Cracking your next PM Interview: Product Sense

This part of the interview process tests your rigor in Product Management domain. You will be tested on the following aspects:

1. Structured thinking
2. Understanding of customer and their problems
3. Understanding of the context
4. Your grip on Product Metrics
5. Creativity
6. Prioritization
7. Strategic thinking

Pro-Tip: DO NOT TRY TO REMEMBER ANY PRE-SET FRAMEWORKS. Build your own idea/workflow of how you will go about handling this round.

8 steps to product sense

Questions you can expect:

There are 3 broad categories in which the questions fall…

1. Launching new product
   — How will you go about designing a system for Air Traffic Control?
   — Design a Social travel product for Facebook
2. Launching new features in existing products
   — How will you improve WhatsApp?
   — How can you improve your phones camera App?
   — What changes do you want to make to your most used product?
3. Introducing known products for different set of customers
   — How will you create LinkedIn for BlueCollar workers?
   — Create Uber for blind people

You should be prepared for…

1. Ambiguity: Most people get overwhelmed by ambiguity, but this is PMs everyday job — to deal with ambiguity. So going into this round you must get comfortable with the fact that you are likely to hear lot of ambiguous questions/statement.
2. Interruptions and cross questions: Your interviewer is likely to introduce new scenarios or change the existing context.
3. Striking a balance: Too long a pause vs too much speaking, too many questions vs no questions
4. Be adept with data: Make sure you have revised your concepts of some key metrics — Lifetime Value, Unit economics etc.
5. Cross industry questions: If you are from B2C industry be prepared to take on a product sense question from B2B industry, ensure that you have a basic understanding of different industries.

In Depth…

Structured thinking: This is the stage where you are laying the foundation of how you are going to answer the question. If there are loopholes in your foundation, no amount of creative solutions are going to stand the cross questions the interviewer is going to throw at you. Here’s how to build the foundation strong…
— Paraphrase the problem statement as what you have understood, ensure you call out your assumptions about product. For eg., you can state that “LinkedIn is a social networking platform for people to post, seek work or work related learnings”
— understand the problem: org, user impact because of the problem
— Define success: what it will it look like if we launch the feature/product
— Decompose the statement: based on the second point, you can now create an equation of sorts. Revenue = Existing market * Revenue + New market * revenue
— understand the constraints: For eg., New market cannot include individuals below the age of 18 because of policy controls. Don’t forget to update the equation
— Metric modelling: Ensure you have defined and evaluated all the relevant metrics.

Understanding of customer and their problems in depth: Once you have laid the foundation, its time now for you to get the building blocks right. One of the most important building blocks is to get the understanding of customer and their journeys right.
— Customer: Who are the customers, what are their demographics, is there a difference between customer and user? Pick a persona
— Jobs to be done: Understand the jobs to be done by the customers in using the launched/to be launched feature or product
— Pain points: What are customers pain points that current products/features are unable to address
— Gain points: Going above and beyond just the pain points what points can be true delighters
— Build end-to-end customer journey

Understand the context:This is the stage where you need to zoom out and have a 10000 feet view. Consider following elements for context…
— Core competency: How relevant is the new feature/product to companies goals and core competencies. For eg., If flipkart has to launch a ride hailing app, how will this impact its core competency or how can the core competency benefit the feature/product.
— Economics: Why is it important for us to launch this feature/product now?
— Competition: Who are the players that are already there in the market — sometimes, you need to look beyond obvious for understanding the competition.
— Behavioural changes: Have there been any recent behavioural changes in the population? For eg., adoption of mobile phone or penetration of metaverse.
— Ecosystem: Be aware of the eco-system. At times when you are too focused on customer, you may miss-out on other users in the eco-system and cause destruction in value for them. For eg., partners are a big part of B2B eco-system, when solving the problem please check if you are causing any harm to their business.

Product Metrics: I have a detailed article published on how to model product metrics here. Here are few more details…

1. Remember H.E.A.R.T: Google introduced this form to keep track of important metrics — Happiness, Engagement, Acquisition, Retention and Task success. Make sure to understand what this means for the company you are interviewing.

2. Input metrics vs outcomes: At times you may not have control over the outcome (for eg., improving NPS), in that case you should be clear to call out the metrics where you can make a direct impact ( for eg., CTR of button).

3. Technical metrics: At times interviewer may want to check if you are thinking about scale when building the product or feature. So its a good idea to brush up on some of the technical metrics, Availability, Reliability, Latency, Accuracy etc.

4. Be sure to build the funnel and get your estimates in the range — do not overestimate or underestimate.

Solutions: Now that you have understood the problem, user, context and metrics, its time you scratch that left brain of yours.

1. State the hypothesis: Before you start writing the solutions, recap the discussion and build a strong hypothesis. Include product, user, metric in your hypothesis.

2. Go broad with your solutions: List your solutions as broad as possible, wait for feasibility until next step.

3. Focus: Pick the solution you are going after but make sure you explain why are you picking this solution and not going after others — any inherent assumptions about feasibility or impact please call out.

4. Benchmark: Its okay to think of someone else who has solved similar problem — may be in a different industry. This will be another indication to interviewer on how seriously you are about user problems.

5. Zero-in on metrics: Refine some of the success metrics you have stated earlier with the new understanding of the solution you are going to build.

Prioritization: A PMs job is not only to find answers to what and why but also why now! so this is likely to be an important part in this interview.

Focus on 10x and not on 10%

Strategic and Tactical solutions: Put the solutions to the use-case in 2 broad buckets, one that will address the solutions for long term and ones that will have immediate impact.

Frameworks: There are times when the frameworks are useful (R.I.C.E or MoSCoW or anyother) but remember to not get tangled in these. Your job is to deliver “Biggest bang for the buck” — find a way to arrive at bang (right bang!!).

MVP Trap: Don’t fall for the MVP trap, its okay to focus on delighters.

Strategic thinking: This is the time to address the threats to your usecase and solutions. Ask yourself…

— Will the solutions stand the test of the time?
— Should the company continue to stay in this business or target the same objectives?
— Are there any single points of failures in the solutions?

Recap: Don’t forget to connect the dots and ensure you are not missing a trail. Objectives->customers->context->Success metrics->Solutions->Prioritization