how do you resolve conflicting product requirements [Music] hi everyone and welcome to another session with exponent today we're here with Aaron would you like to introduce yourself absolutely my name is Aaron ropolo I am a product manager leap yearnet affirm it's uh day eight for me this is still early days but I'm living in the Boulder Colorado areas kind of north of Denver and um my career has taken a lot of interesting paths I'm definitely from a non-traditional background so didn't come from consulting or banking or or engineering I'm an ex-professor an ex-recreation director so
I did that for a while six or seven years yeah so I've taught everything from like Personal Fitness 101 up to senior biomechanics built-in brand Recreation programs for Red Rocks Community College for the Maryland Institute College of Art and a couple of others but eventually found that education just moved a little bit too slow for me and didn't have that techy nerdy Edge that I'm bringing to a lot of my own passions so went back to school earned an MBA at Fuqua and was able to Parlay that into PM unit Amazon worked in their International
B2B space for a little while worked in Alexa Auto for two years and launched um auto mode for the Alexa app and helped them to build that strategy poached by love every and series B at the time now series C startup doing um I don't know if you're familiar with like Bark Box but essentially like a subscription box of toys for parents for uh parents ages zero to four they're always relatively appropriate and I was brought on board to launch a mobile app for them very cool that I've launched and I was looking for new
opportunities to continue to grow hence being at a firm nice that that really is an unusual trajectory and I love hearing those stories because I feel like it just um I yeah I feel like when you keep hearing the same stories about the same paths that people take it kind of boxes people out so you know what maybe another session we'll make a video about just digging into your career and how you got to where you are I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in that I'd be happy to I think there's a
lot of paths to product and the skills are mostly about you know being able to organize convince others and listen really well so yeah yeah absolutely well today we're here for uh product management mock interview um and my first question for you is how do you resolve conflicting product requirements okay yeah conflicting product requirements so I think when I hear conflict and I think about my role as a product manager I feel like a lot of conflict resolution happens well before the conflict ever occurs so I think for me to resolve a conflict hopefully ahead
of that time but before we've maybe reached a an impasse with engineering or design or stakeholders hopefully what I've done is invested in two places one and first and foremost are relationships need strong relationships with the people you work with directly with your designer or designers your researchers your engineers and the the same holds true for your fellow PMS that own other road maps the same holds true for the stakeholders what that does is it builds a layer of trust and hopefully it also also helps like lend me some some knowledge about what their goals
are what you know what what their their feet are to the fire for um because oftentimes a conflict has to do with like misalignment of goals or misalignment of kpis so at least investing in those relationships early getting to know that person as a human and not just as a colleague I think really helps and it allows you to feel comfortable maybe ahead of a known conflict saying like hey I know that I said this was a P0 we've rescoped it there's no way it's going to make the cut line it's going to be a
P1 that becomes a private slack message or like a 10 minute Zoom call before it becomes an official document that's reviewed by a large group so I think investing in relationships first is key the other big thing ahead of a conflict is to develop really good mechanisms and that that's stealing a term from from my time at Amazon but a mechanism is really anything that helps to achieve a desired outcome and the idea here is that for stakeholders especially you want to give them self-service mechanisms a lot of times they are working off hours we
all work you know largely like International companies these days we don't want them to have to Ping the product manager or the designer or the engineer we don't want to bottleneck them in their roles so we need to give them up-to-date access to a roadmap easy filters on that roadmap so they can see the things that they care about when they're going to be delivered and you also need to develop input mechanisms where you're regularly soliciting input from your stakeholders and updating them on your expectations so I know that's a long kind of intro into
how I would resolve conflict but I wanted to say that by laying that ground work I think you resolve a lot of conflict from the get-go and then as conflict arises you have a foundation of trust to kind of build it off of and a paper trail to point that yeah actually you know we we talked about this for the last three months it's continues to be below the line yeah but that doesn't always work and it will inevitably fail uh so I think for me it's it's starting back at the the beginning of the
product or the feature that we're trying to launch the why um there's a y for the business like we're trying to drive certain kpis there's a y for the user um sometimes you're on like a two-sided Market there's also like a y for a merchant similar to kind of where I'm at at a firm um but ultimately what you want to start with in my mind is to align on like the ultimate goal and maybe even try to stack rank those because oftentimes you're trying to deliver the best thing for the end user but it
may be cannibalizes something internally if you reach that alignment oftentimes just by having that discussion writing it out um you're able to overcome that conflict but if you're not a really important thing to do as a product manager is to escalate and escalate quickly if you allow these conflicts to kind of fester and sync the shift and you lose your speed yeah there's your tongue to Market you lose the trust of the engineering team and you kind of degrade your brand internally as like a PM who can get things done so I think it's important
to go like hey like Nema you and I we're clearly not reaching an agreement here let's let's call in you know our managers let's have a discussion at a higher level and see if we can reach alignment there and it's not meant to be a it's not meant to be aggressive it's not meant to be a conflict it's just saying like hey let's let's pull the end on chord clearly we can't see eye to eye you've got a great argument I've got a great argument let's get some help to figure this out yeah there's that
makes sense thank you there's maybe a couple of other conflict types that come up in my mind or maybe ways to resolve conflicts so again let's say that maybe we're not aligner we're not sure the conviction's not there I don't have strong data to show like when we launch feature X we expect y to go up then you know Z go down and that that's a desirable outcome and maybe it's a risky proposition we're trying to do something ahead of a Black Friday Cyber Monday or we're trying to launch something that may harm our core
product but we think it'd be really valuable as a bet there's other things you can do you can take a step back from longsheen hopefully this has been agreed upon early but sometimes we get ahead of ourselves sometimes we get siled so you can come back and say like okay let's let's pilot it let's launch it as a beta test let's let's dial it up to one percent and see what happens um I think anything that you can do to convert this into a two-way door something that you could back out of but learn from
opening that door is a really good tool to convince stakeholders and frankly to convince yourself you know a lot of times you go through that door and you realize like oops you don't want to launch this and it's really nice to make that decision before you've invested like six to half weeks into a project or something like that so I think that that anytime you can kind of pilot something and study it maybe it's just getting Scrappy on usertesting.com maybe it's internally dog fooding it with a partner team that doesn't know much about the product
and you can kind of give them a click-through mock-up it's a lot of ways to get Scrappy there and that that form of conflict resolution in my mind is really similar to the same conflict that comes up with engineering where they're like cool that's 20 Dev weeks oh uh and it requires like ideation getting Scrappy hopefully again maybe as an upfront measure you know the tech and you know the code base well enough and you can help the solution these problems because like actually what you propose isn't necessary we can cut back that scope and
if you can do this I don't know fancy ml model and instead we just I don't know got got Scrappy and updated the like the the experience for customers on a nightly basis so maybe it didn't update session per session but it updated day over day and it just was essentially like an ETL that that pushed to new values to like a Content ranking system um yeah there's ways you can get creative as a PM to kind of cut away at engineering scope cut away at design scope and still get something out the door that
comes across initially as a requirement conflict but it's actually more of an implementation conflict yeah um I think the last thing that's really important is like to resolve conflict a lot of times you just need to have conviction if you don't believe in this yourself why are you doing it I think a lot of times um we as PMS feel like we've been given some goals from on high and it's really easy to go like well I'm doing this because the highest person in the room said so that's not a good reason the good reason
is because we think it's going to boost the kpis the way we do we think it's going to create a really great customer experience and as a product manager's job to develop that conviction and if you can't convince yourself then you should be telling everyone that this isn't a good idea yeah uh so yeah having conviction coming in really helps to really helps to kind of resolve that conflict and if you don't have that conviction you probably shouldn't be pitching this and there's likely other priorities yeah you're your first litmus test for this do you
believe it yeah without a doubt yeah so for me that like if I had to break that up and maybe elevator it for you to kind of sum things up I think a lot of conflict management for product managers has done ahead of time by like good relationship management and really good mechanisms to keep everybody on the same page that doesn't do everything and a lot of it's about approaching the conflict without a strong ego but a strong desire to do the best thing for for the collective uh and that can show up in in
terms of like willingness to step back and pilot willingness to get Scrappy and reduce scope uh and willingness to escalate when you feel like your conviction is there and saying like no I really disagree we're not going to come do an agreement let's let's bring in somebody else to help make this decision yeah okay thank you um I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you to pick a product of your choice um what are the goals of that product and what's in your monthly business review deck for the leadership team for that
product okay I I'd love to double check with you do you have any preferences on product like do you want to stay in Tech uh if tech like Hardware software or or do you want to go non-tech and it's kind of I think we can I'm actually going to leave it up to you whatever product you feel like you're most comfortable to speak on um I'd like to hear that yeah I'm I'm gonna go a little bit outside of my wheelhouse then um and and something that I'm a customer of but have never managed myself
and that's um this guy the uh the aura Aura yeah okay who's like had a lot of press both good and bad recently um yeah I think a major competitor just launched and it's a it's a space that's like in terms of fitbits and apple watches and Garmin watches it has a lot of a lot of competitors uh so like fighting for differentiation is kind of tough and I think yeah um or uh to to kind of give the the viewers it sounds like you're familiar with it which is awesome but to give everybody else
an idea um it's a it's a ring it's a smart ring and it's aimed at um giving you more information about your body and like how especially how you're sleeping but also how you're performing in the gym and also helping with things like meditation giving you reminders to stand up every hour and get away from the desk so it's a pretty comprehensive tool and I think there's probably a couple different user bases of this tool but I want to start with saying that it's it's a premium product I mean the like the marketing brings in
like Michelle Obama's of the world the Prince Harry's of the world it's it's I mean this is like a three to four hundred dollar ring with a subscription on top of it it is not an Amazon Halo um you know five bucks a month type of a deal yeah this is competing against probably the likes of whoop uh or an Apple Watch in that case so it's it's not inexpensive um it flies under the radar and it can be seen as a bit of a status symbol and that shows up in a lot of their
marketing um what that means though is that they need to convert heavily on all of that marketing it's expensive marketing so I think the goal of Aura overall though I'm going to focus on one feature is to to see like a return on their investment in marketing um and and to convert users from like through the the traditional funnel of like Discovery all the way through to um purchaser and then the other big one for them especially with the subscription fee is going to be using retention once they get them there oh with aura I
mean they've got a captive audience of folks who are generally going to be higher income to be able to afford you know essentially like 400 ring and then another I think it's like 60 to 80 a year um okay I thought you were going to say per month I'm like what no I have so I happen to be an early adopter and I I got grandfathered in so I don't actually okay monthly fee um but there is a monthly fee now between probably like five to ten dollars a month um yeah no if it was
60 bucks a month that would be insane it would have to uh you can become Spider-Man you can shoot uh string out of your hand screwed up gym membership geez if that means that their users are um either like very engaged in their own like in their own Fitness and Wellness they're like a Quantified Self person uh maybe they're very engaged in their health they have an underlying health concern and they care about these things but what that means is they're always launching new features to be able to use the actually pull it off really
quick and we'll see if we can see it but to use like the the small sensor array that they've got built into this thing kind of showing up okay yeah recently they launched a brand new feature it's called spo2 and the which is a uh it shows your blood oxygen saturation while you sleep complex stuff so like what are the goals for this product I alluded to it before but like ultimately if I was the PM launching blood oxygen sensing I think first and foremost I'm trying to differentiate this product I'm saying like hey you
might have a Fitbit it doesn't do that we can so you're trying to say like this is continuing to double down on that premium product piece where they kind of fill that market niche the other goal here is user retention so like hey you bought this ring a couple of months ago it's pretty expensive and you started looking at your Netflix and your Spotify and your HBO and you're like maybe wanting to pair down on the subscriptions how can we keep you uh in terms of the users uh user retention and user acquisition are the
two major goals within that it gets a little bit more complex so within that acquisition funnel I think I mentioned it before we've got like now we're offering a differentiated feature and that helps to like this is this is a purchase that is substantial it's a purchase that folks are going to look up on Reddit they're going to look at the website multiple times um it's not a it's not an Impulse buy and therefore like you want them as a comparison shopping against other similar status symbols and health uh trackers to see this and go
like because they've got oxygen saturation I'm going to purchase it so it becomes like a Wi-Fi for a certain subset of users on the retention side what we've done is like the goal here is to create a high value feature that drives usage drives engagement and then through that usage and engagement and through that like acquisition funnel both are hoping to drive the potential or current user education because what you're doing is you're kind of bringing them and leveling them up making them feel like the smart person in the room about their own health and
that creates a positive feeling it's just kind of like a lot of the work we did at love every was to make people feel like they um they were doing a great job as a parent and they were because they were engaging with their children in activities that we were feeding them they were engaging with their um like their partner about articles to help them think about their parenting Styles so like those are really positive and they're associated with great parenting outcomes but that good feeling that was generated by engaging with that content also is
associated with subscriber retention I think the same play is is evident here so ultimately what we end up with then are hopefully existing users that are driving referrals and we end up with this kind of flywheel of um users that are retained also driving new acquisitions um but that's sort of the broad spectrum is that does that chat with you Nemar do you feel like maybe I missed anything on the goal side of the house I think from a high level perspective that makes sense would you mind summarizing some of the things that you would
that you just mentioned yeah so or as an expensive product it's not Market product and it's it's in a fierce market so they're seeking to differentiate their product uh with the purpose of or like the end goal of being able to acquire new users and to retain existing users and maybe some sub bullets of uh within generally the retention but there's a user education bullet in there that we want to see and there's a engagement with the feature or at least you can get the app bullet on a regular basis now for me and are
we are we speaking specifically about the the blood oxygen concentration feature or just about Aura in general as the as a product a little bit of both so I think the Box feature itself is achieving those goals okay which to me tells tells me that like this is a core product for them it's like continuing to drive that acquisition retention flywheel um by by no means are these the metrics that we would uh talking about an MBR but I at least want to make sure that we're aligned on kind of the why behind this sure
because we're never going to really be able to measure like directly like user education or that yeah it felt like the smart person in the room so we have to use other underlying metrics that we can measure to kind of say like yes we're hitting our targets and when we launched spo2 like this was a success or you know a flop yeah yeah okay okay yeah that makes sense um sorry you I cut you off you wanted to say something else no I think for me it's just kind of transitioning into like the next phase
of like how would we like if I own reporting for this like what would that look like um yeah how would we structure it and what are like the key data points that would maybe fit on a one-page dashboard yeah um this is mobile this is consumer and it's it's very much about like creating a premium experience so for me I would tend to gravitate towards using a framework like Google's heart framework um you know that's something that was developed by their like I think their ux core team but the idea is that it's sort
of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive to like use that Consulting feel but uh or Mesi as you've heard but the idea is that you measure happiness you measure engagement you measure adoption uh you measure retention and then you measure task success and within those there's like umpteen options you have within each but you kind of determine like for your product or for your feature what are the important ones and as long as you've got kind of a leading kpi at least one in each you may not even focus on one as a goal for like a
quarter but at least if you've got one in each then you have kind of like the dashboard in your car you know the temperature of your engine you know how fast you're going you know the RPM and all of those things yeah part is that similar idea like I have all the right gauges in front of me and whether it's in kilometers and miles like that's up to you and team and Leadership to figure out so if if you're reported I'd love to kind of talk through an MBR sheet in a heart framework sure yeah
sounds good I'm gonna I'm gonna go through it alphabetically just because I think it's easier but I'll say that I don't think happiness is like the first thing that I would put on that MBR sheet it's uh and if I did it would be more to frame up like an anecdote and a star rating or an NPS score but it is not like user happiness is certainly correlated with retention it's certainly correlated with with acquisition uh through referral and Word of Mouth but it is not the like the leading kpi here um but for happiness
I think I would look at probably what I just mentioned like the the like two or three things one would be app star rating um and hopefully what we would see this would be more of a post-launch report um like a trailing 90-day adoption do we see like a net increase or decrease a Delta and star ratings associated with users who have adopted at spo2 um to see like a positive increase and then we probably wouldn't really report on it anymore because that would be more at like the higher level like or app reporting but
at the very least for launch that'd be something that we would do but what we could do with star ratings is integrate with a third-party service and app Annie and app bot or something that's home brewed internally to pull out anecdotes that relate to that so we would look at saturation oxygen spo2 as keywords and then continue to keep a star rating based on keywords the the in there the number is going to be pretty low likely but it helps to add some flavor text to your mbrs and I think it's really important as a
product manager to bring the customer into the room any chance you get so even if it's like a single quote at the top of every ndi that you solved in the last 30 days about the product five star or one star that we want those those kind of extremes to to give some flavor text there for happiness um the other big one that you can do uh I guess quantitatively would be net promoter score a little harder you have to build that into the app you'd have to have some sort of a survey mechanism that
that passages How likely are you to um to recommend this product and somehow you'd also have to attribute that to the feature so maybe it's a feature in PS score which you could do but you also risk kind of over saturation of of surveying your your existing customer base we don't want to do that so that might happen during beta and we might set like a hurdle NPS score um but after that I think that that may kind of fall off with our beta group and not something we do again or if we're seeing some
of these other like engagement and adoption metrics flagging we might spin up research and and do in that promoter score yeah as part of that to kind of understand but I want to mention considering that both of these are very reliant on Direct feedback from the consumer what happens in the situation or in the event that one of these is gained so that we always hear about um you know the customer wants to have a voice and one of the best ways for them to have a voice is to just write in the App Store
and sometimes that happens through campaigns of people coming in and like giving reviews how do you how do you deal with that I think at least the product manager or whomever is responsible for that reporting I think there's a little bit of different structure depending on the team should be keeping their finger on that pulse if we see like review velocity go up massively over over a period of time then hopefully what we're doing is either like I'm directly seen not because I'm looking at these metrics on a daily weekly or monthly basis or the
analytics team is seeing this and bringing that to me we have that trust where they can go like hey this looks weird what's going on yeah because what it should do is is spark curiosity I think and it should come up in an MBR where it's like hey we actually saw you know normally we see the frequency of like five reviews that mention spo2 every every month we solve 50. tenfold increase that should be registered in my MBR um even if we scrub the happiness section overall it should come up in like a highlight section
it needs to be elevated to that yeah after as you work scrappily if you're at a startup or or cross-functionally if you're at a larger company to start to understand was there a Vox article that came out about about this feature um are there are there Reddit threads that that happens or maybe really delighted customers it kind of goes both ways yeah I mean I think about myspace uh not Myspace but like we're not right now at a firm and even in the last two weeks there's been a a Vox article on buy now pay
later uh not a great one uh there's also been like a very favorable Wall Street Journal article uh with our CEO and those two things are going to drive customer contacts it's important to have good ties to your PR team good ties to the marketing teams to kind of understand the environment and like what may be changing uh and what could be influencing something like a happiness metric same goes with all the rest of them but I think it's okay um what you don't want to do is Hydra and then you have a VP go
like hey I noticed this thing WTF uh and all you have to do is stutter like that's yeah one of the most important things you can do is selling it or just throw your customers under the bus yeah not ideal I feel like that happens a lot in the B2B space um yeah because those customers have a face you know who they are and you can be like oh you know that Aaron guy he's just really hard to work with and that's why we don't have a conversion of yeah of features with that so yeah
yeah but I I'm going a little long so I'm gonna see if I can go back and and talk through the rest of this heart framework so for to kind of refresh we had happiness as the first one H yeah the next one's engagement I think that this is likely going to be the most important metric that that I'd be looking at as the product owner is like and this is you know down funnel from adoption and retention uh but engagement with the spo2 features kind of really what I want to see and I'm thinking
maybe three different ways to look at this the first would be just gross engagement um like in terms of views of the feature per X period of time I'm trying to think this through this is like a daily thing so every morning the user wakes up they look at their Readiness score they look at their sleep score and hopefully what we've done now is that daily active users also now a daily active user of the spo2 score so they're diving one layer deeper which has friction and they're pulling up their spo2 to go like oh
cool like I got really great oxygen saturation last night that's why my sleep score was great um there's always going to be a subset of users that love this um they're they are the core of our like l28 curve like the last 28 days like they used it 28 of the last 28 days and these may be people with like sleep apnea snorting uh maybe they're athletes and they really care about their performance but those those users are on the far end of the curve what does our average look like um and is that changing
as we maybe work on featuring education is that changing as we maybe change where that feature is promoted instead of being one or two layers deep if we bring it front page is the ability to select that like those changes in engagement I think are really important to look at on a week of a week month over month basis um but the probably the the key metric for me would be something like a dow over Mal daily active user over monthly active user and what I'm trying to look for is a significant percentage I think
healthy within this would be something like I'm gonna gut check this one and I think like to be clear on the job I would do more research uh I'd work with our ux research team and folks who understand statistics better than I do to really come up with a bar but just using gut for the interview purposes I'd say it's probably something like 60 we'd want to see a daily active user over monthly active user of 60 mean that um of folks who use the spo2 feature on a monthly basis sixty percent of them also
use it on a daily basis I would say like we've got a pretty strong product health or a pretty strong feature Health there in terms of Engagement yeah um the last one in this this is interesting to see is like do of users who engage with spo2 do we see deviations positive or negative and gross engagement overall are they engaging other features in the app are they engaging with the app overall more often um because it may be like a make or break feature for some customers and like since we launched it maybe we see
like a certain subset light back up and now they're back in the app every day and they're looking at their sleep score every day so I think yeah there's kind of a causal lift is maybe how I would call call that yeah yeah I want to respect your time I know that we're running a little long so that's fine looking at um the next letter down we have user acquisition of users who have been exposed to this feature I guess it's adoption like how many actually use it yeah is likely measured early in beta but
for my MBR slide it's essentially just a a ratio hopefully we we see a pretty steady ratio I think there will always be users I mean none of us are strangers of this in Tech that are like very privacy focused maybe they use the ring for like one specific thing that they're not comfortable giving their blood oxygen saturation uh to a company especially a private company who you don't know what they're doing with it so I think there will be a subset of users should turn that off if you get go there are also some
negative outcomes of a feature like this I know this because I'm I'm a user but I think you can also think about it as an engineer and think of it as a product manager like we're turning on a sensor this is a very tiny product with a tiny battery we're not using that sensor regularly throughout the night to look for deviations in blood oxygen than we're draining your battery yeah it's the same as like turning location services on or off on your phone so we're going to see folks who care more about battery life than
spo2 and those folks will turn it off as well but once we figure out either through beta or through GA like what that number is then hopefully we're seeing a pretty steady adoption number for new users and we start to see that change then we know that there's likely been a change in the way that the app is structured the way that we've done user education or the way that our marketing is which again brings up that Curiosity reflex and we might decide like this isn't what we want to hang our hat on a marketing
standpoint and it does reduce our user adoption but we're okay with it because overall macro level adoption retention are better yeah a little further down the list we have retention so you know of folks who started using it how many keep up with using it uh it's really similar to engagement and it's similar to adoption in that this is likely going to be a pretty steady metric and what we'll likely see is some sort of a drop-off so um of users who began using it like what is what does that curve look like uh in
terms of um oh what's the right way to phrase this this is always an area I struggle with a little bit as a PM in terms of attention is like what is this call okay can you describe it what was that can you describe it yeah I almost want to think of it as like a just kind of a user base so like we have X users right but of that group of users uh we have active users and then there's a slice below that it elapsed users these are people who like last week were
active now this week they're not using the feature we have reacquired users these are folks who last week weren't using it but this week they are yeah then we have net new users who uh we didn't see last in last week's cohort but they're in this week's cohort and they adopted so yeah it was like I think it's a quick ratio is what it's called ratio um and a lot of times for a feature again this will remain pretty steady with like a trail off over time as that feature becomes less exciting and users adopt
other features unless it remains core um but as you experiment internally with enhancing this feature enhancing user education making it part of the onboarding process or not doing a push notification strategy saying like hey we noticed you haven't used this in a week maybe you want to give it another try and check it out um then we should see some deviations in that in our MBR um lastly we have task success so it's really nuanced and a lot of times I wouldn't put it in an MBR it might be come up as a highlight for
like the hinge team and for myself it's something we might monitor on a pretty regular basis especially release over release because what it tells us is like did something break or is there friction in a process like friction in terms of onboarding for this feature or friction in terms of turning off this feature um but ultimately we we look through the customer Journey from seat to nuts and we decide like what are the tasks that user needs to do are they clicking through them or not are they able to get through are we seeing like
a lot of folks in the funnel dropping off at a certain point and that again that kind of brings the Curiosity Flex up like are they erroring out uh is it unclear does it does it boot them into a system setting that they have to do especially on something like iOS where where now they get into system settings and they're like I don't know what I'm doing or I don't feel comfortable because Apple scared me with all the litigious uh you know sharing location settings and things um ultimately it's probably not in br it's important
to kind of round out that in between the conversation because it may be relevant either at a given period of time or as a regular piece of task success got it okay yeah I think this is a good place to to stop I would actually I so I'm sorry I also interjected a lot this kind of turned into from a mock interview to a discussion because I think there's a lot of interesting content here and just forever is watching this um yeah take these Frameworks and structured ways of thinking and then use that to your
advantage in an interview like you don't the interviewer is probably going to cut you off at some point and look for something specific but yeah as long as you like have a structure to it I feel like it's this is these are like easy cheat codes cheat codes for for coming up with answers to something in it to a question like this yeah so thank you thanks for rolling with the discussion pivot in this I mean frankly I think a really good interview is a discussion yeah yeah if it turns into a monologue that that
can be a little scary um and like for those watching you'll notice like at many points like as I progress through in my structure in my brain I stepped back and asked you like does that make sense are you okay going forward with that yeah because it it invites you into the conversation again um so I think that's a really important tactic and if if your interview turned out as a discussion you've probably done really well yeah don't lose your interviewer they're your partner in this they want you yeah yeah absolutely um do you have
any do you have any advice for anyone who's watching for when they get questions like this what if something like actually one thing that occurred to me while you were answering is these questions could seem very intimidating to someone who doesn't have any PM experience at all you've had right now some you've built up your career as a PM in the industry um so maybe you have some of these things to kind of call back on from experience what did you do when you didn't have that experience uh you know interestingly I mentioned this up
front like product is almost all transferable skills so I think about like what happened in difficult product requirement situation and I can actually look back at my Recreation career and talk about how we had to debate between a rock climbing wall or or like a proper ceiling height for a weight room and it's like a little thing right but what we ended up doing was talking about like the HVAC system the air conditioner and where it was going to be placed and if we place it in the weight room folks could lift weights ever had
it we placed it in the rock wall it was going to be like eight feet shorter yeah that's a conflict of requirements so and I'm talking about building a Jet right like this is yes it's completely not Tech I think almost everybody can find examples so the the best thing you can do is look at some of these common questions and prep yourself through something like exponent and and decide how you want to tackle questions like this to it like a framework is just a tool there's no magic framework that gets you the job or
or impresses the interviewer and there's a lot of different ways to answer this question I could have easily there's another framework called what game uh goals actions uh measurement and then I can't remember the e but uh evaluation like how you there's many different Frameworks you can use for this question um yeah I think one that flows for your brain and then stick to it but also be comfortable be comfortable tripping up not knowing the answer I mean this is a mock interview and I'm still like crap right like off the top of my head
but it's okay to struggle a little bit it shows that you're human um and a a really good tactic is to say like I don't really know what I would do there but here's how I'd find that info or on the job I would have a much more robust well-rounded I'd look it up on stack flow I'd look at our yeah you know I'd consult with our ux research team but my gut is this like those are kind of acceptable shortcuts in an interview in my mind they don't work for everybody but yeah I think
that's that's great advice thank you so much Erin it was great having you here with us today um I hope we get to talk in the future I'd love to maybe tell the viewers a little bit more about your career that sounds really interesting it'd be a lot of fun thank you yeah absolutely thank you very much thanks everyone and good luck with your future interviews thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like And subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out
hundreds more videos just like this at try exponent.com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview [Music]
