Decoding the Product Design Interview
This framework has worked brilliantly for me and a few others whom I’ve mentored for their interview prep. Please remember, product sense and design interview questions are a lot of improvising on the fly. Please do tons of mock interviews to internalize this framework and improvise on the go.
Join the fastest growing and most inclusive product community, PMx. A space for product managers, analysts, designers and data scientists all together. Click here to sign up and create your profile.
Product Management Interviews a roughly broken into the following:
- Product sense
- Product execution
- Analytical and/or System Design
- Behavioral: (Amazon’s behavioral interview) 14 leadership tenets.
These can be broken down in the following types:
//Product Design
o Design a watch for visually impaired (google — Physical Products)
o Design a fridge for kids (google — Physical products)
o Design a bike renting app for tourists
o Design a voice assistant
o Design an app for people moving to new cities to find a doctor
o Build a product to check whether a product was sold on fB marketplace.
//Product Improvement
o How would you improve youtube
o How would you improve google maps
o How would you improve facebook messenger
o How do you see the future of youtube
o How do you see the future of facebook
o How would you increase engagement of Instagram stories
Product Execution questions are asked to understand how do you think about metrics and measurements inside of the product.
These can be further broken down into the following types:
- Product Metrics
- Debugging the product
- Evaluating product tradeoffs
//Product Metrics:
- How would you set your goals for Facebook Book watch
- How would you measure meaningful social interactions
- How would you measure the success of Instagram reactions
- How would you set goals for your team for success
//Product Debugging:
- You’re the PM of ABC, and you see traffic is down by 10% , what do you do?
- Any metric is down by 5% what do you do?
//Tradeoffs:
- Whatsapp is thinking to introduce payments, what do you think about it.
- Youtube is looking to introduce short format video what do you think about it.
- How would you decide to show “people you may know” unit or an ad unit.
Having done more than 300 interviews and helping more than 1000 PMs to crack their jobs, this framework has worked for me and I am hoping that this will work for you too. More details on the working of this framework, more tips and tricks in this amazing video by Art and Science Method
The step by step guide to answering product sense question is:
1. Clarifying questions: Always ask clarifying questions about the problem statement given to you. Talk about the 3Cs: Company, customer and competition.
2. Laying down the structure: Introduce the structure of your solution to the interviewer right ahead so that he/she knows what to expect and how you’re going to approach solving the problem.
3. Company’s Mission: Always start with the company’s mission. No company would build a product that does not align with its mission statement. It always helps to ground the interviewer with the mission statement of the company.
4. Why should the company build this? Where does it fit in the overarching mission statement.
5. Product mission: Set out a product mission of the product that you’re building.
6. Product Objective: Pick a product objective that you plan to achieve by building the product. Depending upon the organization, you may want to choose between adoption, engagement, retention or monetization. At times interviewers come with their own pre-fixated ideas, it helps to bounce off what you’re thinking, so that it aligns with what they have in mind.
7. User Segment: This is the most important section of the interview which will lay down the foundation of your next 20–30 mins of the discussion. Picking the right user segment inside of the right user segment. Picking the right user type and the right user segment inside of that user type is the key to solving product design questions. Picking the right user segment shows that you have enough user empathy to color the problem set nicely.
User types are the KEY Stakeholders!! The various sides of the eco system. Such as a market place can be two sided or three sided, with middle men or without middle men, with logistics or without logistics as a part of the solution.
When in doubt, either clarify or state of your assumptions clearly and check in with your interviewer if he/she has an opinion on the same.
Following are some of the parameters basis which, you can break down the user segment and pick the one that suits the problem statement best.
- Demographics
- Motivations
- Age
- Life stage
- Occupation types
- How much money do they have
- How much Time do they have at hand
- Tech savvy?
- Mobile vs web
- Wifi vs 3g, 2g,
- Text vs video vs audio
- Accessibility issues to address such as visually impaired
CALL OUT the reasons for this and WHY!!
8. Pain points: EMPHATY EMPATHY EMPATHY. While laying out the user journey of a typical happy flow inside of the product, it’ll be super helpful to bring in tons of empathy for why the user will use it or not use it. Come up with minimum three pain points. A few common pain points are:
a. Discoverability
b. Pricing and Reviews
c. Social sharing on the go
Pick one (or at max two) Pain point(s) to solve for and support it with a why !!
9. Solution: Its extremely important that you’re focused and discreet in picking only the most important pain point that you’re trying to solve for. Do not go all over the place while coming up with solutions. Come up with only one or at max two solutions to solve the problem that you picked in the previous step.
a. Sol 1
b. Sol 2
Which ever solution you pick… tie it back to the product objective
10. How do you measure the success of this product. Come up with the north star metrics
a. Lay down your north star metrics and your guard rail metrics.
b. Keep it very very simple.
11. Tradeoffs: Do take a minute to talk about the trade off of the solution that you’ve proposed. It helps in letting the interviewer know that you’re a balanced personality and also the fact that you can criticize your own solution and are open to feedback. A few tradeoffs are:
a. Cannibalization
b. Time spend on the main product
12. Summarize: summarize the discussion all the way to the tradeoff section.
I learned it from this amazing video called as the Art and Science method to nailing the product sense interview. This blog is a humble attempt at sharing what has worked for me. Hopefully it’ll be of help to you. Hope you find this structure helpful. Leave a comment if you want to discuss this framework or any other approach or if you want to book my time for a mock interview. Will follow up on this post to lay down the structure for answering Product Execution questions.
Connect with me on linkedin, Instagram , twitter or follow my youtube channel. You can also book my time for your PM interview prep. Happy to help!
Introducing, the most advanced Interview prep platform to help you with your most important journey!! Check out InterviewClub.co — your AI Co-Pilot for interviews and book time with more than 200 mentors across Product management, design, data, AI/ML, Marketing and more
Book a 1:1 with me on Interviewclub.co
