 Hi. Welcome for today's talk on how to ace the product design interview. My name is Tim. I'm a product manager at Meta, and I've kept this talk and this explanation very general. So it will help you when you're preparing for your product design interviews on how you understand a question, how you approach it, and how you can prepare yourself actually the best. It helped me a lot and it took me a while until I got there. Yeah, and I'm happy to share this with you. What I'll be doing in this interview on this conversation is actually I'll be shutting off the camera and I'll put the presentation into the front. So you'll just hear my voice and I hope that this is more useful for you. Now, let me now just share my screen. Okay, so you should be seeing now my screen. Okey-doke. Now, in general, interviewing is a muscle. When I started myself, I wasn't very confident in doing any kind of interviews. And it took me a while actually until I got there. And it depends on where you are in your career path and how often you have done these. Sometimes doing a bit of a refresher will get to the point where you need to be. If you haven't really done a lot of these until now, you might need a while until you get there. Maybe it's 20, maybe 30, maybe it's 50, maybe it's 60. There are platforms out there that can help you to do this. I know that Product School itself is offering like the capabilities or like opportunities to do these kind of interviews. There are other platforms out there that you can look for and find that it can help you actually to find other people you're going to mark with and train yourself until you get to the point where you feel confident. What is super important in my opinion is that you don't follow anything blindly. But I mean by this, any kind of framework that you will be seeing somewhere has reasons why it has all those pieces together. But if you don't get to the point that you understand why something is being done, then it's not going to be a tool for you. What I mean by this is like it's hard if you just like follow blindly something. The interview will notice this, but if you're doing something very intentionally and you know why you're doing what you're doing, that will help you actually to have a much better conversation and a much better experience for your interviewer. So you don't sound like a robot. Let's put it like this. And if you know why you're doing what you're doing, it will help you if the conversation gets different or is being changed by the interviewer through questions. You are able to adapt to these and you're not taken out of your plan. Okay, so now you can think about this. This is kind of like an analysis how I see myself the interview. And I'm going to walk you through all those different steps separately. But what I want to make sure is that you see that there are those different steps. And on one side you have the interviewer and on the other side you have to interview. And I'll walk you through each of those steps. Now, we have, for example, the small talk, building a bridge and you have the question that comes from your interviewer. And now it is on you after you got the question to give that type of feedback, to disambiguate the question. We state an objective, dive deeper into the topics and stand the stakeholders, shape the persona and see what other needs of those personas and create a mission statement. Yes, very late in the process. Then craft the solutions and then look on how you can actually measure the success of those or assess the risks. Now let's dive into each of those. The small talk, build a bridge. Normally that's not been seen as a kind of a step in the normal frameworks that you might be seeing but I think it's something worth noting and talking about. The goal of a small talk is a way to build a first bridge with the interviewer. I be aware of that. If you introduce yourself, you shouldn't go into like a five minute talk because it's going to eat much of your very needed time for the interview. But know how to introduce yourself nicely and have a smile on your face, be friendly. It depends. Sometimes the interviewer might not be in the best mood. They might have had this stress day. They might have been like, be the person where you feel like that they get the feeling, okay, this is today's going to be a fun conversation. And it's not going to be necessarily something where they are going to be trained more. So put this into your mind. And if you go into a conversation like that and if you get this positivity into the conversation, it should help you and it will have the interviewer because at the end of day, it is a dance that you'll be doing. Now, let's say we are going to this interview, introduce yourself, and then the question comes, design sunglasses for toddlers. I want you to think about something that this question is now the question that I'm sharing as an example. But the interviewer might have asked this question already 20 times and it's just assessing you. That's something I was doing while I was working with different interview partners. I had one question which I knew in and out and I would just use it in order to have people, in order for me to be able to assess and compare people much better. So seeing those different answers to the same questions are going to give the interviewer much better ability to compare. So have this just in your mind that this question might have been answered for the person already 20 times. That doesn't change anything for you from your perspective but I think it's worth looking at it from your perspective and being aware that here it's not necessarily about like you are going with your answer. It's not your answer, it's the way how you get there, the conversation, how you lead it, the thinking, how you laid out, that is what's going to shine and it's going to show that you are a great communicator and a great product manager. So if you get this type of question, design sunglasses for toddlers. The first most important thing that you need to do is to disambiguate the question and retrieve more information from the interview. And why are you doing this? You're doing this because you want to make sure that both of you are on the same page. The question that I've given you might sound very straightforward. Design sunglasses for toddlers. Could be actually easy, right? Now it depends. You don't know what's going on in the mind of the interviewer. I'll give you an example. If I were to tell you go and buy bread for you right now, you would take that as a task. It would be very simple for you. You know where to go to and buy the bread, how you have to pay for it, et cetera, et cetera, for your world. If I were to take you and transform you into another country, let's say India and tell you go and buy bread. If you're not an Indian or intellectual surrounding that's just not familiar to you, you will have a hard time. You will start to ask questions. Okay, where do I go and buy bread? How do I pay for this? What do you mean by bread? Is there different types of bread? Like you see that once you are in this ambiguous situation, something that is not clear to you, you start to ask questions. And that is the most important skill of a product manager to ask questions, ask them directly and try to understand the other side. And this is here your opportunity to ask these type of questions. See the interviewer as the first data point who can give you information about that question. And you want to make sure that you break out of your own thinking patterns and look at the problem broadly. Imagine you don't know anything about sunglasses. Imagine you don't know anything about toddlers. Ask. What type of sunglasses? Anything specific? Why are we doing this? Am I a startup? Who am I? All these type of questions will help you to form a better understanding of how the interviewer is thinking about this. They might not give you a lot of clues. That's possible. That's okay. But at least you have asked that question. And then if they don't give you clues, it's okay to get some assumptions in. And state them. But at the end of the day, you should make sure that you have taken that opportunity to ask as many questions as possible about this question. So, yeah, sometimes I say, you are the humble John Snow. It means you know nothing. And this is how you should approach it and with questions you will learn more. So once you have asked this question, you should be restating the objective. Meaning you will get the confirmation at the end from the interviewer that you're on the same page. And the objective itself will sound very, very similar to what the interviewer had asked you. Design, for example, here in this case, could be design sunglasses for toddlers in the USA as a startup founder. Okay, don't make this part too lengthy. But what you're doing, if you go here back to the front, you get the question, which is being played from the interviewer. You disambiguate the question by asking questions like it will actually, should have had an error on this side as well because it goes in both directions, right? You get disambigated and you get answers and so on. And then it's your turn. Now you have all the information from the interviewer and now it's your turn, you restate the objective. And just to make sure you're going to reformulate this question again with your own words. Okay, so now you've done that. You've restate the objective. You know what you have to do. Now let's go and dig into it. Now you, this is something I like to do. I want to dive deep into the topic. And it tells me or it gives me the opportunity for two things. One, it gives me the opportunity to brainstorm and it gives me also the opportunity to show how I think deeply about things. For example, here in this case, sunglasses. Did we have sunglasses 100 years ago? Yes, no. Why didn't we have them back then? Do we have them for toddlers? When did we start to have them for toddlers? Why do they exist? When did you, when did I start wearing sunglasses myself? Have I bought sunglasses for other toddlers? How do I think about toddlers? Like, I want to make sure like, of course you can take this to length and talk like for too long. And especially this can be a problem for talkative people. But what it helps you, it lays out that space that you're talking about. It lays out that problem space broadly. And it's more like a brainstorm session. And you can also introduce them. So I'm going to talk a bit about this topic. I just want to get a feel for it and what it is, right? And then you dive into it and you try to get those treasures from that topic and lay them out. It can help you. But again, be aware that you don't want to make this too long. And the next step is to examine the stakeholders. And I mean, I don't normally dive just directly into the user, you know, the consumer. I want to look out, okay, there are producers. There is a distribution and then there is the consumer. Now, why do I do this? What it helps me again is more like these two are definitely not something that you should dive into deep. Let's say you have something about, sorry, like the producers. Like just be aware and you show your, the ability to understand the economic environment where the product would be living in, right? Keep that part, at least for those who are short. But make sure that you then go into the consumer and you focus on what type of consumers could there be. Here in that case, parents, toddlers and the family, maybe they could be buyers, right? Or they are going to influence the buying decision. Then the next part is what we're going to do is to shape the persona and identify needs. Something that really helped me is to think about it as vectors and what I mean by that is in the beginning, sometimes I would use actually at one point in time, I would use, I would see it like as a group inside of a group, inside of a group, right? Parent, but what it helped me to look at it differently and look at it as if it's vectors because there are parents who have more attention to fashion or less attention to fashion are more price sensitive than others, younger parents or older parents. Actually, this party of vision should have been here with the toddler because it's kind of like, do they have a problem with the vision? Yes or no. But also you want to protect your child. How much do you want to protect it? What kind of features should this thing give you? Or they hit those some glasses. For toddlers, they could be gender, probably not relevant here. But I mean, I'm just giving you a type of examples and think about this. You can say at the end, okay, I'm going to focus on a, you might even not need necessarily to focus, right? To pick a certain group or pick a certain characteristic, but it would help you because you're shaping the persona and you're identifying the needs. So for example, you could say at the end, I'm going to design sunglasses for, no, I want to look at toddlers and make sure that this is playful and it's very robust, right? What they're doing. I like the sunglasses itself. And I think that fashion is actually very important for the parents and for this whole thing. So it shows you how you're actually shaping the product itself and what are the needs, like you're looking at the persona, you're looking at the customer, you're looking at what are the specific needs that they have. And that will then help you to understand or to show and convey that you've understood who you should be designing for in a situation like that. Now let's, after I've done that, I do create the mission statement. Sometimes I would hear people to create the mission statement at a very early stage somewhere here, right? After they disambiguate the question, they create the mission statement. But I don't believe that this is actually the right spot to do because until on this point, you have not yet really created the mission. You don't even know who you're going to talk to, who you're going to design for, who you're going to create the solutions for. There is a difference between the objective and the mission statement. Let me show you. So for example, here, this objective we have it, design sunglasses for toddlers in the USA as a startup founder. Now, the mission is put fun into toddler sunglasses. That is kind of what I got out of this year, right? I know I'm going to do it for toddlers. I know that it should be playful. And that is the most important part that I'm seeing. While I'm aware that this is going to be bought by parents, but it's different because what I'm giving here, the mission statement, gives my objective purpose. Now I'm an arrow and now I know exactly where I want to shoot. Okay. And here I start with crafting the solutions. Come up with creative solutions. It could be one solution that had different sections or it could be three different solutions. Make sure that you're not stuck with one very simple thing. That's the point. You don't have sometimes people say, come up with five solutions, four solutions. The point is not about the number itself, the point about being able to show the creativity. When I did this once as a mock interview myself, the idea I had was actually those click-clack sunglasses. So meaning sunglasses that had three different parts that can be taken apart, easily taken apart. So the glasses on the front and then the one on the left on the right, you can take them apart. And then you can buy different parts with different colors. They can have maybe different branded themes like the Elsa edition. And then you can change them. You can interchange them with your friends and you can have an app and the app can be... You can configure them in an app and then you can buy them and you can share the combination. So you see that one solution by itself can actually be sufficient. If you show a different type of creativity in that solution, if you're very confident about the solution, that should be fine to select just one solution. Another solution could be, but I mean, if you have more than one solution, definitely not a bad thing. But I know that interview situations not necessary always give you those spark and those creative ideas. So as long as you have one delighting, delightful solution, that should be fine. But for example, the sunglasses that are so flexible and bendable made out of rubber in different colors could be also a solution, right? There is something where people very often I think I should have put this into the slide, avoid passwords. AI, machine learning is probably the most important part. And then what else? Yeah, like AR, VR. What interviewers try to do or people who came up with these things, they try to impress with passwords. That's what they're doing. If these things are not purposeful, I feel like you are kind of not showing that you can be focused in a real world. For example, once I had someone who would give me an order to pick cheese in a grocery store, they would have AR glasses that can then indicate what kind of cheese they should pick. Sounds like an amazing solution, but it's so far off and all the technical complications that come with it to create something like this is pretty big. Being pragmatic, in my opinion, shows the pragmatism that you have, that you can have and that you can bring in in order to do good product management. Being pragmatic is not a bad thing. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use those passwords, but they need to be purposeful. They need to be clear that they're really adding value to the solution and that they are achievable. They are not too far off. That's my personal opinion. The sky is always the limit, but again, make sure that you don't burn yourself when you're flying towards the sun. Now you've crafted those solutions. Now the most important part or the last part is to measure the success. Why do you measure the success? Because you want to show that you are able to identify how to track the success of a product. How will you collect the feedback? Will it be qualitative or quantitative? Are you aware of metrics? Do you take the human feedback into account? For example, here in this case could be the number of sunglasses sold or the sunglasses created in the app or the feedback you get from buyers. That could be something. And then you could also look at the risks or should be looking at the risks, for example, and that shows that you are able to look forward to identify the problems that can come up. For example, pieces fall off too easily if the solution of those sunglasses the pieces fall off too easily from each other. That's not like you need to make sure that this is bulletproof because it's for toddlers. Joking danger. You're creating smaller pieces that might result in a problem you need to make sure that this doesn't. There is always more risks that you can actually list but what it shows here is that you are able to think ahead and see these type of problems. Yeah, so that's about it. And that itself can be an interesting experience to go through an interview like that. What I'm going to make sure is that you need to look at this here that this here, this is the dense. This is the conversation. The conversation is a dense and you can only become better at dancing when you train and understanding this here like in theory is good but understanding why each of those building blocks exists why are they there and this might be from this framework might be from other frameworks. Make sure that you understand really deeply why you're doing what you are doing. Once you do that, then you are able to use any kind of framework as a tool set that can help you to shape the conversation or the interview and make sure that you make a good impression. Thank you very much. I hope that let me stop the share. Thank you very much for listening. I hope that I was able to convey a good message for you guys and that it's useful and helpful for you. I wish you all the best. Good luck for your interviews and I'm sure that you guys will ace it and you'll get exactly where you need to be. Have a good day. Bye.