one of the most common parts of product interviews today are take-home projects in this video I'm going to show you an example and a structure you can use to tackle take-home projects so you're not spending weeks because you probably have a full-time job and you don't have time for homework so let's get into it the part number one is understanding the business how are you supposed to propose Solutions or a strategy if you don't understand the business and this is a piece that most people skip over or Miss but it's really critical understanding the business
means understanding what is the mission of the company and a lot of the times the mission will be pretty generic but you'll want to highlight the key themes that it stands for so that you can connect your strategy to later so here's an example of Square's Mission which we're going to use as example for the rest of this video next you'll want to understand the goals of the company so these might be three to five metrics what is the Northstar metric of course in all of these goals revenue is going to lie somewhere a business
has to make money but there might be other goals like the number of subscribers The Watch time if it's something like YouTube with square it's probably something like the number of businesses signed up and the total subscription Revenue then you'll want to look to understand who are the users of this company's products it's usually a multi-sided ecosystem and hence you want to cover who are the different players and lastly you'll want to understand the business model how does the business make dollars I mean money and how does the goal ladder up to the way it
makes money so the easiest way to get these things if the company is public is to search their earnings report here's an example of some of the information from Square's latest earnings report again this part is very important because it helps you understand the business and services the foundation you can build your product recommendations on off of the second part is to deal with data and this section is probably the trickiest but also the most pivotal because how are you supposed to come up with a strategy or know what to build if you don't know
information or insights about what the problem is at the same time with these take-home exams because they're so ambiguous it's very easy to fall into a rabbit hole of digging for data and it is really mentally draining trust me so ideally you'll want to find some data but not dig so hard where going past page five on Google search so what are some of the categories of data you want to look for it starts with user research and the first thing you can do is actually do some user interviews and nothing beats talking to customers
and this was something that I learned at stripe where you want to be a culture where you can pick up the phone email VC whatever and talk directly to customers so was actually interviewing for a B2B product and I remember they told me explicitly we want you to go interview our customer and I had another client who was interviewing with Uber who actually interviewed Uber drivers and Uber Riders so this could be a great way to get some interesting insights that the company might not have even realized another way to get some user research is
to look at app reviews so on the Google Play store or the Apple Store you'll find people writing reviews about the product experience again they're not the highest of quality but you might be able to pick out some themes that you see reoccurring and the last place to get some user interviews could be directly from forums so people are talking about the good and the bad of products in things like on things like Reddit or even YouTube videos where people are reviewing products the next category of data you want to get is market research so
this is broken down into things like getting stats and looking at sources like statista or Pew research or sometimes when you just Google stats for say the restaurant industry things come up you can also get industry reports so you would Google stats for X industry sometimes you have companies that are providing that space providing these industry reports because they have customers who want to learn more or you have VCS sharing these industry reports or Consulting companies like McKenzie Boston Consulting Group Bay and Company Etc so those are usually the more reliable sources that you want
to look at and then if you can find look at some raw data and here you might be able to find some of that data in the public earnings report directly so for example Google Shares a lot of information on the number of let's say average revenue you per subscriber so now that you have all this data what are you going to want to do with it and this is the fun part which is you'll want to look for themes that keep coming up over and over again let's say three to five themes here in
your presentation you either want to screenshot it or take direct quotes to show that it's coming from the mouth of users and then from these themes you'll then want to prioritize and as with prioritizing you always lead with a criteria and here are some parts of the criteria might be checking which of these themes are actually gaps in the company because you might prioritize something but then not realize the company's actually working heavily into the space another criteria is what is the impact on investing in this theme on the key goals sure a lot of
people could complain about a product on a certain domain but if the company doesn't care about that space and it is not a way for the company to make money it's not going to matter and another criteria might be is this going to serve as a competitive Advantage for the company or are competitors already working on this and them making a drop in the bucket isn't going to make a difference so a lot of my clients who I help on take-home projects struggle with the thought of I get so stuck on getting data or being
overwhelmed by so much data so note here they don't care so much about the right answer as much as your process so if there was data that is maybe wrong it matters less than how you built upon that data if you're building logical conclusions throughout that at least shows that you can do an execute if you were given the right data step number three is now getting into the strategy the first you now have themes that you've prioritized and hence you want to show a strategy that tackles those themes and discuss how it ladds up
to the higher Mission so this is where you're going to bring back the understand work that was done above in understanding the business how it makes money Etc and the word strategy is a word thrown around all the time people don't really know what it means plain and simple it means a plan of attack a plan on how to win and once you have let's say your three prong strategy you want to come up with some solutions to tackle each part of that strategy so maybe think of two to three ideas per strategy you'll want
a mix of practical Solutions and moonshot ideas to show the company that you can think practically but also think more innovatively especially in companies like Google they really look for moonshot ideas versus companies like Facebook they look to solve the Practical people problem is what we called it then you'll want to do some prioritization off of those Solutions and do an ROI analysis and Roi return on investment is basically looking at what is the effort you would need to put in to execute on this and what is the benefit on some key goals that you
would get and you'd be choosing the solutions that have the largest return on investment and prioritizing those first now you have some ideas and prioritized Solutions you'll want to come up with some wireframes and these these are rough sketches on the user flow on the user experience to show that you know how to design a product you'll then want to turn the strategy into a road map and this is a month-by-month execution plan to show in sequence what are you deciding to work on First and how are you prioritizing it a company wants to know
not only can you come up with the strategy but you know how to get things done which Lads into execution so in the execution section you'll want to talk about success metrics how do you know whether your plan is winning or not and I'm going to link a video above which talks about how to come up with success metrics you'll also want to propose experiments basic AB tests on hypotheses you might have on how the product should be rolled out or designed and you'll also want to talk about the goto Market strategy which is now
let's say you have the product how do you get it into people's awareness and Consciousness how do you get people to actually purchase the product what is the brand that people associate the product with and this is such a key component on launching a successful product so if you're not sure how to tackle this so you'll want to watch this video on me talking about go to market strategies and I will see you guys in the next video
