Hadar's Product Interviewing Toolkit

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Hadar's Product Interviewing Toolkit

Product Sense
Product Sense

Focus on the user. Tie things to the mission. Be methodological as you explore options.

Focus on the user. Tie things to the mission. Be methodological as you explore options.

What they're looking for

Structured approach to grounding the product design/strategy problem at hand in high-level goals and user needs

User-centricity the whole way throughout the problem; constantly coming back to needs/goals

Ability to prioritize between a set of solutions; creativity is good but least important of the above

Types of questions you may be asked

How would you design {existing product} for {new user segment they haven't addressed yet}?

You're the PM for {product} at {company}. How would you improve it?

What's your favorite product and why? How would you improve it?

Make sure your answer more or less covers the following

Goal / Mission

What is the company as a whole's mission?

Why is this area you're evaluating relevant to that mission (user and business perspective)

Users and their needs

What are the core user groups that are relevant?

Not just who uses the product, but who pays for it

eg: for a marketplace, the demand and supply side are two different user groups

What are their needs?

Needs not problems - imagine how to add value beyond current baseline

Any notable gaps in the existing market for these needs?

Pick one primary user need to focus on

How we’d measure solving those users’ problems (high-level)

If it were true that we delivered on the aforementioned user needs, what else would be true?

Would the users in question retain or engage more? Would new users join? Would we be able to make more money?

Keep this to high-level "North Star" metrics for now

Pick one as your main metric

Brainstorm solutions for a key user need

With all of the context above, brainstorm 3-5 solutions for how you would deliver on the previously prioritized user need

Balance of incremental and long-term ideas

Consider your interviewer a thought partner - totally okay if they pitch in ideas or push back on specific ideas

Prioritize one solution (impact/cost)

Ascribe a t-shirt size (S/M/L) to each solution for both impact (North Star metric) and cost to develop the solution (eng/design/operations/etc.); based on intuition and stated assumptions

The solution with the best ratio of impact / cost is probably the one to start with

Doesn't have to be though; use your intuition to double check the output here

Success metrics for that solution, and experimentation

The solution you pick should ultimately help move the North Star metric that you picked earlier

But North Star metrics take a while to observe changes in

Identify some

proxy metrics⁠

that should correlate well with the North Star metric and for which changes be detected more quickly

How would you know that after launching this, the solution was successful in meeting our goals?

Experimentation. Often an A/B test but not always (eg: marketplaces often can't do A/B)

Trade-offs / risks with the recommended approach

Why might the North Star metric you picked be a bad one? Why might the solution you picked be a bad one? Layer trade-offs and critical thought throughout

A note on “Product Strategy” questions

There’s no clear delineation between questions that should be “product sense/design” versus “product strategy”

I think of the difference as what level of abstraction you’re thinking in. The higher-level or longer-term the question at hand is, the more “strategy” it is versus “sense/design”

For example: “How would you think about entering the grocery delivery space today as an entrepreneur?” is more of a strategy question, and “How would you as an Instacart PM think about expanding to catering events?” is more of a sense/design question

For strategy questions, I find the following framework to be helpful:

What is the high-level mission of company? If you’re thinking of new startup ideas, skip this step.

Go through the overall value chain / user journey as it pertains to the prompt (eg: what is the end-to-end journey of grocery items getting manufactured, stocked in a fulfillment center, ordered by a customer, and eventually delivered?)

Talk through the user groups and their needs for each step of this user journey. Deprioritize areas with low user need

Talk through market positioning / industry rivals for each step of this user journey. Deprioritize areas with lots of competition

Now you’ve narrowed the field of opportunity to what should be a smaller set of specific user value propositions to design around. This now becomes more similar to the product sense/design questions!

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👉 Next up:
`Execution`⁠
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