Product Sense/Design Interviews: Common Mistakes

do you want to ace your upcoming product sense interviews if so you probably want to avoid the most common mistakes and traps that average and weaker candidates fall into i've helped a ton of clients prepare for product interviews at top tech companies and initially a lot of them when they first came to me did not even realize they were making these mistakes so in this video i've compiled an entire list of common mistakes traps that i see that you can learn to avoid so by the end of the video you'll be a bit more aware

if you're already making any of these mistakes hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a large tech company in silicon valley california and i bring you the best tips to get into product management and teach you how to succeed once you've made it so a lot of the times when candidates do the things that i'm going to be talking about they come off one not sounding as if they're actually thinking during the interview but rather reading off of the script two they end up asking too many questions that make me think

that they're not doing enough to drive the conversation three they end up requiring too much prompting and nudging so that i'm basically hand holding them during the interview and number four they end up making decisions that seem really subjective versus objective and data driven so what i want to cover in today's video first i'm going to start off reviewing the product sense framework for those who need a refresher because we're going to use the sections in the product sense framework to break down the common mistakes that i see in each section then secondly i'm going

to talk about the most common mistakes that i see i'm going to give you a sense of what they sound like when interviews say those things and then we're going to talk about how to improve it and actually make it better so let's start off by reviewing the product sense framework the product sense question is meant to test whether you can take an ambiguous space and turn it into products that people could love because it solves their problems hence to answer this question comprises of four sections motivation user segmentation identifying pain points and solutions so

the motivation is basically why should we build this user segmentation is who should we build this for identifying pain points means for our target users what are the things that they're struggling with that we can help solve and number four is coming up with clever solutions if you want to see some best practices for the product sense question take a look at this video that i've shared before to get my best tips on how to ace the product sense interview but for now let's dive in into the most common mistakes that i see so the

first section which i actually didn't even mention in the framework is before candidates go into starting their framework they actually spend some time up front asking clarifying questions so a common mistake that i see when people ask clarifying questions is sometimes they ask clarifying questions that don't really matter and other times they ask clarifying questions that they should really figure out and not me giving them the answer so for example some questions that don't really matter during the product sense interview is should this be on mobile or desktop is there a time constraint with building

this most times the company isn't trying to test whether you can build a product under a very tight specific constraint other questions that you should be figuring out that a lot of people ask is which market should we build this for what's the business objective and the last one is should we be building this for company x so what i recommend in the clarifying question section is to altogether avoid questions that again are not going to impact your answer if you get the answer for example if i told you it was mobile how would that

change your answer it wouldn't really and you also don't have to front load all your clarifying questions feel free to ask them throughout the interview some questions that are okay to ask are i know x companies already building a similar product like the one you're asking me to build should i consider that or should we consider building this product pre-covered or during and post-covered the next thing that i see a lot of people forget to do in the beginning of the interview is actually share their structure it's really important to share your structure so your

interviewer knows where you're going to be going and if you're missing any critical things they can early on insert it or if you over scoped and added too many things they can say no let's leave that out of the focus and to that point of over scoping some candidates end up adding a metric section at the end of a product sense question and no that's usually not in scope because they test that in an entirely different interview so they don't try to squeeze in a whole another section and not do well on the most important

sections that they're testing now we're going to break down for each of the four sections of the product sense framework what are common mistakes that we see so we're going to start off with motivation so that section again is answering why should we build this for this particular company for the motivation section the most common mistake that i see is people assume that the question that they're asking them about or the product they're asking them to build should be built for the company that they're interviewing for so what does this sound like an interviewee you

might ask i just want to clarify are we building this for google and the interviewer says you decide and the interviewee replies okay i'm just going to assume that we're google building this product that you're asking me about take this opportunity to actually strategically assess whether the company that you're interviewing for should be building about the space they're asking you about and i want to be asking myself is it aligned to our mission are there strengths that we have to win in this space and three how is it going to help us grow so something

i commonly hear when i give the question build a product to improve the grocery store experience and people interviewing for say facebook would come back saying well facebook's mission is to connect people and build community in this case we're connecting grocery stores and people shopping at grocery stores so hence i think it's aligned with facebook's mission i don't know if you can tell but that was a really generic response because i literally could have given the candidate any space and they would have just said yes it's aligned with the mission because i'm connecting the demand

side and the supply side a better way to tackle this is if the interviewee said something like okay let me figure out why we should build this and i want to consider a couple of things first is this a line to the mission of the company second what are strengths that we as a company have to win in this space third what is the market opportunity and size that gets us excited about investing in the space and fourth do we have any competitive advantages that are going to help us win over any other competitor this

is probably one of the most important parts of the question because think about it think of this as an investment pitch and the investment pitch first starts off with why do we care about building in this space and if you come up with something generic and weak the investor is not going to let you go on with the rest of the presentation so be thoughtful in this section and don't just come off with a generic response now the second part of the product sense framework is user segmentation a common mistake that i see people make

in a user segmentation is either not being brought enough or being too granular so for example say i gave the candidate the question we want to build something in the travel space and the candidate responds when i think about travelers i think about business travelers people who need to bring pets when they're traveling and leisure travelers a better way to approach it is to go from broader buckets to them more granular buckets but not too granular so for example if i was to respond to that prompt again i would say if i think about travel

it's a multi-sided ecosystem where we have the travelers on one side and the businesses providing the services to travelers on another side and say i wanted to focus on travelers if i break that down even further i want to break it down into leisure travelers and business travelers who have totally different needs a second mistake that i see people doing all the time when they're segmenting users is that when they prioritize one of the segments they don't give you an objective criteria or reason why they're choosing that segment so this sounds something like well i

would choose business travelers because they have the most needs the most needs is quite subjective me as an interviewer i might think leisure travelers have the most need so what would help is a more objective criteria either explaining how you quantified most needs so that we're able to compare leisure travelers needs versus business travelers or find more objective criterias for example a better way to evaluate which segment to choose is looking at what is the size of these populations to compare to each other what is the frequency of how they use say travel products and

a third criteria what is their willingness to spend if we're going to develop a product and we want to monetize off of it we'd rather choose a group that has a higher propensity to spend so we can actually make revenue the third common mistake i see people make during segmenting users is not being messy so what does mesi stand for mutually exclusive comprehensively exhaustive which means your segmentations again should be mutually exclusive so that they're not intersecting amongst each other and also comprehensively exhaustive so you're trying to cover as much of the population that would

use this product as possible so what this sounds like to again the same prompt of build something in the travel space is for travelers there's people who travel in groups people who are mothers that travel people who travel with kids travelers who are college students so do you see how some of those groups might intersect for example people who travel in groups and people who travel with kids well those groups might be families and they might be traveling with kids so that does not meet the mutually exclusive part of it a better way to segment

it so it's mutually exclusive but also comprehensively exhaustive is when we think about travelers we have people who travel in groups people who are solo travelers and people who are couples i mean think about it if you're a solo traveler you can't be a traveler that travels in groups i mean maybe sometimes if you guys are finding this video helpful so far i'd love for you to like the video and subscribe to the channel because we're going to be producing even more content to help you ace your product interview now let's move on to the

third part of the product sense framework and what common mistakes we see people make there the first one is most people tend to come up with needs rather than pain points so what does that sound like well if i'm thinking about travelers some of the things that they struggle with are deciding what place to go to organizing the trip coordinating with the group and then deciding what to do when they arrive at the place sure these are general struggles but they're not specific and deep enough to show user empathy you really want to use those

general needs and think about what sucks in each of these parts and each of these needs so what's a better way to tackle this well if i was to think about the user journey for travelers the first is deciding where to go that's a need but some of the pain points they have is not having enough information between all the places they could go in terms of budget that they would need and on top of that a lot of the information is fragmented and it's hard to do that comparison so in this section what could

really help you go the second level of depth in empathy is asking yourself when was the last time you had to deal with this situation and what sucked about it and the second mistake that i see people do while identifying pain points is not using an objective criteria to choose and decide which pain point to go with so this sounds like okay i'm gonna go with the pain point of deciding where to go because it's the first step in the journey and hence if i don't solve this the other steps won't even happen a better

way to value which pain point you should choose is to actually come up with a strong criteria so say i want to optimize on which of these pain points affect the largest part of the population and which of these pain points don't have any existing solutions so you see how that's much more about an objective criteria so or add the last section of the product sense framework which is solutions so what common mistakes do we see in the solution section the first one i see with people trying to come with creative solutions is that they

use certain technologies and trends but very shallowly this sounds like for travel i would build something that enlists vr and ar to help people decide where to go that just sounds like you're choosing your pain point and having a technology and smooshing it together without giving any detail of how the experience is going to be unique or innovative so a better way would sound something like well my solution is going to be using a vr and ar experience where we can basically put the user who needs to decide where to go in multiple places at

the same time so they can actually get a feeling of what it's like to be in the pyramids of giza versus in the rain forests in brazil so you see how that example basically leverages the strengths of vr ar and defines what the experience would actually be like for the user so that the interviewer actually gets excited about the solution and the last common mistake i see people make during the solutioning section is talking about solutions that already exist so for example for the prompt build a product to help people find doctors a bad response

or one that's ignorant of the existing solutions sounds like well i would build a product that allows people to search across a directory of doctors and read reviews and filter on their insurance well this already exists so good job in identifying a needed market but it's already been solved so how are you going to add something innovative on top of that so a better way is actually first acknowledge that there's an existing solution and what you would build on top to make it even better so this sounds like for finding a doctor there already existed

a website out there where you can search a director of doctors filter and read reviews but what's missing that really helps people decide doctors is what issues the doctors have dealt with before so i'd build something that kind of captures the doctor's experience with dealing with specific issues say type 2 diabetes and add that to a list to allow people to easily find doctors that specialize in the issues that they're dealing with by the way as i'm going through these are you seeing yourself make any of these common mistakes if so i'd love for you

to comment below which mistake you're making so that you can become aware to avoid these in the future and you want to avoid these mistakes because they reflect average or weaker candidates who are not thinking during the interview who are asking too many questions and not driving the interview enough who need prompting and hand-holding which again doesn't show a leader we're trying to hire product leaders and fourth end up showing something who can't use data to make decisions so avoid these mistakes at all cost and now you know the mistakes to avoid you'll still want

to figure out well what are the best things that i can do to ace the interview so take a look at these two videos focused on product sense and the best practices that i've developed through working with tons of candidates interviewing for top tech companies i'll see you later guys