 Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Oh. I am a coach on exponents a former VP of products and head of design and a four-time founder I've worked at companies such as grab Which is the uber south asia tech talk, which you all know and Most recently at puong, which is a series B stock and crypto trading app based in Indonesia So I am here to help you interview interview at top tier tech companies and top tier means the likes of say Google Facebook Shopify and the like I've been coaching product managers Probably over a hundred product managers so far help them get into Top tier tech companies and have also been able to get them into startups alike And really I'm starting this series with the park school because of the recent economic events you know, it's the tragedy and really Just really suffocating to just see And and hear a lot of the tragedies that have been going on Sorry, it's not sorry. Just we restart that part. Um, it has been a real tragedy To hear about the economic downturn on how that has really impacted Product managers recruiters marketers and the like in the tech industry. And so I Am starting a series to really help out to help people improve their interviewing skills and to hopefully lend them their dream job at at the next company that they're going to be calling home and so I'm really how I'm doing this for the product school is breaking this down into a five-part series So we'll be going over product sense execution behaviorals So this is all Towards the IC truck and then also going into what those behaviorals look like for the management truck At those talk to tech companies as well Now a lot of the content I'm going to be Speaking on is going to be more specific to a metal style format Meta I think just really encompasses a pretty generic Framework of interviews that have been widely adopted across other tech companies before it gets a little bit too specific And so I will just be covering more of the meta format of which you can then attribute towards more specific Interview formats that you'll be finding out the companies that you're interviewing for So today we will be starting with product sense, which is also my favorite and so I will be sharing my screen and going over this presentation I have prepared for you and Together we'll be going through this journey of how to break down a product sense interview what it is You know why? What exactly are they looking for? Why is it being assessed and so forth? All right, so I'll just hide myself in the little corner here and Let's begin Just again, I want to just briefly go over my background other than grab tiktok and and puong Some of the startups I've I've also found in the past includements ultimate, which is a ultimate frisbee sports company Selling on both shop of line and Amazon still operational today Also founded a startup called Bambify, which was an e-commerce marketplace Which was a web-based marketplace to connect e-commerce businesses with manufacturers and most recently Social city, which was a social hang-up to make your friends. You know what? Sorry, you can just grab the startup You know, sorry, let's briefly go over the info woman time just starting here Okay So to introduce myself I Am a product manager a founder and a coach on exponents I worked at companies such as grab which is like the uber of Southeast Asia There are served under the fraud team working on grab food to reduce the fraud rate that grab is going through at the time I Then transitional were to tiktok As a lead product manager working on a founding Zero-to-one products which was an HR sauce product more specifically and Most recently served as VP of product and head of design at pool on which is a stock encrypted trading app based in Indonesia I serious be startup first managing a team of eight product managers 25 designers two levels down Again, I'm also a coach on exponents, so I coach professionally to help all the product managers Navigate through their product interviews and also their career strategies and Also, just the day-to-day product operations in the first 90 days Starting out at a company I've also Found a startups. So just some of the startups I founded includements ultimate which was a Ultimate Frisbee sports company e-commerce company that was selling about Amazon Shopify and B2B This is a company that later exited The second startup is called Bamba fi of which it was a mark of web-based marketplace to connect e-commerce businesses with manufacturers And then most recently social city, which was a casual hangout up to make new friends so that's a little bit about myself and now we'll love to get into product sense and so What we're gonna do here today is break it down and in a couple verses first is going over what exactly is product sense then we'll be going over the framework and breaking that down for you and Lastly, how should we prepare for these interviews? And so we get to what exactly is product sense? What is this interview format? How does it work? product sense is a Interview format that's become quite common across tech companies Especially top caliber tech companies of which have set up a real proper assessment for product managers To really be able to evaluate their skills in navigating ambiguity Now I know that's a little bit loaded and vague but I'll go through it as we go through this presentation Why is this being assessed? product sense is really just assessing Well as as itself explained the product sense, but more specifically what that what does that mean? It means really just your intuition for products your ability to take an ambiguous problem and Create a clearly defined scope break down that problem and Ultimately come up with a really great solution and this is really important because you know, this is all at the heart the crux of assessing how you think as a product manager and This is one of the key Evaluation assessments throughout your interview process. That's going to Ultimately also determine your calibration which also determines your offer and So this is really really important to nail down I think among all the product interviews you could have in a company when you're evaluating metrics aka execution behavioral and product sense product sense is arguably the most important interviewer you're going to be Faced with and so this is why we're doing this first as well. And lastly who is going to be interviewing you? Now this can be a peer. So for example, if you're interviewing for a senior PM role, you might be interviewing with another senior PM or a BPM Horizontal peers are going to be much less likely to interview you You're likely going to be interviewed by someone who's at least one level up from you So if you're senior PM, it'll likely be a lead PM But more likely could be a manager or even a director slash VP Who is interviewing for that position? So what are some examples of product sense questions you're going to get asked? Well, I'm bucking those into three Classic types of questions you might get asked. So first is what is your favorite product? If you ask a question like this, you're going to be expected to talk about one among three of your favorite products Talk a little bit more in depth in terms of what you really like about it Who is it really solving for one of the problems that it's really solving? And then ultimately how would you improve it? The second type of question you're going to get asked is build a product to do X And the third type of question, which is typically a little bit more challenging would be build X for X or in other words You know an example question of that would be build an ATM For an international airport, that's a little bit of a more popular question on Stripe but that's a Type of question that you're you're likely to get at a company is like Google and Stripe So those are more hardware-based questions. So build X for X and Just backtracking a little bit building a product to do X an example This could be for example build a product to help people find doctors The doctor's piece or rather You know what the goal of that product is is already kind of defined for you in the sense like this Build a product to help people find doctors. We'll use this question as the base template question to go by The rest of the framework that I'll be teaching you today So first I want to ask some clarifying questions. These clarifying questions are really important you know, this is such that These clarifying questions are important because you want to make sure that you and the interviewer are on the same page and Operating within the same environment Do these assumptions or align assumptions that you're going to be making? So the first is going to be asking if it's okay to make data assumptions along the way This is going this is a little bit more of an advanced technique But this is going to help you to be able to justify some of your trade-off decisions along the way or To treat or to properly assess and justify why it's worth going after this particular direction or market Second is to define X. So we saw in that previous example You know for example here build a product to help people find our doctors. Well, let's define doctors X in this case is doctors So we're talking about specialists generalists hospital doctors walking clinics So this is a great way to align with how we're defining X in that sense And if you go back to build X for X so, you know, build an international sort of build an ATM for an international airport in this case you can You can ask, you know, how are we really defining an international airport? Are we talking about an international airport within a domestic country like the country that I'm currently in? Are we talking about addressing more specifically travel is coming in how it's coming out? How are we really defining international airports more specifically yours? You just want to again operate within the same environment and the same understanding and alignment to make sure that you're able to properly tackle this questions without assuming too much on the ambiguity there and Here is where you're going to be asking more important questions Regarding the case more really more related to the goals that could potentially come up later on So you might want to ask if there's a regional focus are we focusing on the United States? Where we currently reside or are we thinking about? targeting other external markets such as India Etc. Now, this is really important to ask Because this is going to also determine the state of the products it also determines the environment of which you're going to be basically building for And all of which is really just key insights that you're going to need Again to help set up that environment for you to operate in throughout this framework. So You know, if we're going to be building a product to help you find doctors If you're interviewing for a meta, you might also want to ask if we're doing this as part of meta Or if we're doing this as part of another company, or sorry, or if we're doing this outside of meta Those are two Important questions to ask because if you're building this as part of meta, then you know in the United States, it's pretty mature market Of which you would classify the stage of the product to be in, you know, meta inside the United States has been operating for 20 years around 20 years and so it's it's And so in this case you can likely attribute a Lot of the the goals of the product to be more centered around monetization and profitability You could also be in the growth stage. So let's just say maybe that growth stage is defined in another country say You know, I'm gonna be spitballing here, let's just say Africa, you know growing market We have maybe 50% market share there today Our goal is to capture the other 40% over the next say five years You know growth A growth metric will likely be the goal there And the last is part is a PMF product market fit So let's just say that we're focusing on a new entirely new region such as India Then you're going to be looking at the product market fit stage for the stage of the products Of which retention rate is likely going to be the greater goal there Or, you know, depending on the situation how you frame this narrative, it could also be growth And this plays into the strategy that you will be setting later on So it's really important to just clarify the regional focus so you can determine the stage of the products and you'll want to Relay both of this information back to the interviewer Lastly, we're looking at Of our final question and that is whether or not we're restricted to software This is an important question to ask because not all problems Are best solved with software, you know, maybe it's a physical Solution or product that actually ends up solving this problem the best So just make sure you're also asking that to your interviewer just to make sure that you guys are again Operating under the same understanding of how you can tackle this case so The first half of this framework is mission strategy user segments and user journey Now I'm separating it like this We'll consider this as part one Each part of this framework is meant to build like a waterfall Where you if you're doing each part, right? It naturally leads the next part and builds a really cohesive concise narrative Of really just narrowing down the ambiguity into something very specific The key part of part one is essentially to set yourself up for success by Being able to really empathize with the user to generate problem statements Which then is covered in part two Whereby you can then come up with problem statements prioritize one and then come up some solutions So what we'll get to that later? So for part one the first thing you have to do is to find the mission So for the mission statement That would either be you know, for example agree is some that this is part of meta. You'll be using that as mission mission statement as part of As part of your lead here If you are not doing this part of meta, then you're free to go ahead and create your own mission statement of which Is directly applied to the case question which in our case going to be helping to build a product to help you find doctors So let's just say this is part of it up So, you know met his mission is to essentially bring empower people to build communities and bring people together and so I Might have gone that off a little bit by the way, so just FYI Then you need to talk about the strategy So the strategy is more like the strategic directioning The strategic direction and asking the question of why why are we doing this? Why are we building a product to help with my doctors as part of meta? So there's a few ways you can really break down the strategic reasoning as to why and tie it back to the mission and so Really, there's a few components that you can use to really build a great strategic narrative You can use competitors market size and the current And the current predicament or problems that the company is currently facing today Now I will bring now these are just a few of the elements there there are more that you can Probably get creative with but I'm just gonna maybe stick with these as the core principles for now So, you know, you can say something like, you know met his mission is the Is to build committee is to empower people to build communities and bring people together You know doctors are a really important part of this mission by making sure that we have healthy communities And people being able to stay both physically and mentally fit This is going to just help empower our mission to Foster great communities within the cities and the neighborhoods with the people that we love most our friends and family You know strategically, it's really important for us to do this because now you can start using some of your data assumption abilities here You know, it's really important for us to address this problem because today, you know, we're getting upstarted by the likes of tech talk and Lemon aids and also snapchat You know, they've really secured the Gen Z's in terms of the next you know one or two decades of The main platforms that are going to be within our ecosystem And it's been really hard for us to penetrate as part of Facebook into into this demographic and so you know one strategic direction that we could possibly take meta and the reason why we're likely doing this is because You know, we could be building specific life lifestyle use cases of which no other social platform has ever done before Facebook itself started with college kids who are now adults but of course Facebook itself has remained a social app and has not really evolved with the needs of The uses themselves that they as they transition from being college kids to working adults to now having families and As they get older, they're also going to have health issues. And so there's really this strategic direction of building lifestyle use cases here that makes this direction of building product our product within meta to help you find doctors a differentiated competitive advantage that we can pursue further to the only increase our retention rate and stickiness within the product, but also to be able to increase our market potential as As the healthcare tech scene is currently a five hundred billion dollar market growing at a 15% compound annual growth rate Okay, so that was a bit lot But again, it's important to be able to just justify and talk on that level of why strategically it makes sense for us to Not only pursue this direction But also time that back to the mission Okay, so once you've had the mission the strategy down you can then talk about The user segmentation and the user journey User segmentation is really important and you have to get this right Now there is no why you're wrong answer, but there's definitely always better answers to have here And companies like stripe Really really emphasize user segmentation as key part of their assessment for your product sense interviews Facebook Facebook, you know values different things Google values different things Google really values big moonshot ideas And using strategy to help guide you along the way So in Shopify, you know, they care a lot more in terms about the collaboration that you're going to have with the interior and also Using that collaboration to try to gain more evidence justification towards trend of decisions as you go through the case itself So you see every company is going to be different in terms of what they're looking for and it'll be either soft skills or Specific parts of the framework that you really need to look out and do a little bit more research on on the company that you're interviewing at So user segmentation though for me is really going to be a non-negotiable I think this part needs to be done really well in order to really prioritize that specific user segment For the user journey, which is the last piece of this part one That's going to help differentiate you across Or into the top 1% of the interviewers Or interviewees and that is being able to really empathize with the user So for user segmentation, let's talk a little bit more in detail about this for user segmentation I Have a rule and that rule is unless it's healthcare don't ever use them Demographics and what I mean by demographics is children teens adults elderly if you say this in any other context but healthcare You will likely fail the interview Because these are not proper segmentations and proper segmentations are really just by use cases So I'll give you kind of two examples that you can always refer to for user segmentation as Kind of like a benchmark to help guide you on how to define Proper use of segmentation for any kind of case question you get The first is uber So for uber, I'm going to first do what I call their one segmentation So that's really just the high level like how would you define our user segment? So for uber we have passengers and drivers Very simple Then you have to talk on what I call layer 2 so this is a pretty high level, but we can be a little bit more specific There's many different ways you can slice and dice this so for specifically for layer 2 So for layer 2 segment of a rider, we have leisure riders and we have Professional riders professional riders being like these are people who are working and and doing business travel More specifically Then on the driver side you have full-time and part-time drivers So these are just you know different examples of how you can really structure the layer 2 User segment just to be a little bit more specific and at the end of that user segment you would have to then select and prioritize which user segments both from the layer 1 and Ideally the layer 2 But you want to solve problems for Now you can you can just use logic to determine which one makes the most sense You know whether that's a check-in-the-neck problem or you know, maybe it makes more sense for us to target say you know in our case since we're building up a Product to help people find doctors You know maybe in this case in this case You know it could be like patients and doctors as a layer 1. Maybe it makes more sense for us to target patients And maybe it makes more sense for us to target patients because no one's ever really focused on building a really canny experience for them There's so many different problems to solve for and if we can build and also as part of Facebook Or or meta we we already have three billion users on the platform All of these people are patients not everyone as a doctor if you can really help So we already have a competitive advantage in the market for this and if we can really Leverage a really great a Really great way to help you find doctors for the three billion people on the platform It'll be a huge pull for us to actually have real healthcare partnerships on board to help serve that market You can just talk, you know freely and logically about Why it makes more sense to go with one or the other again? No, why don't answer you just want to just justify a little bit So for us we're going to go with patients just because I do also just feel there's so many different problems we're going to be solving for here and Given that Facebook is a consumer app It makes more sense for us to probably solve those consumer problems which in this side is going to be the patients So then we can go and we can go and talk to the user journey For a specific patient So with the user journey you want to be able to really empathize as much as possible with that With this specific segment and So the best way to do this is to add a persona and walk through that entire journey of what that person goes through So I'll give you an example Let's talk about Jane. So Jane is a She's a new college grad who's been working over the last one year since she graduated school You know, she started to feel a pain in her abdomen and she is quite unsure what to do with it or What kind of issue it could be and it's been hurting more and more each day for the last five days So just getting quite concerned about it What she does is she decided to go find a doctor and so she the first thing she did is go on Google Search up general clinics found a huge slew of them within a five kilometer radius of her The first problem she encountered was that all of these clinics have three star four star reviews. That's fine, but The bigger problem is that none of these reviews are actually on the doctors themselves Just on the clinic itself as a whole she's looking for a specific doctor that can actually help help guide her through the situation And so she has to go through each one of those clinics reviews to see which doctors are actually the ones that Haven't favorable reviews in order to trust and and they're confident to book with them When she shortlisted about two or three of these she may call to each of them and realize that None of them had appointments available for her At the time that she was looking for and so she just spent another she just spent a whole 20 minutes Shortlisting all these all these clinics for specific doctors only to find out that there was no way for her to even see if they were available at her specific time and So now she has to increase the radius to 10 kilometers and go through this process all over again Quite frustrating but she finally found a clinic about 10 kilometers away that she wanted to book with and Then she just realized that hey this clinic also doesn't cover is not was also not covered by her health insurance Which would have been fine if she knew what the parts would be for a particular checkup But that was also not Not listed anywhere in those reviews or just the online Google Maps platform itself And so this is really just now going into an ever an ever growing bigger issue She has to go do the search again she finally finds a clinic that is available has her insurance She's finally able to make that booking shows up on the day goes in gets gets an x-ray Pays through her insurance Has medication to follow up and That is the typical journey of Jane finding a doctor And And so in this user journey, we've seen that Jane has a lot of different problems that she has that she has faced Throughout the journey of finding a doctor And so from here What you want to do is just List the top three problems. So now we're answering part two list the top three problems that was in that journey this is Now if you've made it to this point Really, and you've done that use the journey really well you're at an advantage because This interviewer is likely very aligned with you on what these problem statements really are These are not problem statements that were just pulled out of your ass These were just truly empathized through a user journey and a logical flow to come up with these top three problem statements I am that you now want to be solving for and So let's doubt the top few problems that you found that journey Then you want to use a matrix to prioritize Those specific problems and that matrix is by pain level Frequency and impact pain levels. How painful is this problem to this specific user? how frequently do they go through this problem and Is there like a particular impact in terms of metric or Or how many or what percentage of people within this target demographic or sorry this target this user segment I had actually gone through And so what you want to do is make a matrix table chart here like this and You just you can just label high medium and low for each of these columns From there you're going to have a pretty good data Set here to help you prioritize and select which problem you want to solve for But then after you've done that just take another step back and just see more Objectively and strategically if it still makes sense to tackle a specific one of those specific problems first Because you know at the end of the day, we're thinking about the whole user journey of helping people find a doctor We notice some of those problems being say not knowing if this clinic is covered by insurance You know not knowing if they even had availability in the first place There's no reviews on doctors themselves The first part of that journey is actually as we noted from the user journey. It's actually just finding doctors Finding reliable doctors, which you know, it is still quite a pain and if you get the wrong doctor that mistreats you you could end up being impaired for life And so, you know given that's the first part of the journey and it still is a moderately Pretty strong problem to have maybe it actually makes more sense to go with this problem first despite the other problems in this matrix actually having checked out as You know, maybe higher pain point higher higher frequency velocity or even higher impact So just take a step back after you've done this matrix and just see you know Logically if it still makes the most sense to prioritize that problem Or if we should be looking at it more from a user journey perspective or a strategic perspective to see if it actually makes more sense to prioritize another problem to solve for So once you prioritize that one specific problem You then want to go into coming up with three specific solutions And when you come up with those three specific solutions You can use another matrix to prioritize which solution you will honor you want to end up ultimately building So for those three solutions the Then the metrics you should be using or and again you can you can Swap in any of these metrics depending on what you've also come up with that's up to you The three I like is value Efforts and impacts. So how valuable is the solution to the user? How much effort is it going to take to build? If it's more of an operational solution Don't just consider the effort from the engineers also consider effort from the operations team That could be really important to have and if you want to go another step further. You can also consider the impact from the designers But designers is less common that that's probably going to be for a much more specific Solution that you have in mind or or question I try to answer. So maybe just stick to either operations or engineering Impact so impact is going to be just again like, you know Either like what percentage of that user segment can we can this be used to solve for? and or What is that? What is that? What is a key metric that this could be that this could be moving? high minimum low Use that to then prioritize your solution and When you come up with solutions, I would highly recommend you come up with three differentiated solutions What I mean by this is is don't come up with a solution that is for example Uber with a right allocation feature a payment feature and a You know, maybe like an uber share feature like these are three Features as part of one solution, but really you're trying to come up with three distinct separate solutions for this problem So come up with three specific products or three like within within either the meta app or outside of the meta app Depending how you phrase that in the very beginning Lastly now I would I would at this point want to check on the interviewer and just say ask if there is time to go through metrics, otherwise you could just wrap this up because at this point you've likely already gone through say 20 to 30 minutes and this interview is capped at 30 minutes So you want to just do a quick time check and just see if it's okay to go through the metrics Otherwise, you can just wrap it up here So for key metrics You know if the interviewer says, okay, it's fine, let's think about what are the key metrics you use to track for this specific solution I'm gonna give you like a really brief table here. It's just simply priority on one column and key metric on the other. So For for priority, I like to label the typical P0 P1 P2 P0 is a north star metric. You can you can only have one of those P1 are the good to track metrics and then P2 are just nice to hubs So really you're just trying to focus on essentially like what is north star metric and which ones of KPIs That you just want to be like monitoring essentially for for this specific solution And when you're thinking about those specific metrics, just make sure that it's both relevant sort of relative in terms of You know you having a look back period on that so month over month six month look back period, etc Make sure it has if applicable Add a direction to it. So for example increasing GMV month over month and When you're thinking about these metrics Also try to come to the most outcome metric possible for the north star So again, it may really depend but that's typically going to be 90% of what a nurse or should probably be so An outcome metric is really like what is the final outcome behavior that you're trying to accomplish slash What is the end? What is the end state of the metric being that being like revenue or profitability related metrics Those are typically going to be the two types of P0s that you'll most likely encounter for these key metrics for your specific solution for product sense now Later on in this series, I'll be when I cover execution We'll be tackling metrics in a slightly different way, but you know, we'll we'll get to that session In our next talk and yeah, that's it for product sense. So You know, it's quite dense, of course, it's it's meant to be and even though the The problem or the initial question seems quite simple You know such as again like build a process to help it find doctors You if done properly, you really will need the full 20 to 30 minutes to really cover that entire case And so how to prepare for this For this specific topic, I think overall it will take you about one to two weeks to become intermediate and tackling the product sense interview What I would recommend is to rehearse Two to three product sense cases per day For three to seven days do this by yourself do it in front of the mirror and time yourself Really important for you to be comfortable with the time management And to be able to memorize the framework Until you get it really down to a beat naturally then the second step is to be able to What what you you should probably be doing is actually just doing a mock with the mocking partner Mock with them once or twice a day Mock once or twice a day for about a week So this is gonna be a little bit more of a sanity check getting you comfortable interacting and working with an interviewer And I would highly recommend getting someone either high aptitude or some of your experience to mock you For these interviews really important and I say this because especially for beginners You might not know how to filter bad feedback And when you do mock with someone who really knows their stuff on this Or again, they don't even have to what I've noticed that even if the person is not even a product manager If they're just high aptitude or they're generally quite smart or intelligence They're able to just pick pick you apart quite well when it comes to These mocks and I've had a lot of my friends be able to actually prep me sometimes even better than experienced product managers Who have actually have a product sense? So just get anyone any one of your friends or find someone online through the exponent community or other communities That you can buddy up with and pair up to mark once or twice per day for about a week and Yeah, once you able to Master this framework You'll know you've mastered it if you're able to generate a framework for any question that comes your way related to product sense Whether that means the question has more context less context Etc when you're able to generate a framework for pretty much any question That's when you know you're really ready for interviews So best of luck, I hope you guys enjoyed this first session and I look forward to seeing you guys next week