i'm going to share how long you want to spend in each section of the goal setting or success metric question and share some tips that you can use to be more efficient and faster so you can answer the question in under 20 minutes hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a large tech company based in silicon valley california so today in this video we're going to cover four key things the first we're going to cover the framework for the goal setting question and what you should cover in each section and how
long each of the sections should take second we're going to talk about where you can save time things that you can skip third we're going to talk about places where you don't want to skimp on time and fourth i'm going to share some additional tips at the end that are going to help you save even more time for the product execution goal setting question so we mentioned for product execution questions you're likely to get questions like what goals would you set for product x what success metrics would you set for product x and then you'll
get trade-off questions this whole interview you're given about 45 minutes assuming five of those minutes is with intro and some outro you're really essentially getting 40 minutes to answer the question and this also includes follow-up questions from the interviewer so you'll really have to manage time because you're going to be asked two questions usually in the span of these 45 minutes and that means usually about 20 minutes for goal setting and then 20 minutes for trade off or you might split it 25 15. but make sure that you are managing your time time's up the
interviewer might not manage the time for you so you have to keep conscious of the clock so you don't fail just by not managing your time correctly so let's talk about the framework for setting success metrics or goal setting it first starts off with understanding the product so here what you want to cover is showing your understanding of the product here it's going to be critical to come up with a deep understanding of the product to help you come up with those nuanced metrics so when we say understand the product what does that mean that
starts off with one covering well what does the product do second who are the key stakeholders using these products so there's usually a demand and supply side then you're talking about what value from this product these stakeholders are getting and then you definitely want to make sure to cover the user flow of how this product works so take this as an opportunity to align your product understanding with the interviewer and it's totally okay if you haven't used the product before that's why this section is even more important to help you learn about the products to
be able to come up with the key metrics and again if you skip this step or you go really shallowly in this step you're probably going to end up with pretty generic metrics so here you want to spend about five minutes in the section and where you can save time and things that you can skip and you don't actually have to talk about how this product competes with other products like this in the ecosystem where you definitely don't want to skimp on is number one thinking about how this works by going through the user flow
or user funnel this is your best way of aligning with the interviewer of how a user is actually using this product and where they're getting value in the flow also don't skip aligning on the product with the interviewer if you haven't used the product before do not pretend like you know what the product is that is gonna get you in trouble the interviewer is very okay sharing with you about the product because they don't expect you coming in to have used every product from their company so take this as an opportunity to ask them the
right questions but make sure to meet them halfway which means don't blatantly just ask well i haven't used this product what is it instead meet them halfway and say i think i haven't used this product but i think this product is this and i think this is how it works can you fill in any gaps that i might be missing the second step of answering the goal setting is coming up with the north star metric so when they ask about what are success metrics one of the most important ones is going to be the north
star metric that you define and here what you want to come up with and cover is what is that one metric that's going to best represent success of the product how you want to do this is figuring out what is the intersection of the value from the different stakeholders that are using this product and remember how many north stars are there in the sky there is one north star so when they ask you for a north star metric don't come up with five so some people have asked me should i cover the north star right
after going to product understanding or after i list some supporting metrics it's really optional whatever you feel comfortable with i start off with the north star because it gives a stronger product narrative and shows the interviewer that i really understand the essential core part of what this product is trying to deliver so how much time should you spend here about three minutes where you don't want to skip one explaining why this particular metric best represents success so a lot of people will share their north star metric but not even share their rationale why a second
thing you don't want to skip is defining the metric in more specificity for example sometimes people will say for the north star it's something like the number of active users well how would you define an active user or sometimes people come up with a metric that can't actually be measured on the platform itself and hence they have to come up with a proxy metric and they totally forget that so make sure to cover those in defining more specificity on your north star metric now let's talk about metrics so in this section you want to come
up with anywhere from five to ten supporting metrics that also maybe are levers to your north star metric that also define success and here you'll want to leverage the user funnel and think about the different sides of the ecosystem and also leverage some product thinking to ask yourself what needs to happen for this product to be successful for users so think about this section as metrics that you would show to your director or vp and you'll want to spend about seven minutes and something that can help you save time so for thinking about showing this
to a director or vp you're not going to come up with 20 metrics to show to them hence you want to keep it focused to something less than 10 metrics so don't try to be overly exhaustive and take the engineering approach where you're going to measure everything that could be logged instead when you come up with a user funnel circle the areas that are the most important that you would want to capture metrics for rather than going through the user funnel and for each part in the user funnel coming up with some metric you don't
want to skip talking about growth or retention metrics here i've seen a lot of candidates where they say i'm just going to prioritize engagement and only focus on those metrics but here the interviewer is asking you how do you assess a healthy product and a healthy product is going to be growing well retaining well and users are engaging so they're all kind of intertwined and it would be hard to only prioritize engagement metrics another thing you don't want to skip is talking about why certain metrics are important and how they reflect something that's needed in
the product to make it successful and valuable to users and lastly you'll want to cover counter metrics and downstream metrics and here you'll think about two to three counter metrics or down and downstream metrics and counter-metrics are metrics you want to watch out for when you optimize your north star metric you're not inadvertently causing harm to the platform so this section is about three minutes and where you can save time here is just think about two to three for counter metrics and for downstream metrics don't try to be overly exhaustive here they're just trying to
understand that you can come up with them rather than come up with all of them we mentioned the other part of the product execution question are trade-off questions so if you're interested in a video like this where we go over how much time to spend into each section and where to save time click on the subscribe button so when we publish it you don't miss the video lastly i wanted to share three more tips to help you save even more time so my three tips number one you can save a ton of time by studying
the product beforehand by doing that you'll be able to come up with how this product works rather than spend all this back and forth time with the interviewing trying to get clarity on how this product works two you want to prioritize versus being overly exhaustive so here you'll think about what is the most important things to measure versus what are the things that i can measure and third you can save time and confusion of the interviewer if you answer the question in a structured approach meaning when you come up with supporting metrics keep a neat
structure by talking about one side of the ecosystem and going through their user funnel and then the other side and then going to the user funnel versus going back and forth between the different users this is going to reduce the number of times the interview has to ask you to clarify and reduce the need for you to summarize at the end nonetheless goal setting questions are tough so if you're looking for more content to help you succeed in the goal setting success metrics video take a look at these two example videos where i again go
through the framework but more importantly i show you an example of how to use the framework
