are you interviewing for a product manager role soon if so one of the most commonly asked questions is what is your favorite product and why and tell me how you would improve it easy right but i see candidates failing this question all the time because they don't come prepared they think to themselves this question is way too easy the interviewer just isn't going to ask me this question well you thought wrong because most interviewers don't necessarily come very prepared so they go to the first question that they can think of so please don't fail the
easy question and today i'm gonna walk you through how i would answer this question and then show you what my favorite product is and why hey everyone i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a big tech company in silicon valley california and i bring you the best tips to help you get into product management and teach you how to succeed once you've made it so today we're going to ask one of the most commonly asked questions what is your favorite product why and how would you improve it so let's go through a simple
three-part structure the first part pick the product pick a product that you would rave about to your friends and that you personally love second identify needs and pain points that product is solving for you and people like you third and lastly what key pain points are not being solved today that could be strategic opportunities for the company so let's show you how i use this in a specific example so the first step picking a product that you actually love i love using yelp before the pandemic i joked that yelp was like my bible because i
was using it all the time because every time i went out to pick a restaurant i would be using yelp so still people ask me what product do i choose and like i said pick a product that you personally love but one that isn't too complex that would require a lengthy time to explain it to the interviewer but also not a product that's so commonly used that the interviewer might have heard the same answer five times before you came in and if the product is not very familiar to the interviewer feel free to take your
phone and show it to the interviewer and introduce the product to them okay so now let's go to the second step and this is your opportunity to show strategic thinking so identify the key needs and pain points here that this product in my case yelp is solving for me and people like me the first problem that yelp was solving for me before it existed was helping me discover new businesses before yelp i would be googling and landing on people's blogs to find out about restaurants i would get personal recommendations from friends i would look at
what's listed on the michelin star list and all of these one were not efficient because it took a lot of time and two were pretty biased so yelp really helped me discover businesses that were viewed by everyday people like myself and by the masses the second pain point yelped helped me solve was giving me information about the business that helped me make a decision whether i wanted to visit the business or not before yelp i would have to go to that specific restaurant or businesses website if they had one and go on multiple websites to
find information and to be able to compare and if they didn't have a website where would i go find photos of the food of how big the places and of the atmosphere so yelp brought all of that information together which empowered me to be able to decide which local business to visit the third problem it helped me solve was giving me an easy way to actually connect directly with the business so before yelp i would have been calling the business or googling looking for the website to find a phone number and it was again an
inefficient process and now i know exactly where on the yelp screen to find the business's contact information so those are some of the needs became fulfilled when yelp came onto the stage now still part of the second step you want to talk about how yelp solves these needs i know i already started talking a little bit about it because again i love the product but let me give you a more strategic way to talk about how yelp solves those needs let's go back to the needs and key pain points that i talked about above and
see how yelp actually addresses them so the first one was yelp helps me discover new business and specifically yelp is one of the largest directories of businesses in the us creates very easy and efficient ways to search for places but it also has a home screen that helps me discover places so in the search functionality the one i use the most is searching by neighborhood so oftentimes i'll be exploring a new neighborhood and i just type in restaurants at the top i'll show you here and it gives me a listing of places that are nearby
which makes it super convenient sometimes when i know i'm going to a neighborhood i won't use the nearby function but i'll put in the neighborhood or the address of the place i'm going to and again all of these are efficient ways to help me find a place that's convenient but also great and well known in that neighborhood and a couple other criteria that help you narrow down and make an efficient decision without having to go through 10 different websites the second problem that yelp helped me solve is getting the necessary business information to help me
decide whether i was going to visit the business or not it stands out by having a next level of detail that wouldn't even exist on the businesses website so for example yelp tells you whether the place is good for groups whether they accept credit cards whether it's pet friendly these aren't usually things listed on a business's website even if they had one but it is a key component in your decision for example how many times have we gone into a restaurant and only realized once we arrived that they didn't accept credit cards and had to
walk five to ten blocks annoyingly to find a near atm or how many times have you walked into a restaurant and came with a group of ten people and realized it was a hole in the wall with four seats so by yelp providing you that next level of information you can make smart decisions about the businesses that you visit or prepare ahead of time and most importantly the type of business information it provides are things like photos of the restaurant from everyday people which again helps me see for myself is the business big enough to
fit a group of 10 what is the atmosphere of the business and these are photos and because these photos are uploaded by everyday people i feel a sense of security that this isn't just a business showing me the best of the business and of course the ratings and reviews is a key component my friends always make fun of me that i'm such a snob and i only choose the four-star restaurants and the third key pain point it's helping me solve is connecting me directly to the business again a lot of small businesses don't necessarily have
websites or have a direct way to contact them except through the phone but also how would you find their phone number if they're not a digital first business where they would know to put their phone number on a website so on yelp they give businesses a way one to add their phone number or to allow other people who have frequented the business to add their phone number but two they give small businesses a messaging platform so i remember a couple years ago i visited a salon and it allowed me to message the business to book
an appointment it gave us a convenient way to easily become a patron of the business if any of this information is useful so far feel free to like the video to support the channel and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next video the third part is where interviewers are testing your creativity and how you think as a product leader most people will use this part to just rattle off cool features that they thought of that they would personally like that is not what you want to do even if you come up with
great ideas how you'll really stand out if you identify the company's key top goals and media opportunities that will help the business grow and prioritize the ones that could have the most impact on the company's growth let's walk you through what this looks like so i'm going to start off with the goal so the biggest value that yelp provides for users is driving discovery and helping people visit businesses yelp also most likely wants to help businesses directly drive sales from yelp to the business and it seems like in the last couple years yelp is making
a more intentional effort towards that so when we think about yelp's revenue at least the ones that i know two mainstreams the first is through sponsored listings so those are when businesses pay to show up first when you do a search for a restaurant so it's kind of like google ads the second is businesses take a commission for every sale they enable so whether that's a delivery order or an appointment so it seems like the top use case people use yelp for today and where it does the best job is discovery but what could be
some strategic opportunities for yelp to drive even more discoveries so i have three opportunities here the first one to build a community concept to help everyday people discover businesses from some of the top influencers on yelp on reviews there are people who have the word elite on their tag and these are people who have reviewed a ton of restaurants and these are people i want to be getting recommendations from but today i don't believe there's a way to follow them and i can imagine a world where they create lists and whenever i go visit a
new city i'm looking for their best list because these are probably foodies and people i aspire to be a second concept to help drive more discoveries yelp could dive deeper in personalization so today if you look at the home screen right now they'll give you recommendations based on what's popular in the city or places based on what you've saved to your list and instead of providing single dimension recommendations i think their algorithm could get a bit smarter in predicting what businesses i'd like to visit for example people tend to love to visit really popular businesses
that are up and coming here i can see a placement on the home screen where every week where they recommend businesses that are getting a ton of traffic or pr recently which can get me set up for the weekend when i go out with friends and looking for a cool place to visit on this front it can also take information from p who i follow and who i'm friends with so if my friends have visited a place i'm maybe more likely to visit the place because rather similar or i'll take my friends recommendations stronger than
if i saw an ad or even if i saw it on yelp so those are some ways that i think yelp could provide a bit more personalization to enable more discovery the last recommendation i'll provide for helping yelp drive more discoveries is thinking about content creation where do you think a lot of people find businesses and discover businesses today it's on instagram people see amazing photos of a pastry or some food out of business and that's how they learn about it even though yelp isn't necessarily a social platform it can encourage businesses to post more
about updates that take gorgeous food porn photos as a way to capture people's attention imagine yelp's home screen a part of it turning into a destination where people are exploring rather than just using the search function which today is the main use case in how most people find restaurants on yelp i see this as a theme of turning yelp from a search led platform to a exploration discovery platform and why the latter could be a bit more powerful is because you don't have to wait around for the person to go search instead if you create
a behavior where people come to yelp just to learn about new businesses just as they would want to get updates from their friends and family when they go on facebook or instagram there's a chance we can turn this product into one where people are spending more time on so discover is one piece of it but sales is another key component that could really help yelp prove to businesses that yelp is helping them drive sales so in the last years i've seen yelp turn into top of funnel where they just show the business's website and address
and facilitate people there to going a level deeper and helping customers complete transactions on yelp itself which that frictionless experience could increase the number of sales that a business is getting so for example restaurants is one of the main types of businesses on yelp today and they've done a great job partnering with grubhub to provide deliveries also for appointment types of businesses they allow you to create a point an appointment today for businesses like hiring plumbers or locksmiths they create a form that you can fill out to request more information from them and a quote
so what else could yelp do here well one it can further go down the list to see what other businesses are really popular on yelp that people are searching for and to go deeper in the funnel to provide unique experiences that help them drive more sales this is a very common use case but if retail clothing shops was something people would popularly search for on yelp you might think creating a catalog of products on yelp where people can browse the actual products could help retail stores sell more another opportunity with sales is can yelp help
these businesses upsell so in the delivery space we talked about today they help users like you and i order a delivery so is there an opportunity there when i'm ordering a burger and fries that they recommend to me the shake goes well with the fries so that's helping that burger joint add incremental marginal revenue that wouldn't have happened if yelp didn't recommend it to me another upsell opportunity for those hair salons and beauty salons that require an appointment once i'm done with my appointment for that day could they remind me to book my next appointment
so these are a couple ways that i think yelp could help increase sales on the platform to help businesses feel like yelp is a great destination for them to grow their business both of these categories helping increase discovery helping businesses increase sales could be tremendous in helping it beat out other competitors like google maps which in the last year have been gaining more momentum in the same space as yelp so this is the way i would answer what is your favorite product and why and how would you improve it to summarize first pick a product
that you actually personally love second identify key needs that the product is helping you and people like you solve and third identify strategic opportunities that's aligned with the businesses goals so i hope that was helpful again this is not the question you want to fail on because it's one of the easiest questions you'll get in the product manager interview so take some of these tips we talked about today and construct your own answer and make sure you walk into the interview prepared with your favorite product and why if you're preparing for interviews check out my
other videos on preparing for product manager interviews and make sure you subscribe to the channel because i'll be producing more videos on preparing for product manager interviews thanks guys
