Get FASTER at Product Design/Sense Interview Questions

managing to answer product sense questions in 45 minutes is one of the key struggles of these product interviews in this video i'm going to help set expectations of how long each section of the product sends interview should take so that you get to a complete answer by the end of the interview hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a large tech company based in silicon valley california and i bring you the best tips to get into product management and teach you how to succeed once you made it before you start optimizing

for time you want to make sure that you can perform well and come up with a solid answer with no time limit if you aren't able to come up with a good answer even with no time constraint it's going to drive you even more mad to add in the additional time crunch and make your performance even worse so focus on getting to good answers without time constraint without someone scrutinizing you on the other side and then start to optimize on becoming faster we're going to cover four things in this video first we're going to break

down the product sense question into sections and i'm going to give you how much time should be allocated to each section secondly we're going to talk about areas where you can save time thirdly we're going to talk about areas where you shouldn't be saving time that you should definitely not skip because it's an important part of how you're going to be evaluated and fourth we're going to give you some more tips to be even faster in the interview the interview is usually 45 minutes long if you take out five minutes for the intro and the

interviewer showing up late that gives you 40 minutes and if you take out five minutes for the outro that ends up being 35 minutes if you take out another five minutes four follow-up questions that the interviewer might have throughout the interview or at the end of the interview that really gives you 30 minutes of you talking to answer this question so that is your goal when you answer product sense questions that you can get it done in 30 minutes so the product sense question is made up of four sections the first one starts with why

should we build this the second is user segments the third is pain points for these target segments and the last one is solutions but before you jump into why you have an intro section where you might clarify some questions so the started section should be no more than three minutes and this encompasses of clarifying questions which might take two minutes and sharing your structure which should take no more than around 30 seconds the structure should be short concise to the point so that you're ready to dive in here where can you save time you can

save time by avoiding generic questions that are not going to influence your answer so for example asking oh is this on mobile or desktop are there time constraints like these are usual questions that are not going to make your answer better here you can also make some assumptions that you state explicitly so for example if you were asked build a product for the grocery store experience you might make the assumption i'm going to focus on building this for the u.s is that okay if you are interviewing for a product manager role in the us that's

a safe assumption to make what you don't want to skip on and don't want to save time on is aligning with the interviewer about the space that you guys are going to be talking about so for example if the prompt is about travel you want to align with the interviewer well travel is really wide are we talking about getting to the destination travel organizing the travel or the actual experience when you're at the place or capturing the travel like which part of travel the second section is the why should we build this and this should

take about five minutes and the different sections under it is first talking about the landscape such as trends and opportunities which should take about two minutes then you want to talk about some of the company's strengths which should take about one to two minutes and then you want to talk about alignment to the company's mission or goals that it sets out for and this should take no more than one minute here you can save time by not trying to be overly exhaustive in each of the subsections so for example if you're going to be talking

about strengths you don't need to list five to six strengths two and three should do what you really don't wanna skip here is mentioning its alignment to the company's mission and goals and here don't do a generic slash shallow job of alignment for example if you're given the question what product would you build to improve the grocery store experience and this is safe for facebook you don't want to say this is helping grocery shoppers and the grocery store owners connect and that's how it fulfills the mission that's a shallow way to talk about how aligned

with the mission by the way has this video been helpful so far if so take a second to like the video to support the channel and share this with a friend who might also be preparing for product interviews the third section of the product science interview is user segments unusual segments should take no more than five minutes so the first three minutes you want to come up with the multiple sides of the ecosystem and then you want to come up with sub segments for one of the sides that you prioritize so for example if we

talk about the grocery store experience you'll have one side which is the grocery store itself and then the grocery shoppers and then you want to do the sub segmentation of say the grocery shoppers which sub segments there might be and then the next two minutes you want to spend prioritizing which of the segments that you want to build for here you can save some time by not sub-segmenting both of the sides of the ecosystem so in our example you wouldn't want to sub-segment both the grocery shoppers and the grocery store the type of grocery stores

because that's just going to take way too much time prioritize one first and then sub segment because if you sub segment for both and then you prioritize you're going to waste a lot of time sub segmenting for the side that you won't end up using anyways another place you can save time is not try to be a hundred percent exhaustive in thinking about user segments too much talking too much talking too much talking too much talking too much talking too much talking for example not coming up with sub segments that make up one or five

percent of the population it's very okay to just think about eighty percent of that segment you're talking about that's good enough to show to the interview you can break out segments another place that you can save time is that when you prioritize you don't have to spend a lot of time sharing out loud why you didn't choose the other segments do that part silently so that if the interviewer asks you why you didn't choose the other segments you have an answer but when you share your prioritization lead with what criteria you're optimizing for what you

end up choosing and why why you end up choosing optimize for that criteria that can save you a whole lot of time because the prioritization process can get very messy complex especially if you have a ton of options however what you don't want to skip on is doing the actual prioritizing using a objective criteria so what i mentioned lastly isn't that you don't want to do it you still want to fairly evaluate all the other options against your criteria so that you don't want to skip on the fourth section is one of the most important

parts of the question which is pain points and this should roughly take about 10 minutes and here the interviewer is trying to assess that you have user empathy and are able to come up with some of the things that people struggle with in the space so under pain points you start off with the user journey which should take no more than two to three minutes and this is basically mapping out what is the existing user's process to accomplish something then you want to go into the pain points within the different phases of the user journey

and that should take no more than five minutes i've got so many problems and once you have a couple of options you want to start prioritizing which should take no more than two to three minutes so where can you save time you can save time by coming up with anywhere from four to six pain points versus going for like a hundred there probably is over a hundred pain points in particular spaces but for the sake of this question where you only have remember 30 minutes you want to come up with four to six that are

the biggest that make up maybe 80 of the challenges another place to save time similar to the last user segmentation part you don't have to go through the rationale of every option that you didn't choose especially in the pain point section you want to be careful of this because there tends to be a lot of options when there are pain points so for coming up with four to six you're going to spend a heck of a long time rationalizing why you didn't choose the other five so instead of using that time to talk about why

you didn't prioritize the other pain points use that time to talk about how you prioritize one of the pain points and why that pain point maximizes your criteria that you optimize for here you don't want to skip the process of going through each of the pain points and seeing how it evaluates against your criteria but you want to do this silently on paper evaluating from one to five what your pain point might score on on say level of pain now what you don't want to skip on avoid being shallow about your pain points so here

you want to spend a wealth of time explaining the pain points and showing that deep user empathy so some joke the pain point section should almost feel like a rant of some of the problems so you're getting so entrenched into the user shoes that you're complaining as if you were one of the users by the way i'm curious which of the sections in the product sense interview is taking you the longest time in answering comment below and let us know and the last section solutions should take roughly seven minutes the first five minutes will encompass

of you coming up with the solutions and verbally sharing your solutions and here i recommend sharing the solutions in a way where it's not just a description of the solution but rather from a user point of view how they might use the solution then you want to spend about two minutes prioritizing your solution and you can do this in two minutes by just limiting the criteria that you use to impact and effort for choosing solutions here where can you save time you don't need to over explain your solution am i rambling i think i'm rambling

but rather talk through how the user uses your solution what don't you want to skip on instead of coming up with one or two solutions which i see most candidates doing because by the time at the end of the interview they run out of fuel try to come up with three to five solutions why because your first one to three solutions are most likely going to be the most common solutions that 95 of the candidates are gonna say and then the last couple are gonna help you peel away from your competition so forcing yourself to

think of more than three solutions are going to help you stand out more if there's extra time at the end the interviewer might ask you to wireframe a solution they might ask you about risks or they may ask you to summarize or ask you some general follow-up questions so let's share some more tips on how you can perform faster during the product sense question but before we do take a second to like the video if this video was helpful make sure to subscribe to the channel for more content like this and pay it forward and

share this with a friend that might be interviewing as well so what are a couple other tips to help you in this interview so number one if you're note-taking take notes in the form of bullet points or sound bites not full sentences i tend to see a lot of candidates end up writing out the entire answer which takes a whole heck a lot of time but the point of note taking during the interview is to serve as triggers to remind you of when you speak not necessarily whole sentences that we as an interviewer can read

to understand your answer so be very careful here the second when you're interviewing make sure you're using easy to navigate tools i see candidates who end up using new tools that they struggle with during the interview that actually makes them perform slower so for example some companies give you digital whiteboarding tools that you can use in the interview but sometimes they're so hard to use that it slows you down so go for easy tools like google docs which is going to be easier than using google's drawing tool three save time by avoid rambling a lot

of times the candidates that i interview they waste a ton of time going in circles on what they're talking about or while they're talking figuring out what they actually want to say so avoid that by taking out about a minute or two minutes max to think through and structure what you want to say jot down bullet points and then share so for some that might sound counter-intuitive well i'm taking one to two minutes to think but that's going to save you a ton of time when you explain and it's going to be so much more

concise the next thing is communicate efficiently a lot of interviewees tend to get nervous during the interview or just have speaking patterns where they're using filler words or talking in circles or repeating the same thing over and over again so as you prepare you're going to be able to go faster if you speak concisely and simply and the last tip on how you can become faster is avoid trying to be overly exhaustive and thinking of the 100 and doing something at perfection here because of the shortage of time you just want to display that you

can do the skills that they want to see instead of trying to be a hundred percent perfect and thinking of all the user segments or thinking of all the pain points because here is where a lot of people end up spending time using the extra two to three minutes thinking of the ten percent of the population or user segment that they missed when that three minutes could have been better served to come up with more creative solutions at the end i mentioned in the beginning what matters more than just your timing and answering product sense

questions is first your performance on these product sense questions so take a look at this video series helping you with best practices on answering the product sense question i go really deep and break out each of the sections on how you should tackle each question to make the answer as a whole really solid see you guys later [Music] you