hey there we'll be doing a reaction analysis video on a mock interview that i did with amit for an amazon pm interview these amazon pm interviews are often quite different and that they're very behaviorally focused so i'll be giving my commentary and feedback throughout the interview on how ahmed handles one of these more behavioral type pm interview questions i'm excited to share with you a little bit more about how i as an interviewer think through this interview without further ado let's get into it [Music] tell me about a time that you solved a pain point
for customers so the just to give you some context my first job was with a startup called trypoint in india this was a chain of tea retail stores similar to kind of what starbucks is here we were trying to do it with chai in india and i was leading marketing there and as part of marketing one of the goals that i had for that quarter or one of my important goals was to launch a mobile based loyalty program and in order to do that uh i was i wanted to understand what are the kind of
features we would build so i was doing some user research in order to do some user research i was visiting stores i was talking to customers in stores and one of the things that i identified was that while a lot of customers felt that a loyalty program would be good i realized that there were some much deeper and bigger pain points they were having with the core experience their experience in the store itself and that was that the queues at the store were just huge especially during rush hours and so that's the problem i identified
and here's what i did about did about it uh the first thing that i did was really try to understand what was happening was it an operational issue was it like a training issue so observing what was happening talking to a few customers and just being at the store i realized um the big pain point was payments uh there was a lot like payments were taking a lot of time at like just to give you a sense the average ticket size was like 50 cents uh in u.s terms so credit you so we didn't have
credit card or debit cards at that time and most of the people were paying using currency and at that time digital payments were not popular so and there was a big problem of tendering change at that time so that was creating a lot of chaos at the counter so um we're diving into this problem almost done a great job of sort of setting the stage this is always um really really helpful to just set context for the person listening um a lot of times people will jump into behavioral interview questions and say hey you know
this is the problem this is what i did but as an interviewer if i don't have the right context i won't be able to know why this decision was made or why it was challenging or why it was hard um this is often known as the first letter of the star um sort of behavioral framework the situation so ahmed's painting a picture of what the situation looks like and then sort of like a great story he set up a problem he said you know this is the situation but then i noticed this problem with the
cues and so omits also kind of telling the story in an interesting way that makes me curious like now at this point in the interview i'm wondering okay what is the issue with the cues and let's find out uh and really like we were aware that something was like this was happening i didn't know how bad how how bad experience this was leading to with that insight i kind of went back to my team and i discussed that you see this is the problem uh this i feel is like a much bigger pain point and
is there something we can do with the loyalty program can we try to address it and one of the team members at that time proposed how about launching a digital wallet how about where customers can come and pay using qr codes and at that time like just to give you a con idea like this right now it's pretty popular common uh pain and using qr codes at that time it was a completely noble concept no one in india at that time was doing it but as but i did more research around it and uh talking
to my team and like doing some understanding from the engineers like how feasible it is i realized like we can develop something like this something of in a basic format and it would have been very hard to develop a few years before but now it's like it's more easy to develop so uh got an understanding that this is something that could be done and next i went to some more senior stakeholders in the company i was reporting to the ceo and they were like the ceo uh like everyone involved and i propose to them like
look this is a much more serious pain point and after talking to my team i realized that we can actually rather than launching a loyalty program we can actually build a payments app where customers can load money onto their wallets digital wallet and pay much more quickly and efficiently so yes so there was some reluctance on their part uh it was not easy to persuade any everyone at that time but i aligned slowly i worked through their whatever their concerns were and i was able to align them and the result was that i was able
to convince them to launch a pilot uh in one single store so for two months we built a very basic mvp if you can say and launched it in just one store we were tracking a couple of metrics like how many people downloaded the app and how much how much it reduced the average transaction time uh the result of the pilot was after about six weeks that we got about a thousand downloads at that store for the pilot it was what it exceeded what we were expecting and the wait time came from 40 seconds to
20 seconds yeah on average and then we rolled this app across all the stores over the next six months uh and within a year 25 of all the companies revenues were coming through this program so uh not only this helped solve a big customer pain point uh it helped shape the whole direction and digital strategy for the company for the many years to come so this is a story that i wanted to share and happy to go into any of the elements that you want to discuss about totally well thanks for sharing that story really
fascinating different take on a type of story in general and it sounds like it had a really big impact on the team which is awesome thanks um yeah so i i guess like i i you mentioned um convincing stakeholders i'd love to dig a little bit deeper into that like how did you go about persuading people that the idea that you had was the right one for the product and for the team so now amit's painted the full picture so he's gone through sort of a rough sense of the star framework the task the action
and the result of uh this particular situation and how he resolved it and he did a great job of mentioning specific metrics throughout he did a great job of mentioning his specific role in it as convincing stakeholders and getting them on board with it um and he also clarified a very clear pain point and answered the actual problem that we're talking about as solving a pain point um one thing that i definitely was missing from that is at the the solution so there was a part where ahmed is talking about hey you know i'm thinking
about the qr codes or you know someone on my team proposed it and then we jumped very quickly to ahmet proposing it to to management and making that final decision or making that final persuasive argument um i was missing sort of how of it thought about it or analyzed the problem and decided that this was going to be the solution as you can imagine there's many other ways to solve the problem of a queue for example having more um cues you can split up the queue into multiple lines or something like that and so um
it's not quite clear to me that that was the right solution and we'll definitely have more of a richer conversation about it afterwards and ahmet did a great job of creating that space so i think what he did is after he sort of went through the overall scope of the problem which was always quite effective is to kind of go through the full thing in a very brief manner and then say hey i'm open to any questions i would love to dive deeper on the areas that you thought were interesting so that i can talk
about them a little bit more i mean if amit didn't want to say the thing up front about how he um solved the problem or how he came up with that solution he could have even just said you know i'd be happy to talk more about the solution but ultimately we ended up deciding that the uh creating our own payments uh solution was going to be the best route for solving this problem i happen to talk more about the justification for that but you know let me i want to talk a little bit more about
the metrics so he could have kind of included that a little bit more um when there are sort of these gaps in the story again you want to take the interviewer through the logic that you went through to come up with that solution so you want to kind of guide them through that and have them come to the same conclusions and understand how you came to them as well that's just part of persuasive speaking so let's see how ahmet handles sort of the second part of this which is more of the free form conversation that
happens after the initial answer to the behavioral interview question so there was there's definitely a lot of uncertainty even i was not sure that this was the right idea and it would some it was something that would work uh i would say like at that time the stakeholders like everyone was aligned that this was an important problem they also to their credit felt very excited that you know this is something that's new and they wanted to test out something new the genuine concern was at that time there were two concerns one was like will people
actually use it there was no precedent like no one was using qr codes at that time for payment and like we were not a big chain you know we were like a small startup doing something so will people really use it that was their concern and the other big concern which was i think a much bigger and real concern was that all these solutions had to be integrated with pos pos the point of system the billing machines and on in the stores and these are really bulky heavy software like they i remembered you know their
downtime was 30 30 of the time the machines would never be talking to back talking back to us it was down like so uh the concern was like you know the if this doesn't work this might actually end up creating even even worse experience for customers so these were all really important points and the way i thought about like the way i resolved those concerns was first like in terms of thinking like how do we get people to use it i propose like i don't know the answer to that but what we can do is
actually launch a small pilot will not know until we do that so we can do a very very low cost pilot i've talked to my team and like the app should not take more than about six to eight weeks to build out the simpler version and rather and we can make it really low risk so we can just roll it up roll it out to one to two stores they and they felt like this seemed like the right strategy so uh i was able to get people on board about this the second one it took
me a lot more i had to do a lot more homework on the second one to solving the complex technology piece i had to talk to the past providers i had to understand like i had to actually convince some other people in finance to upgrade the pos infrastructure at store so we bought better machines we installed better wi-fi we installed better software so there was some cost involved in doing so but uh because everything was just at a small scale at a pilot scale people were not really concerned about like shelling out a lot of
money so god i got it so the pilot sort of helped you be the canary in the coal mine to figure out whether or not this is gonna work and then you scaled it up um i i guess i'm curious to hear a little bit more about so so you ran this pilot where were the were the metrics really good when you ran it was that sort of what was convincing after that yeah so we were tracking two metrics as i was saying like number of people who download the app to give a sense of
are people willing to use the solution to the thing that this is something that will be helpful for them and second was like how much it reduced the the average transaction time how much it reduced the actual problem of waiting uh of payment so was the solution really working at all so ahmet's now described some of the problems that he had in getting this project approved um i think what is really effective about this is he's sort of describing just like the intricacies and the work that he had to do in order to make this
happen which showcases his ability again these behavioral interviews are about showcasing your skill set to the interviewer and so i'm just doing an effective job there um there was a point at the end where i just summarized kind of what he said and i do wish that ahmed had included that summary himself um just to make it a little bit easier for me to digest and understand that so sometimes if you do go for a long period of time talking it's always helpful to pause and just give a one second summary of hey um this
is what i i just mentioned or this is sort of the conclusion of that like of this pilot um in this case um but yeah let's keep going the way it happened the weight evolved over those six to eight weeks was that uh there was a very strong high adoption like this was a good enough problem and we were able to come up with right messaging that there was a lot of downloads but i think it took us some trial and error to get the the the average transaction time to get down from 40 seconds
to 20 seconds for people who were transacting there were some difficulties we faced but we solved them through iterations can you tell me a little bit more about what those challenges were and how you solve them sure so some of those simple challenges were like this was 2015 i guess or 14 i don't exactly remember so it was some time back and one of the challenges was like you know we didn't enter so this needed internet connectivity on users mobile phone to work and those were and there were some people were working using 2g at
that time like and so those were some of the things that i didn't anticipate like and because of those lags it was taking a long time and so one of the things that we had to do was like as a temporary solution installed wi-fi devices at stores but also there were like a lot of minor ux issues like it was very very the onboarding experience was really cumbersome there was so much friction like for people to load money for people to like create accounts so we simplified all of that and that took a lot of
iterations like doing those minor minor changes uh was something that we we we fixed over that course of the time got it yeah that makes sense um i guess i'm also just curious you mentioned the metrics that you evaluated like what sort of like can you tell me about the role of metrics in launching this product and maybe some metrics that weren't as useful that you thought were going to be useful and why you picked the metrics that you picked sure um so i think we picked like a bunch of metrics to pick uh one
to answer your first question why we use metrics was i was very clear going into this this is an experiment that's how i convinced everyone that see this is going to be an experiment and when you run an experiment you need to either at the end of the experiment you need to tell that you know you were able to prove or disprove your hypothesis so before we go into the metrics conversation um i'm asking these follow-up questions that are definitely unexpected for ahmed right it's not like we rehearsed these beforehand and definitely in an interview
you would have no sense of what the interviewer is going to ask you um i is the interviewer i'm just poking around to get a sense of you know how did women think about this problem can i understand uh the solution a little bit better can i understand you know the analysis a little bit better um and it truly is up in the air as to how the interviewer will take the interview um amit's doing a great job of sort of calmly and coolly answering these questions giving a sufficient amount of detail but not going
in too long to rant or ramble which is one of the main issues in interviews i think ahmet's length of his answers are really effective um and he's also just sharing a little bit more detail about what happened he's there's some levity there there's some uh you know reflection there as well which is really really helpful as well um and ultimately it interviews with behavioral interviews especially are a little bit more just conversational in nature you're chatting with the interviewer catching up with them seeing what questions they have um now in just a moment i'm
going to dive a little bit deeper on the metrics part because that was something that was interesting to me about what alma talked about and then we'll have a more rich discussion about that one so metrics played an extremely important role and we said like okay we are going to look at these three or four metrics and we are going to say that if we get more than 500 downloads that means the solution is working so that was exact and we define a metric and we defined certain threshold and those thresholds were like i didn't
do like i didn't build like huge data models to come up with what those thresholds were but it's based on some quick estimation like how much traffic we were getting we said like okay based on the traffic that we were getting if 10 of people would download the app that's good enough for us so uh that's how we kind of defined the metrics and their thresholds uh some of the other metrics that i was also tracking i wanted to track was how like around how frequently people would be using the app once they downloaded it
what the ticket size on that those metrics would be how much are they spending like what's the revenue that we would be getting so i think those were useful metrics to track just to keep an eye on but in terms of proving this hypothesis wrong or right those were not as useful as the first two one that i talked about got it got it that makes sense um so i guess maybe uh just a tangential question i have for you um is if you were to redo this experience like what what have you learned and
what would you do differently from from how you launched that yeah i think i'll just say something that i feel i'll start with something that i feel i did we did well overall i think it was just to kind of show we we didn't waste a lot of time in terms of designing experiment or like thinking a lot about it we launched it quickly and we got it off we i mean like i think having that bias for action was extremely important and that helped kick start this program so before we go into i'm going
to talk a little bit more about a tangential question of this um ahmed's conversation around metrics was interesting um there were a few elements that definitely stood out to me right so if i'm an amazon interviewer and um someone was just picking a metric for 10 um without much justification that might be concerned um given amazon's scale and size but also considering that this is a small startup that makes a lot of sense you have to kind of pick these goal posts and um there's a lot more finger in the air of figuring out what
makes sense um so i think it's it's something that i could have leaned into even a little bit more and just mentioning like hey you know at a big company i might consider many more factors when considering the metrics that i pick but at this company we we pick this basically just to get a sense of if it's working i think his point about experimentation is also really really astute and gives an insight into how he thinks as a product manager as well experiments ultimately you do need to measure metrics to determine if an experiment
is a success or a failure having said that i feel like i could have done a little bit more research around thinking about all the edge cases like i uh things that can go wrong so for example one of the things that i had not anticipated about were potential security concern or like fraud uh fraud scenarios that could come up uh once this experiment started what we started seeing was that because people were loading money on their digital wallets and then using qr codes some users some customers started taking screenshots of their qr code and
started circulating it and i had not at all anticipated that and that led to some fraud cases that led to some difficulties in accounts reconciliation at the back end and um so i would going ahead i would still like to operate at that pace but at the same time think about certain edge cases think more exhaustively around like what can go wrong even if i don't intend to like take action or build solution for them in the first version i just like to keep that in mind and keep everyone informed about that yeah that makes
a lot of sense it's hard to catch all those things but yeah um it does sound like an insight there is just learning that you can anticipate some of the challenges earlier on as opposed to finding out last minute yeah yeah um awesome well i i do want to uh start to get towards the feedback section but you know if there are other um points or interesting areas of this story that you'd like to share would love to hear any other aspects of it before we we have like a couple minutes before we move on
to the the feedback part um so i'm just doing a couple things really well here first of all he's demonstrating the amazon leadership principle of bias to action um for amazon in particular it's always really really important to show that you're knowledgeable about the leadership principles and weave those into the answers that you have and we have more guides and lessons on that specifically but the other thing that amit's doing he's also just demonstrating humility and thoughtfulness um when asked a question about you know how you may have made a mistake or how you might
do some things over again um it's always helpful just to be honest and candid and say hey i wish that i had checked out these uh edge cases a little bit more when i had thought through it um and that's certainly an aspect of having bias to action is that oftentimes you will run up against some of these problems so um i think one thing that i'm assessing for as i'm listening to this is like how is ahmet to work with you know is he a nice person to work with like does he have um
humility and respect and is he thoughtful about the products that he launches um but does he also have some of those leadership principles um as well that we're looking for in the amazon interview process uh i think we covered most of it i think this was one part this is one small thing which i feel like helped me align stakeholders more closely and it's to do something with the understanding the human element uh you know uh behind what goes on building these kind of products so one of the things that i knew was the ceo
who had the loudest voice amongst everyone he was a big fan of starbucks and what i knew about and when i was doing my research is starbucks had launched something like this and knowing that you know if i presented that story to the ceo he would be persuaded a lot to kind of develop it and like back this so understanding what motivates each of those individual stakeholders help you kind of move the product vision ahead uh and that's a lesson that i've carried on even late in later products that i have worked on yeah it
makes a lot of sense was there something specific that you did that you want to share about knowing the intent of the stakeholder that you positioned really well so he loves starbucks he's b he talks about starbucks all the time and one of the things that i did was actually talk to him about like just share some data around what are some of the metrics around this program was around starbucks loyalty program was how many users it has a lot of the features it was using and i think that that kind of convinced him that
this is a similar direction we should also follow so just sharing that data was like uh kind of pushed him a little bit in that direction got it totally makes sense um all right awesome interview omit um we can take a deep breath and sort of transition now from the interview stage into sort of just talking about the interview and talking about how it was for you and maybe any tips and things like that um so before i jump into some of the notes that i wrote down about what made this interview really really awesome
i would love to hear just a little bit of your self-reflection what do you think went well what would you change within this interview um so in this part of the interview ahmet is first of all taking an opportunity to share a little bit more about something that he knows was a strong suit of his in this particular project um but second of all i think it's a really clever conversation and it demonstrates again on its perspective and he's saying hey i know how to empathize with stakeholders i know how to persuade stakeholders effectively and
that's something that i would do on a team that i joined and again throughout this interview process amit's done a lot of things where he's mentioned aspects of decisions he's made or personality traits that he's had which gives me a better picture of okay how would it be to work with amit and i'm coming away from this interview feeling really excited about hey ahmed's a really smart thoughtful guy very humble and you know open to admitting mistakes and learned a lot he's also very good at persuading stakeholders and empathizing with people he's really effective at
identifying pain points and driving towards solutions for those um and i think he's also just demonstrated conversational prowess he's able to talk through some of these problems effectively and communicate effectively which is always really important for a team um so overall i think this is a really strong interview i think there were a couple aspects where i might have added a little bit more detail or really thought if i had to give one piece of feedback for this interview would be really empathizing with the interviewer and bringing them along the journey that you go through
when you solve a problem so give them all the right pieces of information so that they can come to some similar conclusions with you and you're sort of hand-holding them through this particular problem that you're solving um but ultimately i think alma did great and i hope that this reaction and analysis video was helpful for you and getting better at acing your interviews so as always good luck with your upcoming interviews
