Product sense & strategy questions in PM interviews (part I)

hello everyone my name is Kenton capacity I'm an ex-googler an X BCG consultant and the founder of rocket blocks an online platform that helps candidates prepare for interviews in today's rocket blocks mini-lesson we're gonna be focusing on product management interviews and specifically we're gonna talk about product design and product sense questions that come up in these interviews and what we're gonna do in this video is we're gonna start by talking about what is a product design or product sense question look like what are some of the characteristics of it and then we'll walk through a sample problem we'll look at one of these sample problems and then we will put ourselves in the mindset of the interviewer and think about what is he or she evaluating the candidate on as they're going through this type of question to really sort of understand what sort of skills traits and things they want to see exhibited from a candidate while they're going through and answering that type of question so let's go ahead and jump it okay so the first thing I want to talk about with product design questions is what people actually refer to them as because people use a lot of different terms here you'll hear someone say product design questions you'll hear someone say product sense questions sometimes we'll even hear people say product strategy questions now I think the right way to think about these type of questions is that every one of these questions is a little bit of product design or product sense so pick which one you like best and then a little bit of product strategy because you can't really design or think about or discuss a product in abstract in an interview without doing a little bit of like what is this product for who's the market what's the opportunity which is this sort of prog strategy component and then what is this product and look like how is it gonna act out function how we actually build it which is sort of the product sense or product design component of it so I like to call them product sense and strategy questions so with that out of the way let's talk about the types of product sense and strategy questions that you might face and generally these end up on one or the other side of a spectrum on one side you have what I'll call sort of generic or generalized product sense and strategy questions which are something like hey how would you think about designing a new type of playground for kids and the reason I say its generic or general is because there's no company's specific knowledge or sort of Industry specific knowledge like Delta to a SAS business or say Amazon's product lines that you need to answer that type of question it's just a general question about how are you going to think about the strategy and design of this type of product on the other end of the spectrum you have a company specific question might be something like you know how would you think about improving Gmail's mobile app that requires a little bit of obviously company specific knowledge you need to know about that product it puts you into the context of that particular company and that particular product it's still about product strategy and product sense but the context around it is different I think both of those types of questions can work and folks will face both of them in product management interviews the big pro of a general question the playground one that we talked about is that basically if you ask a question like that there is no bias from industry context that gets wrapped up in it because it's not about what the person is gonna do generally on the job now the con of that type of question is if there are particular types of details and roles and nuance or the nuance to the role that is being interviewed for a question like that might lose whether the candidate is strong in those particular areas or not the flipside if you use a scenario specific question does address that comp like you'll get the the idea of dozens Canada understand this particular product area this particular product space did they get some of that nuance the con of it is there may be a lot of bias from the interviewer especially if they work at the company or the product that they're asking about and they have a lot of context that the that the candidate is not gonna have and sometimes that can bias their own assessment of how the candidates doing so that's the con as well typically that can be handled by just one the interviewer being aware of that bias and to sort of calibrating over time if they use this question over and over again with a bunch of candidates they'll sort of understand the level of knowledge that someone from outside the company would approach that particular product okay so those is that that's the spectrum of different product sense and strategy questions that can come up now let's talk about an actual sample question and we're gonna pick one from the company specific area and this is what we've got here so say uber has a big and growing challenge that they're wrestling with and that is how do they return lost items efficiently to their customers after they lose an item in an uber car so you are a new p.m. at uber and your director has asked you to take the lead on designing a new lost item recovery system okay so this is the question that we're going to work with now we're going to go into the next section and we're going to talk about what is the interviewers mindset as they're evaluating a candidate answering that question okay so now that we know what question we're dealing with let's take a look at the interview or mindset when they're evaluating a candidate going through this question and there's five key things I wants to think about the first is what is the candidate optimizing for and have they made that clear so for example in the uber question the candidate may internally decide that they're gonna optimize for the average amount of time it takes to return a lost item and the lower they can get that number the better however if the interviewer is default assumption is that the way to optimize for this question is to maximize the percentage of lost items correctly returned then there's gonna be a mismatch there and unless that's called out and there's a discussion head about why the right thing is to optimize for X versus Y the interviewer might be compete confused with the candidates answer because they're thinking about optimizing for a different thing so the first thing is what is the candidate optimizing for and is that clear has it been communicated to the interviewer as well the second thing is structured does the candidate have a structured approach to solving this problem and that's really important for a handful of reasons the first is that the interviewer wants to confidently know that the candidate wasn't just able to solve this particular problem that was put in front of them but that they have a problem-solving approach that's clear that's logical and that's repeatable and that if they're on the job no matter what sort of product problem comes them they'll be able to break down that problem and say okay for this problem I'd like to look at bucket a bucket B bucket C these are the things I need to look at who we're gonna optimize for what are the customers what are the pain points etc and they can repeat that process in a really structured way so that's the second key thing the third is they're gonna be thinking about is the candidate able to traverse the spectrum of product management duties and so what I mean by this is product management is one of those roles where you spend some time up at 20,000 foot strategy and some time all the way on the opposite end of the spectrum doing need agree things like triage bugs or or thinking about what color should this particular button be how should it be designed where should it be on the screen that type of thing and as you're going through a product sense and strategy question like this you want to show that you can traverse that spectrum if you're just stuck on the tactical details of colors and what the user flow is gonna look like etc that's not great nor is it great if you can only talk about the high level strategy of the product but you sort of break down when you get into designing the components the look and feel and everything like that so you need to be able to span that spectrum then the fourth thing that really matters in the interviewer is going to be thinking about is does this person understand how to leverage all of the assets that this company has so especially in these scenario specific questions the assets that a company might have in this case are well there's various technological assets that Hoover has and there might be some physical assets so in the lost item recovery question an asset that they may be able to use is the driver registration centers maybe those centers can be repurposed as lost item reclamation centers as well and customers customers can go back to those centers to pick up their items after drivers have dropped them off I don't know that's the right solution for this particular case you'd have to look at whether that's more efficient than having drivers just return them directly or some other solution but it is a type of asset that uber has that is worth thinking about you know how could that be used and leveraged to solve the problem at hand and then the fifth thing that the interviewer is gonna think be gonna be thinking about is does this candidate have a sixth sense about product do they have some sort of you know spidey sense about what makes a good product what's the look and feel like do they think about you know have a deep understanding of the user standpoint how to build a product that shows empathy for the situation there's and do they really bring some sort of kind of special insights this problem and care about building products to solve solve the pain points at hand some some people you know like thinking a lot about just the high-level strategy now we need to do expert crafting is not as exciting to them and for those people you know maybe product management isn't exactly the right profession because there's a lot of that that goes into building a good product and that's what interviewers are gonna be looking for when they're looking you know asking themselves does this person have that sixth sense about product design so those are I think the five key questions that an interviewer is going to be thinking about as they're assessing a candidate with a question like this okay that should give you the good sense of what is a product sense and strategy question what types of different flavors do these questions come in and more importantly what is the interviewer thinking and assessing a candidate on as they're going through and answering this type of question and the last meta point I will leave you with is if you think about a product sense and strategy question and the fact that it's really asking a candidate how they're gonna think about designing a product building a product launching it who the who the customer is the market it's all the sort of fun parts of product management it's not the bad parts of triaging bugs or managing different stakeholders and so the implication of that is that if it's not clear that a candidate is really engaged and having fun when going through this type of question it's really sort of tough for interviewers to believe that a candidate is gonna have the grit necessary to do the less pleasant aspects of the product management job like bug triaging on a weekend or managing a complicated set of stakeholders so that's the final point I'll leave you with the interviewers I can be thinking about when they ask one of these types of questions so thank you so much for watching if you haven't subscribed yet already there is a big red button below we've got a ton of great content coming out on both the consulting and product management career paths and interviews of thank you so much for watching have a great day and we'll see you soon you

Channel: rocketblocks

Views: 52,757

Keywords: product management interviews, pm interviews, pm interview questions, product management interview questions, product sense questions, product strategy questions, google pm interviews, facebook pm interviews, amazon pm interviews, tech pm interviews

Id: LVZ-ImQfo4E

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020