Interview Prep Deep Dive - Product Sense
What is it, the expectations, and how you win
Next in the Interview Prep Deep Dive series, I’m going to delve into one of the “meats” of product manager interviews - Product Sense.
Different companies might name this type of interview slightly differently. It could also be “product insights”, “product design”, “product case”, or sometimes even a more lengthy “build-a-product-customers-love” interview. Don’t let them confuse you. They all share the same goal:
Evaluate your ability to effectively navigate through ambiguity and build products that really matter to the users and the business.
Boy isn’t it a core responsibility of a PM? No wonder it’s an interview focus for almost every tech companies on earth nowadays! (with exceptions, of course).
I’ll take you through in 3 parts:
🍭 Flavors of product sense questions
🔍 Interviewer assessments/expectations
📘 How to prepare
Let’s go.
🍭 Flavors of product sense questions
In a non-exhaustive fashion, here are the most frequently seen:
“Build a product to <solve XYZ broad problem> and/or <for a broad user group>”
Examples:
Build a product to solve unemployment problems in US
Design a product to help people find doctors
Build a product for farmers in Philippines
Design Facebook for Kids
“Improve XYZ (existing broad) product”
Examples:
Improve Spotify
If you’re the PM for Facebook Story, what would you build next?
How would you improve Google Maps?
“Name {your favorite, mostly used, mobile phone homepage, recently bought, least favorite, well designed, poorly designed, used-this-morning, etc.} products. Why?”
Examples:
What’s your favorite app? Why?
Tell me about 3 apps you use this week. (Interviewer) select one to deep dive
Think of a product that’s poorly designed. Why?
Can you share with me a physical (non-tech) product you recently bought? What do you like about it?
And these questions usually are followed by product improvement questions (“aka as PM how do you improve it / what will you build”).
Before I talk about how to prepare for / answer them, let’s first talk about Interviewer’s expectation and what exactly they evaluate you at.
🔍 Interviewer assessment/expectations
It’s worth repeating the key goal of Product Sense type interviews:
Evaluate your ability to effectively navigate through ambiguity and build products that really matter to the users and the business.
It’s designed to peak into your end to end process from identifying the right, very specific opportunity/problem to scoping/building out an MVP that taps into it.
To break it down into key areas of assessments to help you better understand interviewer’s expectations:
Communication and structure: A general but most critical assessment across all interview types. Can you listen well and communicate clearly and concisely? Are you structured in your thinking, communication, and how you approach problems throughout?
Vision and strategy: Do you start with why and discuss big pictures before drilling in? Can you demonstrate a vision on where the product is headed long term and come back to the ground iterating toward it?
User empathy: Do you understand who you’re building the product for exactly? What are their needs, pain points, and underlying motivations that are not as obvious on the surface? Can you segment broad user base effectively based on the problems/goals at hand?
Goal setting: Can you break down the vague prompt into pieces one level at a time, and ultimately define a concrete, specific goal that’s measurable, to guide how you build out the product, prioritize options, and make tradeoffs?
Prioritization: Can you effectively prioritize target users, problems, or solutions? Can you apply a structure to these prioritization decisions that are also easily understood and agreeable by who you work with?
Creativity: Can you think out of the box? Can you go beyond me-too and dream big, while clearly understand the practicality?
A great interview outcome (as scored by the interviewer) requires you to demonstrate most if not all of the above. Obviously, few can be perfect in all dimensions. These are primarily to help you to keep in mind while you prepare and answer the questions.
Knowing what the interviewers are looking for is the first important step to crack the interview. Now lets switch to look at how you prepare / answer.
📘 How to prepare
Let me not repeat what I’ve covered in Land That Dream Product Job – Interviews, with regard to how you prepare any interview in general. Feel free to revisit as I believe they are still good fundamentals to know about.
Let’s dive into how to best tackle these Product Sense questions! 👊🏻
First on the product creation/improvement questions, I’ll use a framework just to illustrate a good sample approach in steps. I want to remind you to please do NOT blindly apply this to ANY question. Because 1) it might not immediately a best templated fit for all variants. Interviewers actually do intentionally twist the question to catch you off guard. 2) It shows - as an interviewer I immediately tell if a candidate memorizes and attempts to rigidly apply a specific framework he reads online. You will have to follow the general principles and create a framework on the fly.
I’ll then follow with some reminders.
Framework
[Problem Space] Clarify → Pause → Outline → Context → Users → Specify → [Solution Space] Brainstorm → Prioritize → Summarize.
[Problem Space]
Clarify: All questions are intentionally ambiguous. Most of the ambiguity requires you to break down and figure out on your own (in collaboration with the interviewer) in the next steps. But you should always make sure you understand every word in the question and what interviewers expect as the outcome (if he/she didn’t mention). E.g. by “Facebook Story”, do you really know what that product is and how it works? You might want to confirm with the interviewer. E.g2. by “improving Public Transportation” do we mean the like of buses, transit, trains? All of them or any specific one? Take interviewer’s “you may figure out / make assumptions on your own” as an answer as well, and move on.
Pause: Now that you understand the question. Remember to hold the urge to dive into responding immediately. Give yourself / ask for some time to think through the next steps. Interviewers are not only ok but they’d love to see it. Use to time to actually collect your thoughts, come up with your “on-the-fly” framework based on all you’ve learned before and on the interview, and think about how you concisely explain, before you start speaking. (for why this is important, you have to read Thinking, Fast and Slow).
Outline: Outline your structure to your interviewer. This is similar to outlining the agenda ahead of the presentation, which helps the audience set expectation and follow along more effortlessly. Make sure you talk about it in a way that does not sound robotic. Something like “here’s how I’d approach it next” and speak to the bullets would be one way to do it.
Context: context matters in every way in product management. Why does company A want to build XYZ product / solve ABC problem? Why does it matter? How does it connect to company’s mission and key business goals? By “building a product for NNN”, who’s behind building the product? There will be different considerations if a big corporate who has an ecosystem like Facebook builds it vs a startup. Etc. etc. Try to discuss the why and the context (definitely depending on the question, too).
Users: The target users, their needs/motivations, and their problems. who are we building the product for exactly? Start from what you were given (e.g. farmers in Philippines, blind people, all Spotify users, etc.). Define and break them down into segments, one step at a time. Discuss their needs, motivations and segment specific problems. Demonstrate your user-centricity, empathy, and effective segmentation (I can write a full article about these, happy to explain more down the road).
Specify: Logically specify one specific user segment and some specific problems to focus on and clearly explain your rationale/structure to come up with the conclusion. It’s much more about your reasoning than whether the decision is right or wrong. It’s helpful to also summarize for the interviewer at this point as a good pivot into solutioning.
[Solution Space]
Brainstorm: Ask for time to brainstorm about solutions. Come up with 3 options which usually is a good magic number that balances diversity vs simplicity. When you brainstorm, make sure you focus on the user and problem you identified and always tie back to how your solutions do solve the defined problem. Communicate these options back to your interviewer when ready.
Prioritize: prioritize your solutions by evaluating relative impact but also consider effort and potential risks. Discuss trade offs (pros/cons) between options if needed. Like in “Specify”, it’s much more about your reasoning and structure than which is the best conclusion.
Summarize: summarize your recommended MVP solution. It might be good to reinforce how it solves the user’s problem and how it ties to be bigger picture. Be prepared to answer any follow up questions interviewer might have.
Reminders
Focus more on users than business: most companies believe in “focus on the users, rest will follow” principle. They want you to demonstrate it as well.
It’s a collaboration: Expect the whole interview to be a back-n-forth discussion between you and the interviewer. It’ll NOT be your own monologue. So don’t launch into long ramble, check in with interviewers, listen attentively throughout, and adjust your paths flexibly.
Don’t over complicate: It’s a 45 minute (or even 30 minute) interview. Don’t get yourself into trouble by coming up with a complex evaluation framework. Simplify it as much as you can as long as the structure makes logical sense and captures main points.
Time management: I used to think it’s interviewer’s responsibility. I learned (the hard way) that we as candidates also need to own it. Remember, interviewers want to assess all the above dimensions in an end to end process. So check time from time to time, and if you believe you’re already behind, try speeding up by further simplify your steps and explanations. But do follow interviewer’s lead as well if he wants you to slow down or dive into a given point.
Closing
If you’re new to Product Sense interview, it’s a lot to take in! If you already have experiences, some might already be familiar. At any rate, I hope the above is a good start to help you better prepare your next Product Sense interview and ultimately “crack it”, consistently.
There are obviously a lot of nuances in every detailed part of the interview, which I’m happy to explain more. Contact me (at introvertinproduct.com or reply to the email) for questions, and let me know if you need coaching help to prepare for your next interviews.