 Hello, folks, welcome to this webinar by Product School. Today, I'm Ankit Shavaswa. I'll be walking you through some interviewing tips and how do you interview for a product role. So I'll be walking you through different sort of interview questions that you can expect in your product interviews and hopefully help you land that product job. So just a quick overview of myself. I'm Ankit. I'm a product lead manager at DocuSign. I've been in the product world for about a decade now. So I've done quite a few interviews. I have interviewed myself. I have interviewed people for positions. I've interviewed managers for positions. So I think today I'm going to be sharing all my knowledge and I'm super happy to do that on how do you interview and how do you specifically interview for questions in the product sense world or questions which are of product sense type and questions which are of product execution type. So today's agenda will all be about giving you sort of a quick overview about interviewing and then digging into a framework. Framework specifically centered around how do you answer that product sense question and then digging in deep into that framework as well as ending with certain pointers that you can use to ace that product sense question and similarly I'll be doing the same for product execution questions as well. So let's not waste any time, let's get right into it. And before I do so, I sort of wanted to sort of bring this slide back in which I used in my last webinar. So I'm going to be making sure that all of these frameworks that I give out have certain numbers on top. So if you go through these slides again, they'll have certain numbers on right inside. So I've sort of made sure that these frameworks, an APM or a junior PM that is interviewing for a junior product role can also use and the expectations over there are much less as compared to the expectations that we've set in the bar that we've set for directors or product lead managers. So while you're interviewing for these questions, I've given you certain hints that if you're a leader, you should be surfacing up and you should be showing expertise in and that would really make you shine up and make you shine out loud. And that would differentiate you from all of the other candidates out there. So yeah, so in the next few slides, you'll see these numbers one, two, three, four on top and one would be for an APM and that framework would apply for an APM. And similarly, four would be for a product director or a product lead manager or managers or a manager or product managers. And the expectations over there would be set for them. So, and again, if you missed my last webinar, please do catch up on that. It's pretty important and super helpful for how do you get into the product management role and what strategies should you be using? So, okay, now let's get back into the topic at hand and let's start off with how do you interview or answer product sense questions? So let's give you a little bit more context and background. So as a product manager, you will potentially own and manage global scale products. So your job is to think outside the box, to be innovative, to articulate thoughts and articulate them in a manner that can be easily be broken down into an understandable chunks by leaders as well as engineers. So this skill is tested by using a product sense interview question. So what we are gonna be, what we as testers of a product sense interview expect you to articulate an ambiguous problem, expect you to break down problems into certain manageable or readable chunks. And then, obviously we expect you to place yourself in customer shoes and understand what are the pain points that customers are experiencing. Once you have all of that, we also want you to prioritize each step. So prioritize each solution that you get. Now, essentially, as a product manager, you're gonna be hearing a lot of different perspectives. Perspectives and requirements would always flow in and it's your job to not just hear all of these perspectives but sort of arrange and prioritize where should you be investing for highest ROI. So it's your job to hear a lot of perspectives but it's also your job to prioritize them. And this question tests your abilities to prioritize. So let's take an example. Let's say I give you a question to design a note-taking application for students. And typically, these questions come with a time period of like 45 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes, depending upon interviews or sometimes even 60 minutes where you have about 60 minutes to sort of walk through this entire framework. Now, it really depends. I would say if the interviews for 60 minutes, you probably get 50 minutes and 10 minutes for asking more questions. So do be mindful of that. If obviously the interview is only 45 minutes, then make sure you're very crisp and clear about all of your answers and you're walking through the framework. But at the same point of time, when you answer these questions, at no point of time should it be so, it should not look like you have a framework in your mind and you only wanna stick to that, this specific framework. You should think about all of these bullet points while you're walking through a solution, but at no point of time should it look framed. So going back to the question, let's design a note-taking application for students. Now, remember, I have one in two numbers over here, which means going back, I would expect senior product managers all the way from APMs to senior product managers to at least bare minimum have this framework or this top process going on in their head while they're answering this question, this product sense question. So first of all, you will come in and you would identify different customer segments. So if let's say we're talking about a note-taking application for students, you must think about the word students and you must think about, hey, how can I categorize and segment out students? Would it be by age, different age groups or should I be thinking about different school types? So should these segments be middle school children all clubbed together? Should it be high school children all clubbed up together? Should it be university students? So you must think about students and the different segments that are applicable for the category of students. And then obviously, once you have all these categories, you would probably need to prioritize one of these categories. Now, again, priority should be based upon impact, reach. You could pick any parameter on which you're picking this segment, but you must articulate and clearly explain why are you picking one segment or other. Once you have that segment picked, you need to walk through different pain points. So let's say we categorize and segmented out the question according to age groups and we wanna pick the age group of K-12 students. And now you must put yourself in the shoes of a K-12 student and sort of walk through what pain points would a K-12 student face while taking notes. So if you're in a math class, what kind of notes would you wanna take? If you're in a science class, what kind of a note would you wanna take? Is the pain point that when I'm in a different class, I wanna take different types of notes or the pain point that I keep losing my notes, it's not easy to organize them and I am always really bad at organizing my notes. So really think through the problem, really think through the pain point that that customer segment group is facing and put yourself in their shoes and imagine you facing those problems in real life. Then once you have that problem visualized, once you've taught visually what those pain points were, you might wanna propose certain solutions. Now obviously, you know, out of the four, I would suggest only, I would only suggest doing about four to five pain points. You would probably not have more time than that. Prioritize one pain point and then jump into solution. So let's say for this question, my pain point is organization and as a K-12 student, I'm not able to organize my notes. I pick that specific pain point and I articulate again that for greatest reach across all of these segments, I think for greatest reach and impact, I would wanna pick the specific pain point. And once you have that pain point, propose a few solutions. So again, maximum of three to four solutions is good enough. I would not go more than that. I think propose all of the solutions, identify what sort of impact would each solution have and then quickly walk through the design of the solution. So, and when I say quickly, I mean pause, think through the design that you'd have in mind. Always remember to take breath, always remember to pause, do not over speak. I think it's better to pause and think through your answers rather than just rumbling out your thought process. Of course, it's important to tell your interviewer what you're thinking, but it's always okay to pause for a few minutes, think through the design of your solution and walk through the design of your solution once you have clarity. So just pro tips, I usually have a pen and paper in hand. When I have my solutions written down, I sort of walk through a priority of why I think one of these solutions would have greatest impact. And then I start just drawing different UX, small UX boxes, sometimes on that piece of paper. If it's in a room, I start using a wiper to sort of show them the experience. And once I have clarity on all different steps of this experience, I propose different success metrics. Now, there's also one more thing that I'm gonna talk in the next slide about and that would tailor and channel into the type of success metrics you propose. So let's jump into, let's say you're a lead manager, what are certain important things that, apart from the four different things that I talked about are also important. So even before you begin this question, I think two important things to set the right pace is get clarity. What do we mean by students in this question? Do we have certain markets that you wanna stick to? Do you want this question to be only limited to US, North America? Do you also wanna think about other continents? Do you want me to only think about, technology-related solutions? Again, no taking could be physical. So are we only talking about proposing certain solutions in the tech world? So get those clarity, ask those questions, interviewers generally are very open to answering any sort of clarifying questions. Set the goal. Now, this is pretty interesting and goal is the word that I'm using. I know Facebook uses this very often, but now it's very industrious. And what is your intention in terms of, what goals do you wanna set for this solution and what goals do you wanna set for this product? And by goals, I mean like, hey, as a product, should this be driving engagement for your product? Should this be driving growth? Are there any top level company missions and statements that we should be taking into account? Setting that goal and intention beforehand really helps. And if there is no goal and intention, you can also talk about, you can set a goal and intention by yourself. So have that conversation with the interviewer, maybe set a goal according to market needs and market the five Cs. So as in what is the customer, what is the market? So in this case, the question was about note-taking. So know your competitors, which is Evernote, know your market segment. And if you're talking about, let's say if you're developing a note-taking app for let's say Microsoft, over there note-taking is a free application. So you should sort of know about these small things. And therefore the goal usually is to drive engagement and drive more users into the funnel. So it's a top funnel product at the end of the day. So driving more growth and driving more users and setting that goal is what you should be doing. And then you should be walking through the intentions of setting a customer segmentation, pain points, proposing solutions, and then design. Now connecting this back to the earlier slide that I was talking about, talking about a design or showing a user experience is great. But I think what interviewers really like is how would you measure success of this product? So certain metrics throughout the design, so whether it's CTR or whether it is click-through rates or whether it's CSAT, I think proposing those top-level metrics as success metrics is also important. Some people forget about doing this and then think it's only part of the product execution exercise. But I think if you want to stand out, if you wanna go above and beyond, that is something you should definitely do. Similarly, now let's talk about how do you go above and beyond? How do you go beyond the realms of standard frameworks, beyond the realms of just being an APM and how do you go answer the same question from perspective of a product leader and a director? I think what really sets apart a leader is their know-how and understanding of the market. So if it's a note-taking market or if it's in our previous question, it was all about note-taking and it was about arranging thoughts in a cohesive manner. I think that market segment, if you understand that market, if you understand the customers, if you understand whether this is a two-sided or a three-sided marketplace, so those are super important and play a critical role in showing your know-hows and your understanding of these different segments. Additionally, I think apart from a dressable market and apart from knowing market know-has, if you are able to show clearly that you're prioritizing based upon each impact or effort or some other reasoning behind your priority, I think it clearly shows that you are a great leader. So keep those two things in two hints in mind. I think those are super important and they will help you make sure that you are standing out in your interviews. Okay, so let's pause here a little bit. Also, do remember to shoot me any questions if you have. Feel free to send me messages on LinkedIn. I will certainly love to answer them. So let's change the gears a little bit. Let's talk about product execution. What is product execution? Product execution is another question that will be thrown in your way while you're interviewing as a product manager and what they'll really try to do is measure and identify if you can set goals for your product, whether these are goals that are aligned towards your mission and UberSharjee are important and whether or not you can take these goals and suggest and define success metrics is the second most important thing about this question. So setting goals and then setting success metrics. And by success metrics, we also mean, not start metrics related to all of the metrics that you've set. So three important things. And then fourth, usually a sub part or sometimes even a separate interview in certain cases tries to test you on your abilities to debug issues. So this is super important. Sometimes as product managers, we will have occurrences where we need to either validate our hypothesis or need to dig down deep into some root causes and understand what went wrong and really look through different metrics to understand what caused an issue. The latter part of this interview targets our abilities to debug issues. Targets and targets are skill sets and understands if we have those skills are not to debug issues. And I think that's super important. I think that's really what being a product manager is all about, knowing quickly where are the problems, knowing quickly how can we solve them and knowing quickly what is going wrong will set you apart. So let's dive in into a product execution framework. So here's a quick question. How would you measure success for Facebook marketplace? Now, of course, marketplaces, usually commerce marketplaces are two-sided. So there's a buyer and then there's a seller. So almost all of these business types where all of these e-commerce business types would have certain top level metrics that would be available for all e-commerce businesses. So having a little bit of knowledge of different business types is super helpful. And I think if you read through certain books, so obviously decoding, PM interviews is probably the top big seller out there. You will have certain different business types that certain business types that'd be sort of surfaced up in these books. So e-commerce platforms or e-commerce websites, then mobile applications, what should you be measuring for mobile apps? They have certain metrics for each of these categories. Do take a look. I would highly suggest that, you have certain understanding of these metrics for sure. But getting back to the question, how do I, what do I ask? How do I sort of tackle this question? First, obviously ask those clarifying questions, ask whether this question is limited to a certain scope, to a certain region, to a certain market. And then I think most people forget doing this, but this is key to acing the product execution interview. Walk through the user experience. So if it's Facebook Marketplace or any other product out there, ask them if user comes in, what do they click on, or just walk through an experience of, okay, I'm as a Facebook Marketplace user, what do I do? Well, I take my phone, I take certain pictures of a product that I wanna sell. I create a listing quickly. I add where am I located, if this item is for pickup only or for delivery as well. I post this posting and then I get messages, I reply to them. And then I set up a place to meet and then I show this product that I wanna sell or sometimes I just video call and show this product and then I sell this product and collect money for what product I'm selling. So this end to end experience is super important. And when you do this, two things happen. One, first of all, you know you and your interviewer on the same page about the product. Sometimes you might not even know the product. So once when you do this experience, the interviewer can open the guide you on what is the product and what is the experience? What is the user associated user experience? And then at the same point of time, it gives you clarity in your mind on what are the different steps that need to be measured for this product to be successful. So remember, you've done goal setting by now. You've set this goal of like, hey, this product is, you've already taught through the mission statement of Facebook, you've already taught through what Facebook is for and what goals are you thriving to achieve? So if you're thriving to achieve engagement, you walk through the user experience, you know what the user experience is like and now you must propose success metrics tailored towards the goal of driving high user engagement. And sorry, before you do and propose these, before you go ahead and propose these metrics, you must make sure you dive through different customer segments. So I sort of walked through that earlier where I said two-sided marketplace, you know, there's a buyer and there's a seller and you wanna make sure you're prioritizing one. So obviously if there are no sellers, there wouldn't be any buyers. So you, in two-sided marketplaces, you wanna make sure that there are enough sellers and the marketplaces enough products before, you know, you start surfacing into buyers. So most likely you will prioritize the buyer side and then you would go and propose certain metrics to measure, you know, the number of buyers and the number of listings out there. And remember metrics, and this is the best tip I can give you, metrics should be actionable, measurable and not gameable. What that means is, you know, people sort of propose random metrics, but I think, A, you should be, you should make sure that they're actionable and so they should have numerator and denominators and they should be over a certain period of time. So, you know, have the component of days, months or years associated with them. So they should be measurable, they should be actionable and then non-gameable. So I think what that means is like, hey, I cannot just, you know, have certain metrics which are bloated and, you know, which others can gamify. I'll touch on that subject a little bit more in the next slide. So just pause there for a second, but I'll come back to it. Don't worry. In the end, I think what we're looking for is, you know, you prioritizing one important metric, calling it not star metric. And you do so by walking through each metric and talking about pros and cons about each metric until you realize which one stands out and which one is the not star metric. After you've done that, you summarize, you know, you talk about, you know, yeah, you give your closing comments, you can talk about this one simple not metric that you proposed. Here's some additions to how the other things that, or what other things you would add. So remember, I was talking about, you know, gamifying and what I would also expect from different product leaders and managers is when they talk about success metrics, they should also talk about counter metrics. So let's say if the goal is growth, you should also talk about how your spendings in bringing more and more buyers would be impactful or in bottom line because you're gonna be spending a lot to market out and get more buyers in or partnering with different buyers and different, you know, different sort of sellers out there, which would impact your bottom line. So your user growth projections would be high, but your revenue growth projections or your bottom line projections might not be that high. So I think counter metrics and talking about counter metrics, what impact can your not star metric have on other metrics is also important. And that's what makes you a leader, that makes us understand as interviewers that you're not just thinking about your product, you're also thinking about other products out there that you can either cannibalize or have an impact or have either positive or negative impact on knowingly. So that sort of strategy and that sort of thought process is super important and makes you stand out. So I'm gonna pause here. Sorry, I'm actually not gonna pause here. Again, I think I'll walk through debugging and then I'll pause and if you have again and if you have any questions about execution or debugging, feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Yeah, let's jump into product execution and the debugging aspect of this. This is very interesting. I think over the last couple of years, we've most product execution questions have added this sub part to it, where after you've proposed your success metrics, we try to understand, try to gamify a little bit and we try to understand, when I say gamify, I mean like make the interview more gamable and we try to ask this question where like, hey, imagine you're having this spike in your monthly active users in your amount and it's a downward spike and most of our customers are not there. What do we investigate and how do we investigate what this spike or drop was about? And then investigation is actually very, I would say it's a step process. You can walk through certain steps but never make it look like you're walking through steps. Always make it look like that you're thinking through each of these categories, each of these steps in real time and actually understanding the problem at hand. So when you started investigating, investigation could be regional, seasonal, gradual. So your drop or your spike could be due to either of these reasons and then sort of make a tree structure in your head where you're going, okay, if it was seasonal, what could it be? If it was regional, what it could be? If it was gradual, what are the different areas that I should be thinking about? And then most of these categories, I've tried to club them up into certain categories that I generally think about and let's walk through them. So I think it could be sort of physical walls. So people who are using the product, let's say you're in North America, there's certain reasons why this app was not working in North America. We had a localization issue. We sort of just released and fixed a new bug and that caused like problems with this app in North America. So it could be physical world or specific to a region. It could be user-specific. So it could be broken experiences. So some experiences for our user were broken, which is why we saw this bike. Or this is a very interesting one, competitive issues. So our competitor launched something and it's a new product, which is why our current user base walked over to this newer product. And our marketing is making some rollouts, which is causing either gain or loss users. And then finally, you should always talk about this, which is internal product issues causing spikes. So maybe there was another feature that was launched and that cannibalized my current feature and which is why my product is not doing as well as it's supposed to do. So walk through each categories, walk through different reasons. Again, make sure it's a conversation between you and the interviewer, rather than you just walking through these random categories and just making them think that you've just learned these in the back of your mind. Yeah, so do that. I think that should be about it. I think these are big hints and big sort of solutions that I've given you. Obviously, I've published a list of books and articles that you should be reading. You should also try this platform known as Exponent. I try Exponent, I really like it. I think it has these list of interview questions that you can use and list of answers as well and videos that are awesome. Apart from that, I think read through some books, talk to more and more product managers that would network more and that would certainly help you in your interview stages. That was it. I think we're right on time. So thank you so much for tuning in, listening to this. I really appreciate all of you. If you have any questions, feel free to get back to me and have a great day.