Mock Product Manager Interview (VP Product): Redesign City Park Experience

hey everyone we're now live on another p.m. mock interview I am as you know these are you know exponent p.m. mock interviews where we interview awesome park managers to do mock interviews so that we can get a sense of how other PM's might answer some common interview questions and just to get to know a lot of other product managers I'm super excited to be here with Sarah today Sarah is at one of our p.m. coaches with exponent um Sarah why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself from your background thanks Steven I'm super nice to meet everyone my name is Sarah really excited to be here I am currently a vice president of product actually at an early stage startup company based in New York called the batch and we are aiming to solve kind of the headache around planning your or your friend's bachelor and bachelorette parties and through making a group planning app that just makes everything a little bit easier before that I've actually been product manager kind of at the big enterprise companies like GE or PBS around video streaming apps all the way down to fourths employee first product hire so I really just love product all stages of it working with engineers designers solving problems for people awesome cool and for those of you watching again if you want to learn more about exponent or what we do at exponent you can always check out try exponent comm and it was also a subscribe like all those kinds of buttons does help us a lot so if you're watching please share and do all those kinds of things so that it helps us make sure that we keep keep this going cool so today we're gonna do a product design question and so the question in particular that I'm going to ask will involve the city part experience so Sarah are you ready to kind of jump into the question yeah so the question is how would you design a high-tech city park experience ah okay so just a couple questions to clarify and make sure I understand before you get started um first question or I guess more of an assumption as I love to focus city park experience will say like us city is just so I could make some assumptions around culture people things like that and probably also maybe like top 20 top 10 cities or something just to narrow in is that okay sounds great okay quoi um and then okay so high-tech park in terms of goals is there any kind of like the drivers behind this design question should I focus solely on just making sure it feels high-tech do we want to incorporate potential revenue opportunities in any way like trying to get more people to the park or to spend longer like any driving goals that I should keep in mind yeah I think the above the utmost importance is like a awesome user experience so like can we design an incredible user experience I think we'd love to hear your thoughts on the ladder on the other aspects of it like revenue generation attraction all those kinds of things but we predict that an awesome user experience will will drive a lot of those for us too so it's worth mentioning yeah okay I'm and I asked last question before I get started as just around any potential constraints so I think it'd be good to think about I guess software but also maybe hardware should I not go there any other kind of borders or boundaries on what I should consider No Boundaries this is an open-ended kind of creative area for you to think about yeah okay um just to give you an idea of how I work through it I want to think a little bit about the users I'm like people who actually go to parks why they go to parks what the current experience is like do a little brainstorming then around the potential design and then talk about the temperature priorities and which ones I might actually go with so just to first talk about who goes to parks I'll probably just talk it out um so if I think about the park experience and top cities across the u.s. there's probably a few different like main user groups first I'll say like families so people who kind of have young children and they probably especially go to parks like on the weekend to get their kids outside they probably feel guilty that like their kids are in a city all during the week and they're running around trying to get all these things done and so they want their kids to get exercise be outdoors I'm spend time with the family it's kind of more of like a bonding and like good parent experience to get them outside and it's part of like family time that's probably why they're going to parks after that probably like just groups of friends I'm so going to a park because they want to spend time with their friends maybe they want to play a sport there's no like open space in cities to be able to do that they want to play volleyball they want to do spiked wall like things like that or they kind of just want to like hang out and have an afternoon of a few drinks and got in a free open space and not have to overpay at a bar so like quality time with friends that's not super expensive I'm just taking a few notes as I talk this out cheap okay and then maybe the last group of people is just individuals who I just want some alone time go to read a book people watch do their own kind of like workout in the gym once again cheap I feel like maybe that's a theme that's coming up is just like not having to pay to go to a gym not having to pay at a coffee shop to read a book things like that individuals on their own and I think honestly what I talk about might solve all these problems but as I wrote those things down I think I want to focus on families and groups of friends just cuz it kind of has like the group dynamic and if we solve something for a larger group of people then it's going to solve like a larger percent of our user base of parks so I'm gonna focus on kind of the pain points and the goals of the families and the group of friends I might narrow in on one as I talk about solutions if if I need to get more specific but gonna focus that and maybe that will also help individuals but I think that will help us have a bigger impact with our potential solution so okay you don't mind me to take like 30 seconds or a minute I want to write out some just like specific pain points and stuff around families and friends totally and for those of you watching and coming in a little bit late this is a try expander comm exponent on p.m. mock interview we are interviewing Sarah as a mock interview Sarah is a VP of product and I started called the batch and the question is a product design question involving designing a high-tech Park experience we love comments likes all those kinds of things so please do give us some especially if you have any questions for Sarah or for me either pertaining to this interview or pertaining to pod to product management in general we'd love to get questions so please do chime in or comment below even if it's just saying hi okay so I am just to clarify who I'm really honing in on so I'm thinking about families groups of friends and their real goal like the reason you go to a park in the first place it's just fun quality time with each other be outdoors and just like really feel like you're living in the moment get out of the fast-paced city life like quality chill time and thinking about some potential challenges there so first of all is like getting prepared to go to the park so I I might just be me but I think multiple people have that moment when like you pack up you get to the park and you realize like oh crap I forgot the blanket the most important thing and I need to sit on the grass and like that's kind of annoying or you're there for an hour and you realize you have no water and the park is massive and you don't know where a vending machine is and you really are thirsty and you're like do I leave do I stay what do I do so it's kind of just like getting all the things also especially for thing about families like that I can only imagine having children and how many more things you need to pack so I think packing all the things is like a experience in and of itself to try to get to the park and if you don't know the right things that could shorten the time you spend there which as the park itself they want you to be there as long as possible so that's a potential pain point to focus on also just the weather parks are outside and so on a rainy weekend in New York City or San Francisco or something that you're not gonna have as many people going to the park that seems like a harder problem to solve but maybe we could do something with that changing weather that'll be me too yeah and then maybe like the last group of pain points is more just on the experience once you're there so sometimes they're gonna be hard to like find space once you're actually at the park and so many people there can I get a spot for my blanket in the shade where should I go maybe even finding your friends like some people are there and you can't figure out exactly what corner of the park you're at I'm so just finding where to set up and then also there's kind of like the whole dog and pet experience I don't know if I'm gonna play I don't know what that'll work into it but like having to like pick up after your dog if they've gone to the bathroom like all those little things once you like get into the park um I think probably the first three that I talked about are more valuable pain points so I'm going to focus on those and take another like minute to brainstorm actual solutions now the fun part awesome and can you and me rate the pain points that you're gonna go through right now yeah no problem so I'm thinking about one just but getting prepared for the park experience and making sure you have all the right things and yeah and then second we'll see if I can do anything about the weather won't change the weather but maybe some potential solutions to make sure the park can be used all year around or even on bad days in the weekend and then the experience once you're actually at the park how it can be a pain to figure out where to set up find your friends kind of like get settled for the day hmm cool well and again for those watching I know there are a bunch of viewers coming in a little late and this is a true exponent p.m. mock interview we love comments questions likes all that kind of stuff so please do you know comment below with any thoughts or questions you have for us and you can always check out more at try exponent comm to see our course for product management interview prep and more um and today we're here with Sarah who's a VP of products at a startup called the batch okay I probably probably couldn't come up with lots more but we'll start with this have a mix of some good and probably really bad ideas so and also I actually thought of one other user group and a pain point that it was for ensuring that I hadn't thought of which is actually on the other side so like people maintaining the park or people who work for the city who actually so not users of the park but it's something that the city itself is probably thinking a lot about when they have to maintain the park and just how much work it is to keep parks clean and take care of it make sure they're safe and things like that so I'm not thinking of them as a primary user group but that did kind of like pop in that as we're seeing about solutions that could be something interesting to think about too because the easier it is to maintain is probably like the better perfect parents and actually that could have been a pain point that I totally missed which is just like first and foremost the park needs to be a good experience once you get there it needs to be clean it needs to be safe for your kids and if it's not that then you're not even worrying about if you're forgetting a blanket so that's kind of like a route a route goal overall mmm alright so the three thing the three main kind of like general feature sets or potential directions that I brainstormed is one more around like the people finding people and connecting once you go to a park so highlighting really the main goal is like connection with people spending quality time finding your friends spending time with your family I'm finding a good place at the part to hang out so I'm kind of envisioning more of like a app software solution so when you get to a park maybe you're you can open up like the park map and it not only shows just like the layout of the map but maybe it shows like the high density areas of the park where there's a lot of people hanging out already where there's an open space where their shade so there's Sun depending on how pale you are or not like me always looking for the shade and maybe if there's also a way to like have friends on it so people can you can see when your friends are at the park actually this could turn into more of even like a marketplace type act absolutely maybe there's about like the ball court at the park and people can say hey a games starting in five minutes we're looking for a new person so it kind of turns into a park community experience but it's activated by you like your physical presence you have to be at the park and it's not about connecting with people like I wouldn't want to go full social network Facebook like we don't necessarily need more of those but it's like when you're at the park how can we make it easy to find people to play games with find the right spot for you and be even more social well you're at the park because that could be one of the goals and so yeah that's a potential direction another one which is kind of more on the physical side is like a self maintaining Park so thinking about I was thinking it kind of about the weather and just the quality of the park itself so what if instead of like mmm what if like the grass this is one of those could be a bad idea but like the grass is heated so if it's a little cold and raining it's it heats up and it's self drying so like sometimes it's somehow it drives itself and you can still hang out when it's raining maybe like the trees aren't actually real and the leaves turn into like a roof when it's screaming and they help you hang out so this one's a little more out there I am NOT a hardware guru so I don't know how much of this is actually possible but it's kind of going even wider maybe we're thing about the app how it helps you find an open space in the park maybe like with this physical idea the grass is a different color if it's available to be fat on and so like you can quickly see from above what's free I don't know going a little crazy there but we'll say that's the more like physical hot super super high-tech more like a soft maintaining Park you don't need people to take care of it anymore it's just like oh it cleans itself dog poop disappears on a sidewalk once it's once its laid things like that and then a last potential ideas may be taking that but going a little smaller and so I'm thinking about the problem around bringing all your stuff to the park so maybe there's like just high-tech vending machines or something physical at the park when you get there and so you don't have to bring anything and so it you can like quickly rent a blanket just from a machine you can get a little picnic basket from a machine you can like put maybe like put in a twenty dollar deposit get out your beach volleyball or like all the things to play bocce ball and when you return the set it gives you your money back so maybe it's something just maybe the product we're building is actually just something to give you the goods or maybe even store your goods if you go to the park a lot or maybe like some right maybe some kind of like regular park membership where you show up swipe my card on Sarah Sprague give me my things for the park for the month and that way it's like personal you know what I like for the park I can get a X amount of times I don't have to bring it okay now that I've talked about all those I kind of just want to pick pick one I guess I'm gonna pause any major like parts of the question where I'm bearing off thanks for checking yeah thanks for checking in oh these are super creative interesting ideas and I think yeah you know I would love to see which one you want to move forward with like and how you justify picking the one that you pick out of the set of options that you've enumerated but yeah super interesting creative ideas like a dog poop scooper Auto scooper would be like man good for everyone in world people's driveways and okay so I'm looking back at the pain points that I had wrote down and the overall goal because the biggest goal we have right now is just we want it to feel high-tech and we want it to really just have an awesome user experience which to me based on what I was saying at the beginning is really all about once you're there you're feeling like you're getting that real quality time why you went to a park in the first place if someone feels like that it's gonna be a great user experience they're gonna want to go back to that park and then so combining that with yeah so combining that with the potential options I was talking about and the biggest pain points that I wrote about I didn't think I was gonna go with this cuz I kind of feel like it's more than obvious solution which is like let's just do an app that connects people so I thought I was like not going to go that direction but given the what we're really trying to do which is help people be more social and like love that time at the park I think I'm gonna go there and say I think that will help people having a really good app to especially find other things that they could do at the park will help groups of friends and also families get the most out of time because what if it even becomes a mark like what if you could even offer like there's five kids playing over here with like a paid nanny for an hour and like the parents can now hang out on their blanket and get some alone time while their kid goes in plays with the kids as much as I would like to figure out how to build some high-tech smart grass for the park I think based on the potential for that to really achieve the goals I'm gonna go with the first idea and just flesh that out a little bit more so the vision or I mean I do like the vending machine idea too because that actually solves it tangible tangible problem which is not forgetting your things mm-hmm classic product decision which one I the purpose of this question you can go with either I think yeah by the way Sean who just commented we will get to your question in a little bit of time when there's a pause in the interview but thanks for commenting and um keep it up feel free others on the show to ask more questions well we're while we're doing the interview yeah happy to answer sending in all questions at the end and okay so I'm gonna change it up and actually go with the vending machines because well even though the app sounds I get good achieve our goals more really thing about use our pain points it's not as clear which intense like immediate pain at solving for someone whereas I think forgetting things at the park and not having what you need to stay is like an actual tangible pain point rather than I'm nice to have like finding people easier to hang out spark so the vision then that I'm gonna go with and just from there maybe highlight a few features and a potential sequencing and then we'll wrap up um is the future high-tech park experience is one where you can actually go to the park you don't need to spend any time prepping anything and once you get there the park knows what things are perfect for your park experience it knows you need to blanket and knows you need food it has water soda whatever you need and it gives it to you when you get to the park experience you get your little basket and then you can go hang out at the park and potentially in future versions we could like pair an app with that as well where instead of like you have to go to a vending machine to get your water or your food two hours later you could like just pull it up and see where there's vendors selling those things for you there could be a software component to this too but I think the first future high tech Park experience is just a better way to get things like blanket sunscreen bug spray hats that you might forget at the park awesome I I do have some questions but if you want to keep going in on real I don't want to cut you off um I I have a couple questions so the sun's really awesome interesting I'm curious what do you think would be a success metric for this product like let's say we're launching these things and you know we want to presumably people are forgetting stuff they're gonna want stuff at the park maybe they can go to nearby liquor stores or I don't know whatever is like around the corner like how do we know that this is going to be successful product yeah so okay I have potential success metric I think is so we probably have an idea heading into it how many people are at a park on a given weekend in that specific City so let's just think about one park we know to make it easy a hundred people go to that park on a Saturday so in the beginning is just like what percent of those people aren't even using this vending machine in the first place how many people like decide to take something from it and I think probably this isn't a perfect idea yet but if there is some way to have them become like repeat repeat this is strange a repeat blanket vending machine users so it's like you get your your blanket and your umbrella for the Sun and you're kind of like drink and you say I come to the park every weekend this month so this is like a package that I want to use so it's not just a vending machine it's like you have an account somehow and it connects to your app and then so like what percent of people actually say I want to use this again when they're like leaving returning their blanket and their things so maybe it's really less of maybe a vending machine in more of like an automated high-tech like Country Club your your cabana person who takes care of you now it's all automated you get your things when you show up when you leave so this is such metrics is how many people actually use it then how many people after the first time say I want to use this again and remember my order so I can just pick it bingo the next time I'm at the park so return we're trying to users got it and can you talk just really briefly about why you picked that my trick as opposed to like sales or you know like usage of the machine yeah um I think well based on what you just said it at the beginning which is round yes revenue opportunities are important but the first most important thing is an awesome user experience I think anyone can use something once but if you actually want to use it again it tells me that you really got value out of it and if we have like a foundational base of repeat users then there's probably a lot more ways we can start to make money from them so thinking about yeah especially kind of creepy users and who wants to use it again to me that's one of the best signs of was this actually something that improved your experience or something that you could go without next time awesome cool okay and then I have I want to be cognizant of time and I know folks have questions so if you are watching this like this is the perfect time to chime in with questions or comments or thoughts anything like that even a like or a heart that does that's also really supportive and also been nice and be like that too I want us just one last question and you know maybe if this is an interview with we would kind of tease out more or do more but the last question what can go wrong like what are you concerned about with this product like what are some of the trade-offs you're considering okay so I mean first and foremost I feel like the biggest thing that could go wrong is like no one actually wants this in the first place so that's just like general product validation so probably thinking about how we could start small tried in one park first is there a way to maybe even do this like as a manual test before in creating some really advanced physical technology of you know having even a human handing out these packages like for one weekend before we go and design the smartest vending machine you've ever seen and so just like general validation second thing that could go wrong is just you know people don't return the thing so I guess the biggest decision is are we selling consumable products or that are yours once you buy it or are we expecting people to return things and if so how do we actually get them to return it rather than just like take the towel and run and then we are never making money so that is something to consider human behavior and how we can incentivize the right thing and even if we incentivize it maybe people will never do what we want and so maybe this isn't even a viable idea at all um and I think what other potential problems is I guess just figuring out what the right things people want in a park experience are like I talked about a blanket sunscreen things like that but if we are gonna try to go to the food and drink route that's probably a whole nother issue because you know food can only last so long there's so many different varieties of things you could actually stock so kind of honing in on what are the key amenities we would want this to focus on to have like kind of the biggest impact and thinking if it has to be perishable things like there might be some challenges there got it cool awesome I'll let you take a breath fun pause there and like we can kind of wrap the interview I got a good sense obviously you did a great job and and we can kind of talk through some of the feedback and and some of the notes that I wrote about what you did well and what you didn't do well or mostly it's all just like amazing I thought this is a really fun interview and he came to a really fun solution at the end not where I thought it would end that's good I mean it's authentic and live and that's why we do these interviews so um before I get to some of the comments that I had I do want to get to Sean Sean your question um and Sara if you ever thought you can answer it we can kind of talk to unit two but Sean's question is how would you differentiate this type of question from something like quote how would you decide whether to launch and creat a high-tech city park are they the same question give any thoughts on that I think first of all a really awesome question and even highlights a follow-up question that I could have asked at the beginning which is kind of like so I'm making an assumption you've already decided that making a high-tech park it's worth it is that an okay assumption to make because I think that's a really good follow-up question to tease out do they want you to even question the underlying goal here or do they want you to just run with it and see your creative brainstorming so to me the the goal of this question is on the more creative side and Steven you even kind of said that at the beginning which is I really want to see where you go with it so if if you ask this fault question they say that then to me it's more about those things and if instead they say they're really trying to see kind of in your analytical they're testing your analytical side of things I want to know how would you make this validation decision like what are the pros and cons those things then the follow-up question asking for clarification would sheet that out so to me it's a really good point and potentially one worth clarifying with a follow-up question if the interviewer doesn't make it clear what they're looking for when they ask it cool yeah I totally agree with what you said Sarah and yeah I think I think just always clarifying asking clarifying questions is always a really helpful part of the interview so just make sure you do that upfront to kind of get a sense of like what they're looking for I I'll go to so you know folks watching please do comment last last chance for questions and thoughts and all that kind of stuff um in the meantime I will kind of go through some of the thoughts that I had on the interview Sarah so overall like great job I what I loved about your interview is you broke it down into user segments we're really clear I thought you actually came up with like super creative like really interesting solutions and you weren't afraid to mention them a lot of people are like oh like can I mention this is this gonna be okay they kind of bottle themselves into these very bold like boring honestly answers that are not unique or exciting to talk about from even from an interviewers perspective one note I thought you asked you to do this but like a numerating the pain points the enumeration throughout would be helpful but overall I thought you had a really great structure I liked your humorous like conversational tone I actually thought it was like really helpful because well one it was funny and it's fun to talk about but I thought you did a good job of kind of showing your thought process throughout the interview as you were thinking of it like even there are points we really Oh should I go here should I not go and the fact that I was eyes and interview were able to hear your thought process and hear you make that decision was actually really really helpful for me as an interviewer to get a sense of your candidacy and like how you think about problems so folks watching maybe like you know don't be afraid to kind of like go in and make a mistake and go back out or just say something and change it up I think it's like a really strong point of your interview style actually I also wrote down that yeah the last piece that I really liked was that you related it back to the overall goal so I like at some point in the interview you were like okay like wait whatever my what's my vision what's my pain points what are like the user segments and so you know instead of just like sometimes in interviews you like go through the interview like totally forget about what you just talked about you like related it way back to the beginning and kind of came back and I was like really really awesome and like I was like wow awesome like this is exactly what you should eat an interview so I thought that was like super awesome yeah otherwise overall I think checking in with the interviewer a little bit more - I know you did that once but I'm just like checking in with me just like hey is this time okay like is there any other direction that I should go in and then yeah if we had more time I think we could talk more about the metrics and like some of the specifics of the product I know we're trying to do this as a short interviews that people can watch it casually um but I think this is a really good Stampler and a really good taste um so I'll pause there any reactions comments thoughts on what I just said Sarah uh no I think I I totally agree I felt like I could have checked in one or two more times like a little earlier than when I did and I think um even connecting it even more towards the end of just like reordering the pain points and making sure once you've gone through the whole process of brainstorming because it can be hard when you're trying to like in-person brainstorm get creative and then make sure the where you went and got creative actually still solves the problem so I think just I would it I'm glad you called out that I did that thank you but I would have done that maybe even like one more time just to make sure that it's like okay gut check at the end is this solution doing what we wanted to in the first place and yeah making sure maybe shrine MVR too far totally yeah I think that's a really good point and overall great job we do have one more question that I want to get to and then I do want to just ask you a question that I think is a question that people might have for you since your VP product at a start-up and that's kind of a unique experience so first I want to get to car as a question on Carnes question is what metrics should we not focus on and I'm not totally sure if he's asking that Curran is asking that in like interviewer mode or not but me I don't know if you have some immediate thoughts Sara otherwise I can chime in too yeah I'm not sure if it's specific to the shirt or not it doesn't it doesn't look like we have more context but maybe we can just get our best guess like at least in terms of this case we I think we have a somewhat like brief discussion though about like why we didn't want to pick that one metric maybe you could talk a little bit more about when we think about products why we don't think about acquisition as opposed to retention right yeah um so I think it's like there are so many metrics in this example that we could have looked at so like you're saying I went more the retention side you could have done more just like how many how much money are people stunning per purchase how many items are people buying things like that and I think it just goes back to what is the goal in the first place any of those metrics actually could have been the right metrics for this product but at the beginning Steven mentioned that the biggest goal here is to improve the user experience and also thinking about the stage of the product which at the end I was mentioning like the biggest goal right now is to validate that this is even something that we should invest a lot of money in before rolling out to all of the parks so I think thinking about the goal the goal of interviewer gave you or in the context of the product tells me that looking at something retention is going to give me a better indicator of is this product even working and is it improving the experience which then phase 2 is maybe we're thinking more about scaling how many people are using it how do we roll out how many people tell other people that they should use it and more like acquisition things like that so to me that's that's you want to think about when you're picking the right metric there's a lot of potential metrics but its core more about the context and what's important right now

Channel: Exponent

Views: 32,093

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 explained, product management in startups, product management interview, pm interview, pm jobs, product manager coaching, product management coach, vp product, product manager startup, startup pm

Id: LIqWUuzNeK8

Length: 35min 34sec (2134 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019