how would you fail an execution goal-setting question i don't actually want you to fail but i thought it'd be useful to teach you what are some common mistakes or weaker answers that i see from candidates hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a large tech company based in silicon valley california today we're going to talk about what i commonly see as let's say just not great things that make a weaker answer to the goal setting question so the question we're going to use is set goals for facebook marketplace oh interesting facebook
marketplace i've actually never used it can you tell me what it is so here the interviewer is not going to expect that you're an expert at the product or use the product but you do come off a bit unprepared so what i recommend for the companies that you're going to be interviewing for go through and use their most common products and get familiar with the user flow so that you can come into the interview feeling confident that if they ask you about one of their products you're able to then quickly align the interview and show
that you have understanding i hear from clients that i work with all the time in preparing for interviews while i don't use social media products i've deleted all of facebook and instagram etc really that's not an excuse if you're preparing for an interview that you really care about go through the main product flows download the product for a day just so you can familiarize with the product so you can get the job and my second comment here a better way to approach understanding what the product is meet the interviewer halfway and take the initiative to
maybe guess what the product is sure so facebook marketplace is a marketplace where you have sellers and buyers the sellers are posting items that they want to sell and buyers use the platform to buy and discover products that they either can find a good deal on or find something really rare and how the transaction happens is they can either meet up in person or the seller can ship to them and this product has been around since 2017. thanks for that explanation since the product has been around for four years i'd assume it's already a mature
product and hence i would de-prioritize acquisition and focus on engagement this is something i hear all the time a healthy product is going to have healthy acquisition healthy engagement retention etc so i don't think narrowing the focus to one part is a great definer of success and the challenge i have with this a lot of the times is that 95 of people who go through this they end up landing on picking engagement so it almost always sounds kind of generic and just not adding additional insight to the question actually i'd love for you to think
about the success of the product across the entire product lifecycle if you think about it if we don't have a product that's growing though users are very heavily engaged it's still not going to be very successful so we'll need a balance of both okay fine so some metrics that i'm thinking are the number of buyers how many purchases are being made how many items buyers are purchasing and let me share with you why it wasn't a great answer so firstly the interviewee didn't even share the structure that they were going to use to approach this
question it's not necessarily a deal breaker but it's going to help you come off much more structured and it's also really important because if you miss a section an interviewer can help you identify that early on versus letting you go throughout the entire question and missing that core thing and then time runs out and they have to write down oh didn't cover this thing that i was trying to get signal on another reason why it's helpful to share your structure is sometimes certain interviewers might be a bit impatient so if you don't get to a
certain thing that they're looking for they end up interrupting you and inserting themselves which makes it seem like they end up giving you the answer or prompting you a lot a second mistake and this is actually a mistake that could be a deal breaker is this interviewee didn't establish there were two sides of the ecosystem for a healthy product there's usually a demand and supply side and sometimes in other cases there's multi-sided ecosystem but you heard the interviewee just mentioned buyers number three what wasn't done great he or she was missing a whole host of
other metrics that are going to be helpful in figuring out what are the successful levers to help drive the success of this product for example the candidate was very focused on the transaction portion but even before the purchase is made there's so many steps before that that you have to make successful in order to get to that end transaction before the messages happen the buyer has to view through the listing description before that happens the buyer must have had to search for something and found relevant results to actually click on the fourth reason why this
was an ideal answer so again this is a goal-setting question and everyone thinks it's only about metrics so people come into the answer just listing a bunch of metrics but what's going to actually show that your product leader is having a narrative on why certain metrics are important and another reason why metrics are not enough because people can memorize metrics a lot of people prepare ahead of time by reading blogs and looking for videos of common questions that are asked and sometimes just spit out the metrics from those answers and for these candidates they might
get the metrics right but then the interviewer is going to definitely probe you and check that you actually understand why these metrics are important the fifth and last thing is they come up with metrics that are mostly qualitative but if you had given what they said to a data scientist it would be impossible for the data scientist to know what you really want so for example the interviewee said the number of items that are being purchased is that per day per week or per month is that the average number of items per buyer or is
that just the total number of items so you want to make sure your metric is granular and it's actually a metric that you can put up onto your dashboard and everyone has alignment on what it means so you mentioned you want to measure the number of purchases that happen in facebook marketplace well what are some of the events that lead up to the purchase actually happening we want to make sure those things leading up to the purchase are also helping the user succeed along the way sure sure i'd want to track how many listings that
people are looking at i also want to track how many of them click on those listings let's pick that apart i sense that the interviewee has a really shallow understanding of a product so we spoke earlier that sure you can base it off an existing product that's a marketplace but in this case because they didn't really clarify the user flow for marketplace they're missing some key components so the flow that he or she is talking about where you view a listing and then click the listing and purchase that probably works for ebay but in the
case of marketplace in order to make a transaction happen a buyer has to reach out to the seller by using facebook messenger and if you miss that key part of the product flow you're going to miss to know that that actually is the key metric and i would say north star metric because we're not always able to measure when the final transaction happens and what usually happens is that they start messaging each other and then the purchase happens offline so what about sellers oh right sellers all right some metrics i would measure on the seller
side are the number of sellers and the number of items that they sell so here is another example where the interviewee needed to be prompted because especially for product manager interviews the candidate is responsible for driving the interview and giving the interviewer a sense of what's coming next and that's why we said earlier it's so important to share the structure ahead of time okay so what would be your key northstar metric sure my northstar metric would be the number of sellers because the more sellers on the platform the more items on the platform leading to
a successful marketplace so that was not a great answer because a good northstar metric usually should represent value to both sides of the marketplace ecosystems if there was a hundred million sellers on the platform but no one buying is that really a successful product because ultimately what matters at the end of the day are the purchases and it can't have purchases happen without the buyers oh interesting so if we had a hundred million sellers on the platform but zero buyers would that make the product successful oh that's a good point probably not my north star
metric is the number of meaningful conversations the fact that they said meaningful conversations sort of sprung out of nowhere so it gives me the thought that they just remembered that that was a metric when they saw the video again they're not explaining why meaningful conversations is a good north star metric so let me quickly summarize but before i do if this video was helpful i'd love for you to support the channel by subscribing to the channel because i'd love to keep producing more content like this and i want your support to let me know what
questions you want me to answer alright so let's summarize the list of things we went through that are the most common mistakes number one not sharing a structure ahead of time and the recommendation here is to share with the interviewer after you clarify your questions share we'll say four to five sections a second mistake is when the interviewee doesn't drive the interview but needs prompting often here what you want to try is give your interviewer signals on where you're expected to be going throughout the interview and when you're actually making that transition start a common
mistake is missing multiple sides of the ecosystem so here the recommendation is ahead of time think to yourself what is the demand what does this apply fourth mistake is having a shallow understanding of the product so again try ahead of time to go through the user flow of the most common products for the companies that you're interviewing for and if you've got a question where you don't know the product which could most likely happen ask the interviewer are there any key parts of the flow that i'm missing another common mistake is prioritizing engagement or retention
over acquisition all the time and here it's not you should not prioritize engagement it's here a lot of interviewers want to see that you can consider the entire product life cycle common mistake number six is listing metrics without explaining its importance here the tip is you don't have to explain the why for every metric especially if you have a lot but for some of the key metrics like the north star metric or some of the more important metrics explain why this is important how it reflects success in the ecosystem number seven is not making metrics
measurable or granular enough when you come up with a qualitative thing you want to measure ask yourself what is the time period that i want to measure this in and is this an average or is this a total or is it a percentage that'll force you to be more rigorous to create a metric that's measurable for your data scientist well do you want to see how you actually should be answering this question take a look at this video where i'm answering the question what goals would you set for marketplace and putting some of these best
practices into use and here's a second video using best practices for the goal setting question to help you 10x the quality of your answer
