 Part of management interview questions become harder and harder every single year and was because the competition was so severe, for each job application, less than 1% of the candidates can actually pass the interview and learn the job offer, and most of them failed miserably even in the first round of interviews. They not only ask you those typical questions such as what's your favorite product, but also change the interview type to make it extremely hard to predict and answer. In this video, I'm going to reveal the top 6 most challenging part of management interview questions and tell you the framework and how to answer them effectively. Stay until the end of this video where I share with you the interview type that most people spend most of their time to work on, but failed miserably. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product and feature in Forbes. I help 100 people land their dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startups and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we talk about free product management training and tech trends. Like and subscribe and watch our new video every Tuesday. The product management interview questions actually happened in all type industries. In the past couple of years, I've helped thousands of people landing jobs in fan companies, fintech, healthcare, AI, and different kind of unicorn startups. They all asked the following top 6 product management interview questions. Let's go through them one by one based on the difficulty level. Question number one, product design type interview questions. This is the most common interview questions for product management. However, most candidates fail. You will frequently ask this kind of question. Design an app for museum. Design an Uber app for blind people. The reason this kind of question is very difficult was because it's open-ended question. Lots of candidates start to create any feature design without thinking about different type of customer segmentation and pain point. And most of them do not have the empathy to understand the true pain point of customers. The best way to answer those kind of open-ended interview questions is by using the Modify Circles framework. Now, let me emphasize on the Modify part. Because the Circles framework was invented over 10 years ago, it doesn't work for today's environment. Because interview questions has become harder and harder every single day. Now, the Modify Circles framework, what I recommend everyone to follow is mission and why. For example, if I want to design Uber app for blind people, you need to think about different kind of missions. How is related to Uber? Why Uber want to design for blind people? And connected with the current environment. In this case, it's post-COVID environment. And then you can ask some clarifying questions in terms of the scope of the design. Do they want to launch internationally? Or they want to focus on certain location to start with? The next step is customer segmentation. Most candidates fail the customer segmentation. Because when they think about design Uber app for blind people, they only think about the blind people, but they forgot to think about the drivers. Because Uber app is a two-sided marketplace. You must have drivers and riders to keep it even and balanced. And then you continue to do sub-customer segmentation for blind people and also drivers. After that, you prioritize what type of customer segmentation you need to prioritize for this 45-minute product design case interview. Then this different kind of pain point for prioritize user segmentation. And then you prioritize again to think about the most important pain point to solve right now. Then list top three solutions and then prioritize again to figure out what type of solution is the best at this moment for Uber to work on in order to solve the problem for blind people. I have a specific sample answer and training to show how to solve this very complex product design interview questions. Make sure to watch this video right here. And use my framework and follow into the details. A lot of people also make these big mistakes at the beginning of the interview by asking the wrong clarifying questions. For the sake of time, I'm going to describe more in this video regarding the type of wrong clarifying questions you can watch right here. But you should definitely go to this website to download the top 10 clarifying questions so that you can avoid those mistakes. I'm going to link it in the description of this video. The second hardest interview questions is part of strategy questions. Part of strategy questions sounds like this. Should lift enter the Indian market or not? What should Google do in the space of AI? If you are the CEO of Uber, what's in your mind right now? All of those are very strategic long-term thinkers. Those kind of 10-year thinking methodology. You cannot use those strategic consulting frameworks to solve this problem. Because most consultants will start with, how can we make the most money in the coming few years? That's literally the wrong question to think about and wrong question to ask. Because as a product manager, we need to think about how to solve problems for customers and how to tackle the market in the long run. And without the right problem to solve, you're not able to make money anyway. And if you only fix on money in the short run, you're not going to become a great successful tech company in the long run. Because the majority of the tech companies that raise VC funding, knowing they're not making money in the near term, but they're going to solve big problems, impact millions of people's lives, to make billions of money in the 10 years. So therefore kill all the consulting frameworks without product strategy. So what framework should we use in the part of strategy question? I recommend using the Gucci framework I invented. So Gucci framework stands for goals and mission. Why we're solving this problem? Why Google even thinking about entering the AI space? And you stands for unmet customer needs. This is very different from product design question. We emphasize on big unmet customer needs, not just small incremental improvement. C stands for customer segmentation. And the second C stands for competition. Because it's very important to understand what competitors are doing before you design a long-term strategic roadmap. And I stands for integrated ecosystem. Because this I is very critical. How Uber react to AI is very different from how Google react to AI. Even if the unmet customer needs and competitors, customer segmentation apply similar, but their internal systems are different, and their partnership inside the integrated ecosystem is also very different. I made an in-depth analysis regarding how to use a Gucci framework to answer any type of part of strategy interview questions. You should watch this video right here. I'm also on the link in the description of this video so that you can take lots of notes and nail those part of strategy interview questions. The third hardest part of management into the question is execution and metrics question. For example, people ask you this question. What set the goal for Facebook event? Set the success metrics for YouTube live. When we saw those part of metrics interview question, a lot of candidates made the mistakes by mixing it with part of design because they thought, well, I can just give one or two metrics and thinking about how to combine with design is 100% incorrect. Because in the product metrics interview questions, you really need to think about maybe 10 or up to 20 different metrics you need to measure for the success of the product. And then you also need to have very important North Star metrics. North Star metrics is the most important metric for the entire product. Most people do not understand what is the most important one. They're able to tell a different type of metrics to measure, but they pick the wrong North Star, which is going to kill them immediately in the interview. So what is the right way to answer those kind of interview questions is to use my computer science PhD framework in my nearby documentary. By the way, my PhD was in material science, not computer science. But what is my computer science PhD framework? It stands for why a mission, why Facebook want to have a Facebook event product, how it's related to the mission of the company. CS stands for customer segmentation. Facebook event has event organizer and event attendees. P stands for prioritization and mission-related metrics. Over there, you're going to pick the most important prioritized mission-related metrics that became the North Star metrics. That's the number one thing you need to measure as a successful product manager. H stands for product health metrics. Over there, you're going to have 10 and 20 different product health metrics to have a list of comprehensive answers. D stands for the risk. What kind of potential risk you can involve? If you want to have A plus answer, you can talk about CC. Stands for cannibalization and counter-metrics. So towards the end, you're definitely going to impress the interviewer by using my company science PhD framework. I have a specific training where I teach you how exactly to use this framework with a simple answer you can put it right here, which is going to help you to pass meta product execution and product metrics interview questions right here. I'm also going to link it in the description of this video. When you prepare for those interview questions, make sure to use the latest product management interview questions database. And you can go to this website and download all the top 50 interview questions database to get ready for your upcoming interviews. Regardless, it's for fan companies or healthcare or start-up, they all ask very similar questions. I'm going to link it in the description of this video. The hardest part of management interview question number four, problem solving. Problem solving questions is quite typical, and it's going to see how well you're able to analyze the product situation and ask you your vision. For example, you'll be asked this kind of real-life interview questions. What if your furniture return rate increased from 15% to 20%? What should you do? When you hear these kind of interview questions, the hardest part is actually understand how to think strategically so that you're able to complete the entire answer. Instead of thinking about random ideas, unorganized ideas is very forbidden within the product management interview process. So how to organize the answer correctly, here's a way to do. Number one, you must understand the end-to-end customer journey of people going to Wayfield, purchasing couches or any furniture and return it. Once you lay out the end-to-end customer journey map, then you analyze using the CPTE framework, which stands for C customers, P product, T technology, E external factors. So within each step of customer journey, there must be something wrong such as could be customer, change their opinion regarding not buying couches anymore, could also do some product issue, product failure, or website issue, wrong description of the couches, could also be technology issue and E stands for external factors and maybe some competitors have a furniture sale so people start to return the furnitures. So once you put CPTE framework against a user journey map, it's very easy for you to understand what steps went wrong. The fifth hardest interview question for product management is system design interview. Now all of the companies are going to ask you system design, however it's becoming more and more popular and extremely hard. What type of company will ask you this kind of questions? Depends on how technical the role is. For example, if you work for Amazon web services, they will ask you system design questions no problem, for sure, because you're going to work on very complex situation. So they will ask you a question like this. How would you design Twitter using AWS? And please design the system architecture of Netflix and design Zelle for payment transfer. When you think about system design, even if you don't know how to code, here is a trick to use system thinking methodology, which I learned from MIT to solve this problem. I personally do not know how to code, but system design methodology actually helped me significantly solving any kind of technical interview questions. First of all, when you solve these kind of interview questions, you must lay out different kind of high level functions that the system need to perform to solve problem for customers. For example, Netflix, the different type of functions in terms of delivering content, transcoding, video storage, and all those are important function that Netflix need to have. And then you further decompose each of the key functions into sub functions. And all those functions, you just can't think about it through the user perspective from system high level. You don't need to know how to code at all. And then next step, you start to lay out the specific requirement, performance requirement, functional requirement, scalability requirement, reliability requirement for the specific system. The next step is there are different kind of data structures that you think is important for this specific case. And finally, you can lay out the system architecture diagram based on the functional diagram, all different kind of requirements, and constraints. Now here comes our last, which is also the hardest, most time consumer product management interview question type, which is take home exam. This become more and more common in all the interview questions, and especially for most competitive positions out there. And usually even in the first round interview, the recruiter is gonna have you to do a take home exam to see how good you are, understanding the concept of management. And this is a real life take home exam. Here's example of real life take home exam. Take a product feature for sub hub to help company to grow their business. The feature could be brand new or improving an existing product. Tell us the revenue projection and business model of the new feature. This kind of take home exam is harder than any kind of above product management interview questions, was because it has your product management knowledge and when including investigating the unmet customer needs, creating customer persona, writing product requirements, and evaluating existing product features, and create a long term strategy product roadmap, and then also need to create a business model. Everything end to end about product management is being asked in this take home exam. And what's harder is that you may not be your end user for any of the product. So sometimes you're missing the customer empathy when you create those new features. In this situation, what should you do? You must really treat it as this is a real life product management case that you are the product manager working for the company. You can start from customer interviews, do some research about what they need, and then start to imagine what the future problem will solve for the customers and create solutions for it. And then run the go-to-market strategy campaign to figure out what the real business model you can build. I have the end to end training that teach you how to solve the take home exam in this specific video, where I give you the door-dash take home exam as an example. So make sure to watch this video right there and apply the same framework I just taught you. If you're actively preparing for upcoming product management interview, you must use the latest interview questions database to get ready for your upcoming interviews. Make sure to go to this website and download the 50 product management interview questions database so that you can use it for any fan company startups and healthcare, any kind of industries out there. Make sure to watch this video right here, where I give you the simple answers how to solve the take home example product management interviews. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PMXCenter.io. I'm going to see you in my next video right here.