important pieces hoping you'd mentioned something like that about how this is a really you have to be very careful about doing this feature because we need like 99% accuracy if we're telling people how people feel it's pretty intimate a statement to make and then I thought that you know in general you know my last piece of advice and I've mentioned this before but kind of it seemed like a design principle emerged halfway through which is like clarity and reducing clutter and like making things really an easy unit user interface and I think that ties back to the original on pain point so just make sure anything is that helped are just exercise that when you get the product at the end to look back to the pain points that you identified and make sure that they're addressing them and make sure that they're not causing more pain points and that it has a great way to also generate more trade-offs which is like okay we developed this product which addresses this piece but it may exacerbate this other piece and we should be very aware of that because we've already identified this pain point yeah but in general we're just always tying things back to kind of what our original statements were about the pain points in a user segment I'll pause there that was that was most of the feedback that I had overall like super excellent interview and it was great - can I use with you and learn from from your style and and your answers did you have any reactions to the feedback that I just mentioned no um I totally get with that I think one of the things that I could have definitely we're done time understanding my story audience oh they better I think it's something all p.m. interview you should do like then they can have to propose to me cuz I just look and kind of look at what are some common characteristics have these people what kind of products need this by how did they react to different products and I think it's something that not a lot of interviewees put enough time into I mean I think that'll help come up with better ideas so I think that's something I could have worked out a bit yeah totally um and it's great be of that awareness I want to get to a couple questions on that when you has asked it seem more general and again audience thanks for being with us feel free to ask a couple of questions I think we'll do about two to three total and then we'll we'll leave the session so I want to start with one use first question which is how to impress interviewers by asking good questions at the end of the interview what questions you suggest to ask and so I'm curious Sushant I have some ideas too and I can go first if you'd like but I'm curious what your thoughts are good questions that you end up asking to the interviewer at the end of the session yeah so it get heuristic I like to use with these questions is um if it's something you could Google online just probably not a good idea to ask you know your that um because if you can like for example if you're asking them something generic about the company they were against you could literally Google that and like find that information on the company culture online that kind of shows that you've not really put enough thought into type of questions you're asking but if you ask them something very specific to the work they do or very specific to them I think that shows a degree of thoughtfulness in your question so that's something I'd really push on when you're asking these follow-up questions again cool yeah I totally agree with that one generally I ask questions about how decisions get made at the company specifically nice questions to the interviewer about their opinions about the product vision of the company and yeah there are a couple great questions that you can ask that I really hint it like areas that are hidden below the surface of the company and when one recommendation in general is always to watch like the keynote or some kind of product vision and presentation about the company before going there and then maybe having some opinions or thoughts or questions after that the second question for menu is is it better to provide different answers to each round of back-to-back interviewers if they ask similar questions this is kind of an edge case I don't know if you have any thoughts on this decision on that is it better to want to provide different answers so let's say you have back-to-back interviewers and they ask similar questions like what's your favorite product and why do you change up your answer between those two interviewers or what would you do in that situation it's kind of an edge case I don't really have a clear opinion either I don't know what you how you would think about that so if you have a favorite product chances are there you might not be able to cover all the areas you wanted to about that one product in a given um answer so my suggestion would be not to really change the product or anything but maybe change the type of insights you provide like maybe change like what is something else that frustrates you about the product maybe change some more give different ideas on improvement so maybe you could keep the idea the same but you could just deliver new insights and each one of those answers so that's how I think about that cool yeah I would say something similar to that for when you just you know kind of spice it up change it up and generally I think it's probably not a problem and generally interviewers won't ask you the similar questions like I have most companies they know the interviewers will know what the other interviewers have asked and they won't repeat questions that's how they prevent stuff like that from happening okay great well thank you all for joining this session I thought this is really fun and it was great to have everyone interact we got a lot of people actually ended up viewing and commenting and participating in the channel so thank you guys for joining of course you can always visit more content like this at p.m. lesson calm and where we have online courses and lessons targeted for your product management interview prep we are a site and service and community dedicated to helping folks ace their p.m. interview and help give you the practice that you need in order to do really well thank you so much Tucson she thought juice sorry sue front for being here with me today we did you did a great job with the PM interview and I thought it was a great opportunity for a lot of people to kind of chime in and and challenge you as well yeah it was great great talking east even had a great time I'm going to this interview and thanks so much I really your chiming in cool all right well thanks guys and I'm gonna end the broadcast now

Channel: Exponent

Views: 169,232

Rating: 4.8880816 out of 5

Keywords: product management, product manager, product, what is product management, product management jobs, product management training, project management, product marketing, how to become a product manager, tech product management, learn product management, product management (job title), mobile app product management, product management explained, product management in startups, product management interview, pm interview, pm jobs, product manager coaching, product management coach

Id: e0Nj_eYDj2s

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019