[Music] Hello. Hello. Uh, welcome everyone.
We're going to be doing a live uh, mock interview with Kate. I'm Mike. I, uh, run product at Leland.
I will take the role as the interviewer. And then Kate, I'll pass it on to you if you want to do a quick intro. >> Hi everyone.
I'm Kate. I'm based in Denver, Colorado. My background is in product management at Capital One as well as consulting at Accenture and I became a coach on Leland earlier this year.
So happy to be here. >> Let's uh jump right into this. So the way this is going to work is we will go over an interview question.
Uh so explain what it's going to be. Kate, if you have any thoughts about how you want to approach this question before we start the mock, you can you can do that. and then we'll just jump right into doing the actual question and then uh feedback and then if there's any questions we can respond to those as well.
[Music] We'll we'll start soft with with an easy tell me about yourself. >> Yeah. So before I get into my answer, some things that I want to call out here is like this is a question you are guaranteed to get regardless of the industry or the role.
And so because of that, we really want you to be confident and nail your response. And so typically, I would recommend keeping this to about a minute to a minute and a half. Otherwise, honestly, you're going to start to lose your interviewer's attention.
You'll always have time later on in the interview, especially if it's a behavioral to expand upon certain experiences or highlight your impact. So, really save a majority of that or the nitty-gritty details for later on. Hi, I'm Kate Shaw.
I started my career in management consulting focused on the retail and consumer goods industries. Found that experience to be really valuable in terms of project variety, stakeholder management, and building my communication skills, but also realized that I didn't see myself making a long-term career out of it going up all the way to the managing director level. But what I did like about consulting entailed working on something from start to finish to solve a problem.
So that led me to product management at Capital 1 where I own two customerf facing experiences on the payments team. And I know myself to be more of a visual learner. So I've really enjoyed seeing my impact on these more front-end products where I get to nudge customer payment behavior.
Also, let's just say I'm interviewing for Leland, so I'll tie that in at the end. Um, outside of work, I genuinely love mentoring people. It's something I've done informally for the last six or so years from sharpening resumes to conducting mock case interviews.
And so, I'm really excited about this product position at Leland because there's this ripple effect where I can contribute to making the platform more valuable to the users. The users then go on to achieve their goals and then they might actually come back to become a Leland coach and pay it forward. So that's why I'm here today.
Great. I love that. I um one of the most common mistakes I see when I'm coaching people is they hear from someone some advice that's like you got to talk about X, Y, and Z.
And so they like formulate this like exact formula of what they need to cover. And um it ends up just feeling one a little rehearsed and two a little irrelevant. And I I think the best answer here is use some amount of emotional intelligence to know like what are the parts of my background that are relevant to this conversation and I'm going to spend two minutes bringing those up.
And so I like that you talked about consulting into product into Leland because like all of those things are relevant and then you didn't need to talk about where you went to school, what your childhood was like some of those things or even like what was the impetus of when you first learned about product. I I don't know. I just sometimes feel like I I hear this bad advice from people.
You have to touch certain bullet points and I like that this was just very flowing and natural. Great. Okay, let's uh let's move on.
So, we are now going to go into uh a little bit tougher of a product case. And so, your prompt is design a product to help new grads find their first job more easily. So before I jump into this one, so right now as the question is presented, it's pretty vague and you have the opportunity to walk your interviewer through your entire thought process.
That's what you should be doing. There's a lot of considerations going into this question. And so you really want to make sure that you spend some time asking some clarifying questions, establish some guidelines, and before jumping right into it.
We really want to avoid a brain dump or spewing everything at the top of your mind. So, um, as I get into answering this, um, great. That sounds like an exciting product to work on.
I'd love to ask a few clarifying questions so I get a better idea of what exactly we are trying to do with this product. So, first off, when you say new grads, do you mean high school grads, firstgen, undergraduates, or an even higher level of education, such as an MBA grad? >> A great question.
I'll let you define what flavor of new grad you're most interested in focusing on. >> Okay, perfect. So, in that case, based on what I have the most personal experience in, I will just go ahead and assume we're going to focus on the undergraduate user persona.
>> Great. >> I have a few other questions. So, one, are we focusing on a specific school, program, or region, or keeping this pretty open-ended?
>> Yeah, great question. I'm glad you asked. Let's say for the sake of simplicity that these are people in the United States focusing on jobs in the United States, but let's not focus on any specific program.
This is just more broad entering the workforce for the first time. >> Okay, awesome. That's good to know.
We'll keep it focused to the US. And then another question I had is are we targeting any and all industries or focusing on one area such as management consulting or product management? >> Great question.
I'll let you define if there are specific industries you want to focus on or not. >> Okay. Um, for now, let's just keep it to all industries.
I feel like given that the job market has a reputation for being a little brutal right now, we want to make sure that job applicants are seeing any opportunity that might come up on their radar. Cool. And then my last question for now is I know that we mentioned, hey, we want to help new grads find their first job more easily.
I want to get a little bit more specific if there is a boundary there. Are we prioritizing anything specifically such as the matching speed between applicant to an employer or specific job or the number of suitable matches per day? >> Yeah, really really good question.
I'll let you define what success here means in terms of what is helping new grads. >> Okay, awesome. In that case, I would define our goal or priority as like the matching speed between an applicant submitting that job application up to when they receive a job offer.
Again, going back to what we had settled on earlier in terms of a specific user to focus in on, we said undergraduates. So, okay, I'm going to go out of interview mode. So, this is your chance to go a little deeper into some of those clarifying questions you asked.
So, you want to start with, okay, here's the person I want to focus on. Here's their pain points. We'll get into that.
Here's which painoint we want to prioritize. And really going through that full product development cycle in this interview question. Okay, now I'll go back into interview mode.
So, in my experience, a recent undergraduate is likely someone that has minimal work experience. Usually, some part-time jobs, some student extracurriculars, or internships. And so they're likely feeling some anxiety or pressure to find their first job.
They're they have busy lives as we know if we've ever been a student. We're balancing school work, um extracurriculars, or again those side gigs. And they might also feel like they have no one to reach out to for help.
It can be it can feel daunting to ask for help in such a big process. And so um that's definitely a potential pain point that they might be feeling. As I think about this specific undergraduate user persona, I am going to walk through a potential user journey as they are navigating finding their first job.
Let's just say I'm an undergrad looking to land my first job. Let's just use consulting for example, but it really could be any industry. Um, I would likely start with a general Google search to understand what consulting firms are out there because maybe I've just learned about this industry.
I'm really interested but not quite sure where to start. And so, as I'm thinking about that user journey, one potential pain point here is that I'm going to feel overwhelmed by the number of consulting firms. And I really can't tell the difference between these companies.
What do they offer? What should I go with? what might fit my background and my interest the most.
And so, as we keep progressing through that user journey, as they as I identify some potential roles, I'm going to probably still feel a little confused and uncertain about my candidacy. Like, am I qualified for this position? Like, oh, I don't meet all of the requirements.
Should I still apply? Like, I don't want to get rejected right away, things like that. I don't know how to tailor my application, who to connect with in this space.
And so I might end up getting discouraged and not end up applying to that job at all. So, as we think about some of these potential pain points that this user persona is going to experience, I'd say my next step would be to in an ideal world, I'd want to collect some data through whether that's through surveys, empathy interviews with existing students or even looking at other job platform reviews to understand, hey, what are the most significant pain points for people recent grads that are trying to land their first job? And then that will help inform hey this is where we can be most impactful.
This is where our product can address a gap in the existing job platforms today. So, now that we have walked through identifying some potential pain points and really basing it off of some hypotheticals or assumptions, I'm going to go back to our original goal that I set of optimizing for matching speed between the job applicant and receiving a job offer. Let's just say again, we're working with limited data right now.
If we were to operate with the assumption that the primary pain point is customers or students are unsure whether their background meets the job applica job application and the qualifications and deters them from even applying. Um, I would then want to take this painoint, take this data and organize an ide ideiation session with stakeholders from design, engineering and business analytics to brainstorm some solutions really going casting a wide net of solutions to address that selected pain point. And again, knowing that we're working with limited data, this painoint ideally would be backed by data that we collect.
um maybe even some context on like hey here's the impact here's the severity here's the scale to again make sure that we are picking a painoint that is most commonly felt by our platform users cool I'll pause there before I keep going Mike is there anything you want to add >> nope that sounds good I think I'm uh excited to hear how you uh take it from here >> okay great so back into interview mode let's say we have now gone through an ideation session and we've come up with a broad range of solutions. I'm just going to list about five solutions just for time sake in this interview. So I'm thinking about this from for the solutions I'm thinking about this from a pre-application to post application.
And so a majority of my ideas are more in that pre-application side. Really thinking about our user persona as an undergraduate. they're really feeling anxious, confused, maybe undermining their qualities, their background.
And so one of my first potential solutions that came out of that ideation session is a curated job matching algorithm or tool. And so a user that comes to our product would be able to receive personalized job recommendations based on their skill set, based on their coursework that they completed, some of their interests, whether or not that's related to the job itself and their overall goals just to make sure that we are giving recommendations that are relevant. From personal experience, sometimes my inbox from LinkedIn is flooded with jobs where I have absolutely no interest or I don't even know how it landed in my inbox in the first place.
And so this feels like a solution that would help narrow down on that overwhelming feeling that candidates might be experiencing. My next solution, again within the pre-application bucket, would go into resume and application guidance. So again, either providing personalized résé reviews based on a coach or providing templates to ensure here's what a standard resume template might look like for landing a specific type of interview at a specific type of company.
So really making sure that it's that guidance is tailored to the industry and the relevant roles. Our third idea within the pre-application bucket would be how can we find help them find a mentor within the space whether that's through the alumni connections or matching them with a potential mentor who's actually interested and invested in coaching someone. So really connecting them with recent alumni that are in the role or the industry that is attractive to the user of this platform.
And then the fourth idea within this pre-application bucket or process is hey let's make a application tracker with deadlines. Again this this process in my experience sometimes I end up with 50 to 100 tabs open of like this job opportunity looks great but I don't have a centralized place where I'm tracking deadlines. And so what we could do is implement a tracker that centralizes all of these relevant opportunities.
tracks here's where you've applied, here's where you haven't, and also sends deadline reminders to an email. And my last my last idea for post application is, hey, some interview preparation tools. What are the expected behavioral and industry specific interview questions with some feedback with some practice questions?
So, those are all of my potential solutions that came out of this hypothetical ideation session. And so, now I would want to, we can't do everything all at once. So, I'd want to hone in on one solution.
And this is where I'm really using my the perspectives of the stakeholders in the session to conduct basically an impact slasheffort prioritization exercise. What is going to achieve the greatest impact but require maybe low to medium effort based on our existing infrastructure and team resources? And so again for this hypothetical let's just say we go forward with the curated job matching because after discussions and looking at the data we concluded that it had the highest impact with a medium level of effort.
So then after we finalized the design and the build across the teams and received sign off I would then want to think about my launch strategy. How do I want to roll this out to customers? Make sure that it's working well before we really scale it more broadly.
My plan there would be to do a scaled roll roll out maybe only to 10% of our users. See how that performs based on the success metrics that we defined in the beginning. Again, looking at the matching speed between a job applicant to an employer offer.
And so track that for about 3 to 5 months. And depending on what signals we receive, what we see in the data with those specific metrics we're tracking, um, I would then say, okay, if this looks like it's being it's successful, then I would want to continue with the roll out to maybe 50%. And then 100%.
And again, continuing to monitor the success of this product. And if we ever see run into a situation where we see um a drop in our success metric, something we weren't expecting, um it's not performing as well as we thought, then I would want to revisit our initial solutions, figure out our root cause of why isn't the solution working as we thought as we expected and then go back to the drawing board and see if we need to pivot on our solution or our thinking. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Would there be any guardrail metrics or secondary metrics you'd look at besides matching time? [Music] Yeah. So, I would say I would want to caut I would lean more towards sticking to two to three metrics.
I don't want to necessarily overwhelm or get distracted by picking 10 to 20 metrics because there's always going to be a lot of things we can measure with a solution or with a product. I would also look into let's say like job placement rate. So let's watch the percentage of users who secure a job through the platform within a defined time frame such as 5 months.
And so that would be a good telling success metric. If go if grads are getting a job through our product, then our product is achieving its core goal. And so that would be a telling signal there.
But again, I'd say like really try to stick to one next two to three northstar metrics to avoid getting distracted. Um that could lead to scope creep, for example, or distracting us from our original product goal. >> That makes sense.
And let's say hypothetically the the feature you build gets a ton of adoption, people are using it, but it has no impact on like the the success metric, which is speed to being matched. Would you consider that a successful feature? [Music] Good question.
I would want to revisit. Was there a secondary goal with our product? like did we want was there a secondary company goal to increase adoption?
And so in that sense, I would consider it to be a success but not necessarily a success tied to our original product goal. And so with that in mind, if we realized, hey, this success metric had no impact, I want to go back to the drawing board and say, did we actually pick the right success metric? Was there something that we were missing that we need to revisit and be like, "Oh, actually, this metric would have been more telling.
This is where we saw more traction or more um more of an impact here. " And otherwise, let's see. I would go back to looking at the root cause of what was our solution.
Was it actually addressing our problem? And if not, then that's where I would also want to go revisit our initial solution list, our painoint list to make sure that we are continuing to drive value for that end customer. >> Great.
Okay. Well, thank you Kate. That was that was great.
Um nothing like some live casing. We have some awesome questions in the chat uh that I would love to go over with you before we move on to the next uh questions. So uh the first thing is there's a question that said since all PM interviews are open-ended and although there is a way to answer them there's no exact right solution as you can take on many different routes uh how to be top 1% interviewe and how to stand out among the rest and land the job.
[Music] >> Mhm. My thoughts here is when it's open men open-ended where I've seen people fall short or get a little flustered is like there's either silence or you're kind of expected to drive the case and you're not sure where to go next. And so I would recommend getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and also driving the case.
Like as you think about yourself in a future product manager role, like these are all things you need to define, you need to drive, you need to corral different stakeholders. And so it's going you're going to stand out as a candidate if you're being proactive in your answer. If you're saying like, "Here's everything I'm thinking about.
" Rather than having the interviewer have to prompt you or like, "Hey, did you think about this? Hey, did you think about this? " If you're able to anticipate some of those next questions, it really shows that you're being comprehensive, you're covering, you're thinking about every angle, and that you're going to kill it as a product manager.
>> Yep. >> And I 100% agree. I think they're uh there's like a spectrum of like how good was the case and like on the bad side there's obvious answers right it's like you don't know frameworks um I or like you don't use a framework at all there's I have this horror story of an interview once where I had been given the case prompt of improve Venmo and instead of like framework breaking it down I just immediately responded I hate Venmo search it's so ad.
Why do my friends never show up even though I've Venmoed them like 20 times? And like went on this tiraate about like how bad the search was. Needless to say, I did not do well in that interview and didn't move on.
Um then like so the the next best would be you're able to do it like you have a framework, you can drive, you can answer. And then as you start getting into like what what would a worldclass interview look like? And Kate did a lot of these things.
It's very clear goal of what you are trying to do. There's another question of like why did you pick a matching speed so early and and not save that to like a problem or success metric and the answer is you need to know what you are trying to do. And the worst interviews I've seen it's when you don't have like a direction that you are going.
So that that's a huge one. Another one I've seen that like makes all the difference are the clarifying questions. Again, Kate did a really good job with this of checking all the boxes.
Um, another horror story here, this is less common, but Microsoft used to do this thing where they would tell you one thing, but they would be grading you on another. So, for example, they could they would say something like, uh, design a bus stop. Uh, but what they wouldn't tell you is they're grading you on how well a visually impaired person could navigate it.
And if you're not good at asking questions and like identifying what is the real thing you're trying to do, you're going to totally miss the mark in in terms of what matters. And then additionally, and this is something that took me a while um until like I was an interviewer to to understand how important it is, but if there's something you're hoping to see and someone like doesn't ever figure that out, the rest of the interview is like so painful because they're talking about random like nonrelated things when in reality you want them to be doing something else. And so clarifying like that you and the interviewer are are going the same direction and the requirements and the goal are all aligned.
Um anyway, those are like a couple things. There's like a million other small points about like signposting, verbiage, etc. that can help you stand out, but um generally those are those are big ones.
Okay. Uh Kate, there's a few more questions. Is it okay if we answer them or is there anything you wanted to add there?
>> Yeah, go for it. >> Um, okay. This is one I hear all the time from my clients, but like how long should you be taking to answer questions like this?
[Music] This one could really depend and I would probably take a cue from the interviewer because like as you just saw this could honestly take a whole hour if you wanted to depending on like how in-depth you go. So I would say like this is something you can gut check with your interviewer along the way. Just be like hey like just want to gut check.
would you like me to dive deeper into this or should we move on to like the next portion in this product life cycle? Um, and so that can be a helpful indication of how you should be progressing and you can get a green light or red light from the interviewer. I would say for this question, I don't know, Mike, um, 10 to 20 minutes, but it could also go to half an hour.
It really depends on they might stop you and be like okay we're actually going to get that to that in another question or like yes please go in depth into every single portion. >> Yeah 100%. There's this somewhat trite metaphor or not metaphor quote from Abraham Lincoln that's like if I had six hours to cut down a tree I'd spend five of them sharpening the saw.
And I think these interviews are similar in that if if for however long the interview is, like you want to make sure that you've set expectations with your interviewer very very clearly. And getting a a gauge on how much time do you want me to spend solving this is a totally fair question to ask. And so if you don't know, just ask the interviewer what you think you should be doing and then you will know that you are doing the right thing and not talk for too long or too short.
I know there's also a couple very situation dependent things like hey I have this interview question I don't know how to answer. For the sake of time we usually don't answer those on events and we recommend that you reach out to co to to a coach to get personalized responses. So, you can reach out to Kate here.
Um, and then if you uh are interested in in talking to the Leland team to get a more personalized recommendation, you can also do that. >> Thanks everyone. Have a good one.
>> Thank you everyone. Um, feel free to reach out if you have any other specific questions.
