Product design mock interview: LinkedIn mentorship (w/ Microsoft PM)

hi everyone kentuckvescu here the founder of rocketblocks in today's rocketblocks mini lesson we're going to sit down and do a full product management mock interview this particular product management interview is going to be focused on a product design and product sense question based on a linkedin scenario and product challenge and in this mock interview i'm going to play the role of the interviewer and the candidate will be played by encore biswas he is a product manager at microsoft on the azure team he's a recent graduate of cornell university and a member of the product folks online product community so i'm super excited to walk through this question with the homecore let's go ahead and get started awesome okay well we're excited to have you here and let's go ahead and jump into the question today and what we're going to do is i want you to imagine that you are a product manager at linkedin and you were thinking about how to design a service that would help folks find mentorship on the platform you know big part of moving forward in your careers and advancing is getting mentorship from people that have done it before you and we think there's some opportunity there but it is an entirely sort of open space and we'd love your help sort of defining and exploring that and telling us what it should look like great uh that sounds good i'm pretty familiar with with linkedin so that should be fine i've used it before i know there's tons of users so that's great uh before we actually get into the the meat of the question i do want to clarify the scope a little further is that fine if i just ask you a couple of questions yeah yeah that's great awesome uh so in terms of design itself uh are we thinking of something that's integrated into the already existing linkedin linkedin platform or is this something like a standalone application of its own or website of its own yeah so very good question i think that ultimately we could see either routes working i think depending on sort of how you define things and what you end up prioritizing uh other routes could be viable so we don't have any preconceived notions about it must be an app or it must be integrated i'll keep that in mind when when we make these when we make these designs cool uh the next thing was are we working with any specific resource constraints does this need to happen um at a specific timeline are we looking at something like that are there is this happening at the expense of any other feature that we need to make trade-offs against anything of that sort yeah uh that isn't that's another really good question i think the way to think about it is that you have a team it's a small team so let's imagine like a 10 person team you're gonna have some product marketing resources you're gonna have front end and back end engineering resources and the design in that core team and you have six months to get out of e1 so those are sort of the constraints we'd like you to work with and you can play with it a little bit but you know this can't be something that is going to take four years to to build nor is it something that you need to build in a week okay perfect uh great so before we go into that uh again the design i'm gonna just state a couple of assumptions that i'm making and feel free to correct me if this is wrong uh number one i'm going to assume that people are going into linkedin with the same purposes that they currently do that's to advance their kind of professional careers and the second one is that i'm going to assume that the features that exist in linkedin today are still available on this platform is that are those kind of safe assumptions to be making yes on the first one when you say the clarify what you mean on the second one you just mean that the standard feature set of linkedin is still available correct so the personal like your page view a timeline chatting ability um liking commenting just the basics that you expect of our social media platform and already we know to be ubiquitous on linkedin those exist like the trial versus the premium versus the regular membership stuff like that yeah yeah so that's a good assumption that that is true so everything that exists on linkedin that's publicly available today you can assume is there at your disposal some of the sort of core atomic elements of social behavior like you mentioned and then i think it's also fair to think about uh yes there is the premium premium offering that linkedin has versus just the free membership okay all right uh that kind of clarifies the scope of the problem for me so over the course of this um of the interview and in designing this product i want to go into uh one why this kind of fits in with linkedin's overall statement from from what i know about it um gonna identify who the customers for this particular product or feature set may be and what their needs are okay um try and come up with multiple solutions that may need some one or more of those pain points and then maybe we can evaluate trade-offs and success criteria together and then come up on one kind of mvp style design that we know is feasible to be built in in six months does that sound good i think that sounds like a pretty solid way to approach it all right cool uh can i just take a second to jot down a couple of initial ideas sure absolutely all right so done a little bit of quick scribbling uh and the what i wanted to kind of express off the bat is from the perspective of this product uh i see what we would initially identify as a two-sided market uh so there's not one unique customer segment there's two so what i've identified is the person who's finding a mentor and then the set of mentors themselves both of these sets are customers for this application they both need to have a good experience for us to call this application a success you can't have uh uh an application that has you know a hundred possible mentees on it with only one mentor available to mentor 100 of them it needs to be a good experience uh for both so i'll i'll talk about the mentor group a little bit first and then maybe about the mentees okay um so mentors broadly in my mind fall into a few categories uh number one uh just a general advisor uh so i'm thinking of whenever a student goes into a college program they're assigned a general advisor who kind of talks them through the environment of college uh who talks them through you know what generally people do when they try to think of a particular profession and then those same students get more specialized mentors or professors in their majors or in their particular classes in their project teams and so on and so forth so just a general career counselor maybe one kind of metro yeah another kind of mentor maybe someone that's specialized in a particular profession with more technical skills that they may be able to give and the last kind of mentor may be someone who is looking maybe comes from an underrepresented background maybe comes from particularly difficult circumstances trying to give back to a community that they identify with this can be um this can be you know people from the lgbtq community it could be um it could be safe from racially underrepresented groups and technology and finance i know that that's a big thing uh some maybe something like that yeah yeah from the person uh from the perspective of someone looking for a mentor uh there's a couple as well i i'm thinking broadly of experienced people so people may be five six seven ten fifteen years into their career who maybe are feeling a little stagnated or they might be looking to make a career transition they're kind of bored or or don't see any more growth in what they're doing right now i'm gonna make a switch don't really know about their other options and the second is is a group of people who are completely new to industry so recent college grads maybe people who are transitioning out of the military for example going back to school and they're not going to look for their first jobs so people with less than maybe three years of experience in a professional uh uh setting so the way in which i want to kind of i can again go more into a little more detail about the needs of these groups yeah the way i would like to analyze it is from the perspective of where we can create the most value for these customers and then maybe narrow down the solution that caters to one or more of them okay but i wanted to make sure we're on the same page and if you had any questions feel free yeah i think that uh seems logical the one question i'd have and maybe you're gonna get to this is when you say sort of prioritizing by where we can create the most value how will we quantify what that value is like how do we know or you know how are you gonna think about using that as a metric to or heuristic sure uh i think looking at that is is is great and i want to look at a very high level of what linkedin is as a company and what kind of the value proposition is that linkedin does uh so one core feature of linkedin is providing professional connections it's not meant for something uh you don't upload stories there you don't tell someone what you did on a friday night it's very specifically tailored towards career advancement uh with that also linkedin has the immense amount of data about people's you know professional habits resumes things like that furthermore there's also the social media component of being able to bring people together and i think as a company linkedin wants to make sure that on the platform people achieve more success uh by whatever their own definitions of success is in their careers either getting to know more people learning new skills uh letting other people know what they've accomplished in their careers so from the perspective of growth uh i know linkedin learning is a big push that linkedin is doing offering premium kind of well-established courses that help you succeed in a particular career of your choice so this would again be a kind of a resource available on linkedin for customers to be able to grow their careers at whichever point in time that in their career that they're in uh so in terms of measuring that i think there's there's a couple of things number one of course is is purely engagement uh this platform is only as successful as the number of people that use it and then uh and are on it so i would think of something along the lines of daily or monthly active users uh as i mentioned before a ratio is incredibly important to make sure that this is is good engagement as opposed to any sort of engagement so yeah keeping a good track on the mental automatic ratio available uh and how that is growing and changing over time uh is something that i want to look at on the engagement side from an impact perspective i think mentor-mentee relationships are most positive and create the most amount of value when they happen over a sustained period of time because you want to get to know the person better their needs their interests and cater your questions as a mentee or the advice you give as a mentor based upon that so return rate is something i would want to weigh heavily as to see how long people spend on this platform together in that partnership if you want to call it that and then again the platform is only as successful as the amount of fun or enjoyment that people can get out of it so i'd be looking at maybe customer satisfaction net promoter score the general kind of app store rating type experience related uh metrics that that a platform can have got it okay okay okay so so kind of keeping those goals in mind i'll try to tie in those goals uh at the appropriate times when we're kind of talking about the customers um so so going back to we identified kind of a broad set of of customers and what their needs might be um i want to think about and what i have written down on my little note here is is kind of stories um like the end-to-end journey of what a customer might want out of this platform okay uh so so i can i can think of a few uh and i mentioned of them a little a little bit earlier but one is uh a new person new in career who just wants to get their foot in the door for a particular industry um and that could be a college student that could be a person that's switching out of the military or something like that uh the second thing is a person that just wants to grow their network because a large number of industries are very are not only dependent on your core technical skills required for that industry but who you know that so someone you know who is a director may make you a manager and help you achieve that next step in your career so just kind of grow their connections and make inroads into maybe different companies or different parts of that industry the last one one follow-up question there i want to ask you about so you you sort of framed this bucket of of stories or use cases as the grow your network connections and i definitely agree with the underlying premise that in many industries the network is just as important or sometimes more important as your technical skills that you bring to the table um but the example you gave was i think like you know you're a manager and you want to get to a director so and so maybe you reach out and you you get advice from a director which i think is a very you know realistic use case but my question is is that really just about growing network or is that you know some sort of targeted like career advancement use case i think it's the latter it's more of a career advancement use case it's basically what the mentee is looking for out of that mentorship experience okay uh is is kind of what what i'm trying to get to so that might be one story that that we're looking at uh which may not be as important as as some of the others uh does that kind of answer the question yeah so it sounds like we're sort of on the same page like you're saying there's this use case of essentially career advancement like help me get to next level x whatever correct that might be okay yeah uh so so so there's that the the i guess the last one is as a mentor i want to make sure that i have a set of mentees or a singular mentee who i kind of identify with get along well with on on personal terms because obviously this is something that i am going to do as a mentor outside of my nine to five or ten to six job uh so it needs to be an enjoyable experience for them i want to find people identify with i want to find people who share the same goals and passions that i do so that i can give them the best experience that that they might have um the the last thing is i guess uh what i talked about earlier people who are kind of newer in their careers uh just trying to understand better the landscape of what an industry looks like because industry practices and what it takes to succeed there the skill sets required are very different from what it takes to succeed in a college environment for example typically where where new hires come from um based on kind of that and what we've discussed before about the goals of the application uh i personally think that i would like to focus on new to career folks trying to find industry mentors for the first time and there's a couple of reasons for that i think it's the highest impact proposition number one because it's an investment in the future we mentioned before that this needs to be a sustained long-term relationship to create value uh and also long-term relationship means it's better for the linkedin platform as a whole uh people who are younger want to probably sustain those relationships over a long period of time and uh that would be good for their career as well as long as they're in that industry so that's probably one reason it's the customer segment that's probably in my mind in the most neat because college students have very different priorities when they are in school very geared towards academics very strenuous environment um and currently it's it's not an even playing field students who are from the wealthier backgrounds uh who are in colleges that are better geographically situated uh for example if you're in upstate new york versus a new york city the person in new york city is just going to have more avenues to network and get to find mentors and people uh the internet is used to democratize information and this feels like a good place to kind of even out the playing field for people from underprivileged backgrounds or people who just don't have enough access um and the bang for buck for that college student who is very new in career doesn't really know what the corporate world or the industry is like that would provide them with the most amount of benefit from a sustained uh mentorship does that sound good to you or do you want to also hear about some other stories that i mentioned as well no i think it makes sense i i think one of the things i was thinking about is how do you really try and quantify is a new college student going to get more benefit from a good mentorship relationship than say the mid-career person that's you know a senior manager level trying to get to director and i don't know that i have a good answer for how you quantify that but i i am sympathetic or you know in agreement that boost trying to get someone a boost at the beginning of the career does make sense it feels like if you get them on the right track originally that helps a lot like the trajectory setting so i i buy it i'm not quite sure how you really measure it but i buy i buy the logical like the argument for it sure and and i think i i also want to stress that i guess in terms of impact if we want to think about it that way uh the net change in a person's life when they get from manager to director if that's the example we want to go with in my mind is probably lesser than a person early on in their career that just doesn't really have any idea what they're doing to getting an understanding of which industry which career which part they might want to fit into the kind of value you're adding to that customer's life in my mind is is more for the person who is early on in korean would benefit more from a sustained mentorship um that's that's kind of what where i was going with that yeah i think it's fair and i think if you wanted to get really if you really wanted to sort of nerd out on it you probably could do a study and compare like the incremental benefit of getting from manager to director like a year earlier and like that financial sort of lifetime benefit versus you know potentially going down x path versus y path at the beginning of your career and the compounding benefits that has you know that probably would assuming you get on the right track and mentorship is a part of that um could probably end up largely outpacing it if you really wanted to track yeah and and we're making a assumption that the benefits are compounding but hopefully that that is the case if the if the thing is sustained over a long period of time yeah and i think the other yeah probably the other assumption that's baked in there right is that the benefits even are financial which they may not be you know there's a lot of ways to have a successful career that aren't necessarily tied to financial remuneration right so correct okay correct and i think that for folks that are kind of newer in that career uh it's a lack of understanding of what that industry is like the perception that that folks have going in may be actually very different from that what that career actually may uh the skills that may be required to succeed the environment that they see there so securing about that from someone and being better prepared is again an intangible benefit but one that i think a lot of people would would strongly would strongly benefit from yeah um so i guess before we kind of go into again the the exact features that the the product would have um i want to think a little bit about some uh specific more if we're looking at early interior people pain points that the customer early in career customer may have um in in networking or finding mentors right now uh so again i just have one all right uh i have some ideas and i'd like to share them with you uh broadly uh a couple of things one networking is difficult and the second one that networking and finding mentorships comes with a lot of trade-offs that that may not be fair for a student or early and career person to be okay uh so finding a mentor is one a huge investment of time and for some people an investment of money as well if you're talking about traveling if you're talking about you know getting dressed up to to meet someone something like that it is it comes with it comes the cost of that that is is not at all related to the success of that student if we're talking about that at that point in their lives that's not going to bring them any benefit to their grades or anything like that it's something absolutely different from what they're doing on a day-to-day basis okay um the second thing is that it's just it's awkward um just cold emailing someone finding someone uh who may be able to help you is is just difficult and a lot of people don't want to take the hassle of doing it maybe that's because of fear of rejection maybe that's because they don't want to like appear needy and create a bad impression in case they apply for a job in that company at some point in the future could be multiple reasons the other thing is it's very difficult to know whether there's a reciprocal relationship on the other side which is which is i think uh just because you want someone to mentor you doesn't mean that that person is at the point in their life where they are looking to mentor other people they may have different priorities work might be stressful family commitments it could be any number of things uh so creating that reciprocal relationship uh is is very important the last thing about is is about trade-offs and access i hinted about this a little earlier you're much more easily likely to find a mentor if you're wealthy you're much more easily likely to find a mentor if you're in the middle of a city as opposed to college town in the case of maybe computer science you can think of if you live near san francisco way more likely to just find a mentor online or in person as opposed to maybe if you're living in the middle of ohio just as an example can you unpack a little bit the assumption you made that finding a mentor is easier if you're wealthy i think it's it's to say that if you're wealthy you can probably afford to be a part of social networks where finding access to someone that is also successful in in something is easier so wealthy people tend to in general run in wealthier circles uh and social interactions also happen to be with maybe slightly wealthier again you said that's not maybe a complete denotion of success but to some degree is better connected uh people who might be able to give you more of more of their time than someone who is not got it yeah and i think that's fair so i think the underlying assumption is if you you have a slightly wealthier background or come from that it is more likely that you already have someone within your network that you may want mentorship from correct versus you're not coming from that background and not having that in yeah you have to go establish it for the first time versus being able to ask your father your cousin or whoever correct and that's and that's certainly not true in a vast number of cases but it is true in some in in a subset of the population for sure uh so so that's that's what i have in terms of where that that ranks i'd say uh the first thing that we need to that i would want to prioritize is finding a reciprocal relationship uh especially given that we are working in a social media platform that has access to all of that data and all of that social networking capability finding a reciprocal mentorship is is something that's really important and and the second thing is finding someone that aligns with kind of strategically or career-wise the same interests as you on the same background that's that's also very important to start off with a shared ground to get out of that maybe stage of awkwardness or difficulty in establishing that relationship to begin with yeah can you tell me a little bit so some of the sort of pain points from the the side of the mentee are very clear to me it's hard to find a mentor like it may seem a bit awkward like who am i to reach out to this person that's already been super successful or how do i even reach out or you know am i asking for too much of their time etc so that all i think makes complete sense to me one of the things that i'd like to hear from you and your thoughts on are from the from the mentor side how do you know you're talking about the reciprocity you're trying to create what are the incentives for him or her to engage in this like it's very clear how the the mentee benefits what are the benefits on the flip side of the equation i think on the flip side of the occasion of of it there's there's a couple things number one i think an investment from a mentor uh is good because that is probably an investment that you're making in your team or in your company or in your industry and if that industry grows or that company grows it's a win-win situation for everyone so if i as a as a pm at microsoft and mentoring someone who wants to become a pm someday they might join microsoft or whichever company i'm a part of and contribute to that company so that's that's one kind of direct benefit uh the second thing is that i find a lot of uh and this is of course again maybe a generalization but a lot of people get a lot of professional fulfillment uh in in their lives because of work because of the money they make uh but this might be an avenue to create personal fulfillment uh that otherwise may not come in in any other way uh this is not the kind of relationship you have with your friends or you have with your family something completely different and i think there's an uh there's a there's an inherent benefit or joy that comes from altruism or giving back to someone that may be in need you want to repay the favor that maybe someone did for you when you were when you were younger or you want to play the role of a person that you didn't have when you were younger and you would have greatly benefited from and people derive personal fulfillment for that so those are kind of the two one more tangible and one more emotional benefit that i see for the mentors themselves yeah and i think that's fair and i think i resonate a lot with with the second one i i think a lot of folks that potentially are your mentors really are doing it because of this altruistic aspect they get some sort of you know it's altruistic because they're helping but it's also personal to them because they probably actually receive a lot of personal satisfaction from from doing yeah and i think that this is also encouraged in most companies of note and most companies that we see in from a good eye like there's a lot of places that will compensate you for volunteering there's a lot of places that encourage you to take time off on holidays and help your community uh sports teams do it big companies do it so i don't see this as any different this is just on a more micro personal level people also expressing uh that needed that desire cool so yeah go ahead i i think that all sounds good the only thing i was going to suggest is maybe let's talk about uh designing for for these pain points and customers yeah so so what i'd like to do is uh maybe come up with more than one potential design idea and just talk through the pros and cons of a couple of them and then maybe we can we can even make a hybrid design uh towards the end uh so i did have a couple of ideas uh actually i think i have three ideas i just thought of one now i don't know how how that's going to go but uh the first one is is what i'd like to think of as a kind of a a resource group so to speak uh so a set a many-to-many set of mentors uh sorry of mentors as well as mentees of maybe let's say specifically here people who are uh in college or you know uh between the age of 18 to 25 as as mentees and people between the age of 35 to 30 sorry 25 to 35 as mentors in a group that's set up on linkedin so a kind of group experience where you don't necessarily need to connect with one person you can connect with multiple and get multiple perspectives on questions that you have okay uh second idea that i had was an individual tailored mentorship experience where you have uh obviously introduced through linkedin which acts as a platform a personalized connection with someone either from the industry or interested in uh the role you're interested in or maybe the background that you're for that you're from that's kind of tailor-made to your goals ambitions or pattern uh the third idea that i had just came up on the fly was something that i think is similar to to speed dating uh so in speed dating essentially is you go and you see multiple people for maybe 20 minutes on one night in a constrained environment and then uh you either choose to go ahead with them or you don't so an environment where you're paired very quickly from from an accepting group of people of mentors and mentees for quick conversations or chats maybe 15 minutes 20 minutes resume reviews uh specific questions that you have about a career or a job or an interview uh you do that very quickly and then if one of them happens to be really good and there's a kind of mutual attraction on on both sides mutual consent on both sides then you can continue with that uh at some point in the future um and those again are super high level yeah uh i personally am drawn to the second solution which is an individual sustained mentorship but i'd like to hear your thoughts on the others if you haven't yeah i mean i think they're all interesting and i i i think it'd be fun to explore all of them for the for the sake of just time and since we don't have infinite time here let's just dive into the personal one and i'd love to hear a little bit about like tell me how you're envisioning the mechanics of this work how how do we get to the idea of you know personal connection between a mentee and a mentor uh to you know reality where this happens what does that look and feel like on the platform sure uh of course and kind of trading off between the other things that we talked about earlier uh i think that the in terms of the experience that you're going to give to both parties is probably better in a sustained relationship and there isn't an official way to kind of do that in in the world at the moment i can see resource groups kind of being fulfilled by meetups and and things like that where people from different backgrounds just just talk about things or facebook groups but this a sustained kind of relationship doesn't really exist in any competitive space either which is why i thought the individual mentorship might be a cool thing to go into um so in in terms of kind of features then as to as to what that would look like and how that would play out um i think there's there's a few things number one is the sign up experience so to speak getting into the platform and getting your information in there uh i think the best way to do it would be very similar to how let's say dating applications or even linkedin profiles profiles in general are set up with a set of uh one a set of informal questions that kind of matches personalities and secondly a set of more formal questions that matches career aspirations and goals and what you want to eventually get out of the relationship so uh from the informal side i can think of things like favorite food what you do in your free time uh what is kind of meaningful to you that sort of stuff and then from on the flip side from a purse from a career ambition perspective like where do you see yourself in a few years what you ideally see yourself doing from nine to five uh what is your like favorite company or you know which company is your dream company things like that okay um and that comes in from both sides uh from the side of the mentee more so but i would like the personality based questions to come in from the mentor side as well to kind of have a good mapping of people that share kind of similar interests and backgrounds a second thing is to kind of identify goals coming in from the mentorship perspective again from both parties specifically what outcomes you're looking to see on on either side and the last thing is questions about the time commitment involved so how many hours a week do you want to be mentored for on the flip side how many hours a week are you ready to commit to this could be less than one and there could be ranges uh of time and how long do you think you want to sustain uh this relationship so at the end of this uh this kind of sign up workflow you have the information and data required uh to get to know someone to learn something from someone else and to learn and to share information to kind of have a have a base place to start from which kind of meets the needs of uh breaking the ice so to speak the profiles that you get uh and the information that you have and with the algorithmic backing of linkedin's kind of social media capabilities it kind of helps in creating relationships that might be more successful than others and also when you are armed with this information in kind of a first meeting it makes sure that breaking the isis is relatively easy um so i guess the second core component or feature would be the recommendation engine of of this of this platform um so number one from the mentee side this shouldn't feel like an application like i shouldn't be applying to get mentored by someone and then potentially be getting rejected it should be very much that we will do our best to find someone find someone or maybe even a group of people that match uh the profile that that that you're looking for uh and it should be skewed i believe in the uh on the perspective of the mentee because their emotions and needs are probably greater at this at this particular point okay um coming up with multiple suggestions is is something that i i think is important and i think having information off the the mentors themselves uh abstracted by a couple of levels is probably useful so what i mean by that is when you are saying that there are some profiles that match it would be very similar to how i see some viewers in linkedin have seen your profile so maybe what role they're in but not specifically what they look like what their gender is what company they work at you know how much they make if that information is available on linkedin stuff like that so it's not colored by oh i'm a computer science enthusiast i'm definitely only going to be mentored by someone that works at facebook or netflix some something like that uh i don't want to get into the more devious reasons why you might want to choose someone on a like random basis so so the recommendation engine is is really important the last thing i think as a feature is to be able to create kind of sustained relationships and be in the application itself and i want to do that in a couple of ways number one by making sure that the mentors and the mentees from start to finish feel comfortable using the applications so have guided workflows or guided experiences in the application as to things that they can accomplish together so maybe tee up a first conversation whether whether that's within linkedin or a platform like zoom that's outside with kind of a of a loose script on on what we expect to be talked about in that first interaction with icebreakers with the information that both parties have submitted willingly uh into the application follow that up with once that initial call has been done more information on what that went what you when do you think the next meeting should be uh what outcomes do you expect out of that whether that should be recurring um making it easy to do that so sending calendar invites to both parties uh on their linkedin accounts or their personal accounts uh simultaneously making sure that sustaining that relationship is really easy and creating notifications and reminders that maybe you haven't connected with your mentor in 90 days would you like to reach out similarly on the mentor side maybe you've been busy with work you haven't reached out to your mentee in 30 days would you would you like to send them a message uh something like that to make sure that the experience is easy uh and linkedin does a lot of the work the engine does a bit of the work in ironing out the the pain points or the awkwardness that these two parties may have because they're in the process of getting to know each other and this relationship is only useful if sustained and close uh so kind of bringing that closeness together would be something that that's helpful so those are kind of the three key features that i think i would want to build in that six month period before we launch got it and so okay got it so that makes sense so there's there's like the onboarding flow and the intake of information about where you are in your career what you're looking for what are the goals there's a matchmaking component and then there's a logistical component um how much on the logistical component i think you sort of decided well you know maybe it happens on zoom maybe some of this happens on linkedin how heavy of a hand so to say should linkedin play in that the logistical facilitation of this relationship i think it should be minimal and be as open-ended as possible uh primarily because you want the users to do what works best for them and as linkedin not what's best for you so if we make the users comfortable and using whatever platform that they want and whatever means of communication that they want uh it's more likely that they use this platform to get more mentees or mentors or sustain their relationship over a long period of time so i don't want to ideally in an ideal world link it down to just linkedin messages or linkedin calls if that becomes a feature at some point uh i want to be have an integration with teams so have an integration with zoom or your google account or whatever that is and companies are slowly moving in that direction anyway you can log in with your with your google account for example on on many applications and maybe linkedin is one of them uh so yeah having an open-ended way to connect with with people is probably a better investment i think and integrations with other parties that also opens us up to other google accounts or other yahoo accounts that primarily may want to use this part of linkedin for networking as opposed to as opposed to others so so we open up another set of customers as well got it okay makes sense another thing i wanted to ask you about a little bit is is on the matchmaking component i think you know there's some ml and some work that will go in there there to doing it and i don't doubt that it that it can be done a doubt that i do have is that there's still a big personal element in finding uh a mentorship relationship and that finding one that works sustainably is tough uh so if you accept that premise that it's tough and even if the ml is really good that that matchmaking is going to be something that's going to be a challenge in the product how would you think about you know addressing in the product the flow of hey this person we thought we matched this person but it didn't work out which i think might be something that you run into a decent amount and if creating a true sustained relationship is is part of the value you're looking to provide what it how do you think about addressing that i think there's there's a couple of ways uh the first one is let's talk about that feature specifically in cases where the relationship doesn't work out and i also want to talk about customer trends to some degree um i think at the end of a call uh having a kind of retrospective with both sides on what could on how that went and if that rating is poor and this happens on on let's say zoom for example you rate the the the kind of conversation you had it's only visible to zoom in this case your rating would not be visible to your mentees it's not like a uber drivers rating where that shows up when when you search for them it's just something that linkedin knows about that interaction and maybe some feedback on what that could have been made better and using that information to further inform searches in the future that's one thing the second thing is having a system uh and having ideas of content managers for example whose primary primary job on this feature as it matures is to kind of think of new ways to establish connections new activities to do if personal meetups are possible at some point in the future uh phil solicitating that uh would be would be something that's useful so expanding the scope of the activities that can be done or the conversations that can be had uh you know in a sphere where when both mentor and mentee are comfortable might be might be something to look at the last thing is if that relationship didn't go if that call didn't go particularly well allow the mentor to recommend someone that that may suit them better maybe have linkedin do that themselves uh so this happens in in networking at companies all the time you may talk to one manager who's who maybe says you know i don't think you're a fit for this for my team and my team isn't looking for someone with your skills but i know someone who is and i think as this program matures it's it is something that that can feasibly be done either by the system or by the mentors themselves or who may know someone at their company that might be able to help better got it okay great um i have one last sort of question i'd love to ask you which is yeah we haven't talked at all about uh the monetization impact or whether you're thinking about is this a paid service do i get access for free so how are you how are you thinking that would work for something like this and and just considering the personal sustained use case that we've been building i think initially the what we should be looking at is getting a large number of people into the platform i feel that if it's monetized uh immediately then a large number of people who would benefit most from this service would be locked out of it and unwilling to kind of go ahead and do it i don't think even from a mentor's perspective it makes really a lot of sense to have to pay for a service that allows you to mentor other people you could probably find them in the elsewhere as well uh so i don't think that this is something that should be monetized to begin with i think having a model where where men where folks who are already have linkedin premium accounts are given additional features maybe something that that we can look at so if we go from the last uh from our last kind of question uh maybe the retrospective is more detailed if you have a have a linkedin premium account maybe you get recommendations for alternate mentors if you're if you're a mentee already if you have all if you have a linkedin premium account that's some uh kind of uh nice to have uh bonus features could be could be added in but i think as a base platform it should be available free to all users and and monetize the way linkedin monetizes other free features uh for the moment so that's that's one thing in terms of the launch plan uh that you asked about i think having a kind of a smaller launch to begin with either identifying you know just through interest and the data that we have on linkedin already maybe if you're talking about college students the majors that they have listed dot edu accounts opening it up to specifically certain industries that might be more receptive to these kinds of relationships would be a good thing to start so maybe computer science and mathematics enthusiasts who work in data science to start with and then slowly opening that up to the maybe the financial industry the health care industry so on and so forth having a targeted approach to see how things could be changed for industries that are most receptive to these kind of relationships and then moving into ones where where networking is a more formal thing would be a good way to look at it yeah i like that suggestion because i think by also narrowing down where you focus originally you are going to reduce the problem scope and it'll make it easier to say find good matches because you've just you know you've reduced the problem scope um great so uh we've covered a lot of ground uh it would be awesome maybe if you could just sort of summarize where we ended up and what you're recommending yeah i think yeah i think uh from the perspective of linkedin it's incredibly important that we create a platform for mentors and mentees uh which is enjoyable easy to engage with and uh has the features in it to sustain a mentor mental relationship over a long period of time folks who are early in their careers and don't really know what the professional industry that they want to go into is about and what it takes to succeed there are the customer base from the mentees side that is most at risk and will probably have the most benefit from such an application so that's going to be a target mentee base from a mentor's perspective it's mostly people that want to give back uh who didn't have a mentor themselves or maybe get altruistic benefit uh from from having that personal relationship with some other people uh we want to create an open-ended engine on linkedin uh that has integrations with other technologies uh that collects information from both the mentees and mentors whether that's personal as well as kind of more professional goal oriented we want to tee up conversations and and have uh guided ideas as to what we expect those initial conversations to look like and then remind uh and remind both mentees and mentors if they do fall out of touch to to get in touch maybe over holidays over certain dates or time periods uh something of that nature and to have a small subset of features when the when it is monetized for linkedin premium members uh to give them an additional benefit for paying for the linkedin service got it awesome well thank you for walking us through this and i think there were a lot of good ideas ideas in there cool thank you so much for your time big kudos to anker for going through this product design and product sense question publicly so that everyone can benefit from practicing this particular interview question one final comment that i'll leave everyone with is after we went through this interview one of the things that i had asked hunker about was why he didn't consider any sort of solutions or options where two people are matched to get advice on a more tactical issue that might be a one-off issue but still somewhere someone older and more experienced could provide mentorship in that particular experience or particular challenge that someone else would find really valuable and what encore said is that he actually thought that mentorship to him meant that it must be sustained a sustain sustained experience over time over maybe months or weeks or or even years potentially or decades and that's a really interesting insight and one thing i would encourage everyone to think about when you're going through some of these questions and some of the terms that are used are a little nebulous it really can help to put a stake in the ground and define truly how you're thinking about a particular term and what it means to you because you might find that there are some different assumptions depending on your side of the table but regardless a really solid job done by anker thank you so much for watching we've got a ton of great content coming out on the rocketblocks channel so if you haven't subscribed yet please do so now and that means you get all of our content as soon as it comes out thanks again for watching and have a great day you

Channel: rocketblocks

Views: 26,959

Keywords: product management interviews, product management mock interview, linkedin mock interview, product design mock interview, product design questions, linkedin product design question, PM interviews, PM product design interview

Id: eyT75volM7k

Length: 45min 50sec (2750 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020