Mock Product Manager Interview (Microsoft PM): Design Product For Moving Cities

all right I think we're now live so this is a p.m. lesson live mock interview where I interview folks on product management interview questions and we have some fun answering some common PM interview questions I'm here today with Jen Jen you want to just go ahead and introduce yourself to the folks tuning in yeah I know plain hi everyone my name is Jen Lee and Steve and I actually went to school together so I went to Princeton University and graduated in 2017 and I was always into startups and tech and product and after graduation actually

moved out here to Seattle Washington and started as a p.m. at Microsoft working on Azure compute which is a really cool cloud computing division of Microsoft's growing really quickly and I've actually been super lucky really found a great team and got a chance to really see several products already and features go out the door so that's been a really great learning experience so excited to be here share my thoughts I haven't done an actual PM interview myself in a while but I've interviewed several people on positions around many different tech companies of all different sizes

so I'm happy to help out cool yeah I think it's really awesome to have a you know sometimes folks come on that are still interviewing but it's awesome to have you know a real life Microsoft p.m. and to interview some of these questions and talk about how you might think about them so that's really cool and it's just awesome to have you get your take so anything else before we kind of dive in from um no so I guess um me and Steven will be doing actual like mock interview of an actual question but at

the end I'm gonna add in some of my top tips for all of you guys because I've seen people kind of there's one way to do there's a lot of different ways to do a PM interview and a lot of people would be cracking the coding or cracking the PM interview and definitely do that but I think in order to stand out from the crowd I have around like five tips for you all so you'll get that secret sauce for your next cool awesome and I just tweeted about it so people can tune in people

can watch in we already have about 10 viewers right now so let's get let's get into it so the question that we wanted to ask about today was about designing a product that improves the experience of moving to a new city types analytical types technical etc but want to focus on the product design elements and understanding how you might go about thinking about that any questions about that question before we just go ahead and get started yeah definitely I mean in order to get started I guess I have a few clarifying questions about your question

so there are a lot of different types of people who are always moving around the world so to clarify they're moving to an urban city right in the United States and around like what kind of life stage are they at are they new grads moving to a new city do they have families are they already established families and nesters or even like the elderly population like 65 plus so for the purpose so there's great question so we're trying to understand who we're designing for it the purpose of this question I'll let you kind of pick

who you want to target and who you think is the most important segment to to look into you all right cool and then also on this question what is the main thing that this company who wants to build this product what did they all go after whether top kpi's yeah so I would say that engagement is an important KPI for this company and so you know we want people also to come out of this experience having overall like a higher quality user experience so if we looked at the if we could look at the before

and the after of the experience of moving to new city we would want to market increase in user reported satisfaction and engagement with whatever service we're putting out there all right awesome cool so let's get started I'm going to first talk about the different type of types of users that I'm thinking about so first there are new grats so basically people in their early 20s who are moving to new urban city possibly to start a new job and so on and so forth second is new families so maybe they just got married just starting to

have kids they're trying to build a life for themselves so they're kind of trying to settle down and trying to start their roots and really put down roots in the brand-new city third ought is the elderly population I would say for this case to kind of scope it down a little more sixty five-plus so these people are maybe snowbirds they are empty nesting they're kids all grown up and they're looking for a fun place to retire and kind of about the best years of their lives for sure so it's a kind of recap we were

talking about three different types of users that were thinking about so the new grads the new families and the people new to retirement so I think out of those three I feel like I'm especially especially have knowledge about the very first one especially since I've newly moved to a new city so I would count myself as a user of this and also have actually worked on a startup that targeted a similar user base so I'll use some of those learnings and how I think about this particular product design so I guess to kind of move

forward so to look at new grads what they kind of care about and think about when I was moving to a new city you're usually coming and moving into very urban City and you might have just graduated from college so there's a lot of what's going on and a lot of things you're not prepared for they maybe didn't learn in school and there's just a lot of logistical work so basically if I think about it and you separate that out into several categories first it is finding housings so basically where you can settle down your

own roots and actually figure out where you're going to live where you're gonna stay and where you're gonna call home when you work in this new job so I'm going to also assume that these new guys are moving to new city to pursue like a new career at CERN and so forth second I feel like a lot of people think about their social life so it's always daunting to move into new city because you may not you may know X number of people and that X number could be 0 or a lot and the experiences

will vary throughout depending on how many how you feel how clearly you feel at home in your new city is really easy to be isolated so that's another thing that people always think about and that's the emotional connect I think third I think another really critical thing is also just also logistical you there's a lot of I guess debt that you had and where you came from so you probably had a family doctor you probably had a dentist that you knew you probably knew exactly where to go for certain things um such as like your

bank kind of all of those loose ends that a lot of people really don't want to take the time to figure out all the little bits and pieces so I feel like those that are kind of top three concerns that a new crowd would have so housing social life and all the boring logistical needs that they would have to deal with also other things amongst this target market it would be kind of what they care about so I feel like I kind of mentioned that a little bit before talking about the different things that they

would want to optimize for is that these are usually if they're moving to an urban city so you're probably thinking like New York SF LA Seattle of course there's many other cities around the u.s. but these are people who are moving to really discover the benefits of the city really have a good time out of it and also build their life from it and also on top of that they're exploring so they have a lot of disposable income I'm assuming especially since I'm moving for a career as we had me the Assumption earlier so that's

also another keep think tonight all right so moving on from that unless there are any questions about this particular you know very job structuring and ton of I'm getting a sense of so it sounds like we've gone through the segments of users that we're kind of focusing on and then now we're talking about what their major issues are so yeah we'd love to narrow down on what we're gonna focus on and how we're gonna think about it yeah yeah definitely so I think one of the main things is that because you're in new city you

really want to find a place in call home like when they came from college and that's where a lot of people consider their home away from home and we want to be able to build that for these users in their new home away from home like I said low in loneliness being feeling isolated feeling antisocial are all different emotional connects that we want to make sure that keep top of mind here as well as knowing that they have disposable income and kind of want to have fun and explore so because of that I'm actually going

to tackle the housing need that we identified as number one as well we're gonna build this product for and the reason for that is that any thing about it where people are if they're not work um their home base is where they live that's where their friends can come over this is also the point in people's lives where they start to entertain and host people that's a kind of social activity that has really been popular I feel like ever since there's a lot of different ways to incorporate your friends in your life so I think

that's such a huge part of the time that people think about when they move into new city and also you think about it out of your income that you're spending on food on travel housing is a huge cost unfortunately and that's also another crisis that we can talk about but that's gonna be something where we can really tap into that disposable income that Millennials and this generation these new grads have so they're paying quite a bit of rents in these cities identified earlier so we want to be able to kind of see what chunk of

the pipe can get from that as well so we're gonna go after this housing meet that people have so if we identify how people look for their special housing right now is basically they go around and search for different apartments and how actually I've seen in it from firsthand experience here in Seattle so I guess a suitable user market study is people will kind of look around and the top thing that people pick especially people who have this disposal income is that they look to move into apartment complexes that's over houses that's over condos that's

over finding a room an existing house and the reason for it is because apartment complexes have the amenities that these is what people with the suppose that income are looking for so you don't have to worry about your mailbox you don't have to worry about maintenance because you don't have to go fix up your house yourself you can just call someone a lot of these apartment complexes have gyms and have different melodies that are really nice and people with disposable income can afford that so that's kind of what I've seen is really popular but the

thing that is missing here is kind of all the other parts that you need to go need to have to go from a signed apartment to a thing that you can kind of turnkey put your key in walk in and actually live in so in the whole like apartment complex space there's a lot of different products and startups that we can look at we can look at helping Millennials find find apartments actually find a place to live we can look at the experience of enhancing how they put together their apartment or we can look at

how they can save money in their apartment and for me I'm think I'm gonna go and kind of target the second one so how we can accept how we can improve their experience of putting together their apartment there are a lot of different products that kind of go after finding the apartment and saving cost really varies between cities and we want to be able to have this product scale across the States so in order to have that kind of vision I think I'm gonna go after the second one so look and so to clarify what

stage are we in so this is right after we've found a place and we've like we know what we want yep so you find a place and so to recap we're going after the new grads who are moving into a new city and they are trying to figure out all of this housing of this housing problem and basically they have found a place that they want to live but how do they where do they go from there how do they go from finding and having a key to an empty place to a fully established home

away from home lifestyle gotcha cool okay cool so basically from there so I think we have the targeted problem and the targeted user scope what is what do you actually want to build so what I'm thinking is to put together your place there are several different Oh also sorry one quick second I actually need to charge my computer no problem no problem and and just to jump in there also you know I I think what we've done so far is we've kind of gotten from a stage where we had a very amorphous problem and we're

kind of thinking about how do we actually even address you know this very very big problem and it sounds like we've narrowed it down to kind of the segment of users as well as the segment of pain points that we're gonna address and really honed in on a specific particular pain point that is like the one that we're really gonna focus on for the purpose of designing an actual product and fixing it and yeah no problem Jenna I just felt I just throw them on like kind of how we would go about what we've done

so far and what we're about to do so if your feeling is there you charged up you're good okay all right we're back okay so basically where we left off next is actually thinking about what product we're gonna design and what features we actually want to think about so um there are different things in terms of putting together your apartment but identify the biggest thing and the biggest cost and you wanted to keep that in mind as well is kind of all the different like basically your furniture your cookware your kitchen utensils all the basically

the nuts and bolts you need to live your life so there are different ways that people furnish their apartment right now right like you go you go to Ikea you go to Wayfarer try to like rent a u-haul like drive down the street probably at the drive pretty far because these are urban cities it's really hard to actually find a cheap way to get this furniture to your door unless you ship it and that also involves like putting together everything so on and so forth so it's basically a very cumbersome process and also very time-consuming

as well so you imagine you just move to a new place you have a billion things to do and you just want to basically put together your home so that's a pretty frustrating experience so far another thing is that you can go to garage sales estate sales by secondhand furniture please want to save a little bit of cost because you spend a lot on your apartment is good but that's really hard to find and also you have to figure out it transport it it's not a consistent experience so this is something that you hope to

get lucky in and that's not something that people want to base their home away from home on so thinking about that to actually put together in your apartment the easiest way is if it actually already comes refreshed so that's also interesting why don't people why don't know partner complexes do that for their tenants well it's really complicated of the apartment complex doesn't actually want to deal with having to furnish things especially since that's gonna be part of how the tenant actually views that apartment so if it's in a color scheme that someone doesn't like if

there's a piece of pottery that doesn't really sit well with someone that could actually really hurt the apartment complexes occupancy rate and that's what they care about as well because they depend on rent so the future that I'm gonna or the product I want to talk about today that I thought them to kind of solve this problem is basically a way for people to these new grads to actually furnish their apartment and basically rent the furniture so it's a Furniture Furniture Rental product and the key thing that differentiates this product then other places where I

guess you can rent furniture is well first of all furniture rental is really good but has a few different benefits so first for the Apple user we're going after the new grad you don't have to worry about like having to figure out where your furniture goes after you leave that apartment you don't have to worry about explaining the cost with you and your roommate so on and so forth so basically how this product will go is people will go find their apartment complex and along with their rent they actually can add this on as a

part of their amenities so they would pay a fixed X percent of their rent on renting their furniture so that way you can actually kind of hide the cost in along with the rent so it's not so obvious to the new grad and also something that you don't have to worry about it's not another line item but get the go file or something like that this comes along your rent happens every month like clockwork you can make it recurring so it's really easy for the actual apartment renters that particular new grad um another benefit to

this how this is gonna work is that you basically go in pick a set of basically different pricing schemes so we'll have different price ranges different percentage of your rent so it's really easy we'll just have three so you can basically don't have paralysis by choice and we'll go in click there and I think what is really neat about this too is basically part of this is that we'll have different themes that you can choose from so it's really easy to say oh I want this like boho or I want a very modern very sleek

very minimalist look or I want it to be very colorful very artsy so we'll have a couple of different like pre clustered schemes or furniture items and this is kind of piggybacking off the popularity of things like Pinterest things like that they've already been established Instagram is really good at this basically choosing Agra theme to your space so step two would be allowing years to choose their theme and most of it will actually come preset these ideas that you don't have to worry about the different different these little pieces and different furniture items and so

on and so forth but the third step lets you customize it as well so let's say you can look at if they're different pieces and you can actually switch things out so will allow them to do that once they click done basically this particular product will allow and will basically furnish your apartment and the key thing here is the relationship between our products to the apartment complexes so this is something that we want to work with apartment complexes with so apartment complexes actually are owned by a really big holding companies so you can actually go

after the holding company and you're able to target more apartment complexes at the same time than going individual by individual and you can kind of work with them especially for the monetization part of this idea as well and just to ask you a question Jen so to clarify it like the pricing scheme you paid on a rental basis like does the furniture ever get owned by the consumer or is it is it just like rented always and if and how does it work if there was kind of depreciation of value on those assets right like

the chair might break after the sixth month like how would the system handle that or what are you kind of thinking vaguely you don't get to into the details but how would you handle that yeah so um so to answer your question I would say if you think about it when you actually sign your lease for an apartment you sign a security deposit as well so that would be as we'll take that very similar model so now I have to teach our users and you mental model and that recover that particular set of furniture for

that duration of time so basically like you sign a lease or apartment you sign your lease also for the furniture as well and there will be a different security deposit depending on the low tier medium tier high tier of pricing choices that we have available gotcha cool I'm sorry to interrupt were you gonna go ahead on something or did you want to kind of move on to I mean I I think we're doing a great job kind of identifying this product it sounds really awesome this idea that I can take like a you know different

styles of my apartment and kind of add on to the apartment and in a very similar way trade offs or your areas of risk that you might think where you might think this product might fail or what concerns you might have a launching different product but I also want to make sure that you got through all the things you wanted to say - yeah I mean I think that's the general sale isn't of it there are also like additional features that can talk about as well to kind of play off different aspects of it so

for example different things to add on to it is you can actually um basically make this into like the full fledge vision of this is basically you can work b2b with the apartment complexes to go after these new grads who are looking to move in and really have a turnkey lifestyle looking at the like the kpi's would be looking at is how long these users actually keep like keep renewing their lease for this furniture rental and also if how much they value the customization of it so basically we want to look at customer attention to

like offset like the customer acquisition cost of everything but also how you view engage users right that's something from the very first bit the top KPI is that this company is looking at so you look at engagement there's different ways like obviously renewing the lease is the top way of saying this user is happy this means you're satisfied with experience of moving into new city because their housing needs are met but also if you think about it what are different ways you can actually have them engage with this product even beyond just renewing the lease

you think about it there are a lot of different ideas so like for example you can bring on like influencer interior designers like influencers are huge really kind of like a huge new wave of how people do marketing so actually to talk about my previous experience I had worked on my own fashion tech startup back in school and we taught really tapped into like the influencer mindset and kind of went after that and how he thought about marketing and talking about our product so to kind of bring that learning to this product we can actually

use influencers who are big in interior design to design more sets more customizations so you can kind of have the top influencer and interior design design your apartment as a result so you can really make that personalized and I think that also adds in a detail-oriented touch where people in this target market want to be once you conform but also be unique in their own way so you think about it you can also be really detail-oriented like this particular interior design influencer includes plants went there with their rental with their kind of scheme and plants

are a big thing now for this day and age so it's something where you can kind of reiterate and keep iterating on the different tastes that this target market has which also allows this vision to scale beyond just smooth grats right if you think about it you bring on into your designers who are good at targeting new families you can really move on beyond just a target market but that's kind of the 10x 100x idea of this furniture Angela gotcha cool this is all super great and are some of our viewers are already commenting and

so just want to shout out to our viewers by the way this is you know in case you running a little late this is a p.m. lesson live mock interview or be mock interview folks like Jen over here whose current Microsoft PM on how did go about answering some of these interview questions and we're kind of getting towards the end of the interview so if you do have questions for Jen or just questions in general let post in the comments below so that we can ask them to Jen but before we jump to the questions

I just have kind of one final question Jen for you which was about you know what I alluded to earlier about you know so we have this awesome product I think the influencer English is really awesome and use some really key insights and creative insights but how would we what would you be concerned about if you're launching this product like what what is the risks here and what would you really watch out for we mentioned some of the kpi's but um you know what might be what might we be getting wrong here yeah I mean

I think the part where you have the least data is your really highly dependent on the apartment complexes that business business relationship is really key here and that's actually part of our differentiator right beyond just going after that consumers yourself because if you work with apartment complexes you have potential to more easily get key to the unit put your furniture there before they'll actually tenant moves in so that relationship is very much a high-touch relationship and that needs to be very cultivated in a very careful manner because you want to also integrate with how that

part Minh has their tenant paid their lease because that's also a friction point that you want to make sure that you eliminate you want to make sure that this this is also included in how they think about maintenance and facilities so like you said if a chair breaks the apartment complex could send in their maintenance person to fix the chair but you need to negotiate that with the apartment complex that's kind of how I think about solving those policy brought up earlier but it really does how you dependent on how you have the relationship with

the apartment complex itself gotcha cool okay well thank you for the interview we still have some more questions from our commenters so just a couple that I'd like to go through and kind of answer and viewers please you're more than courage to comment and this is the time to ask questions or even just gives us a thumbs up if you liked the video or interact with us in any way if this is helpful to you of course so Jen the question that you is asking here on the Facebook pages that I think a good question

a fair question is why would people on the higher end of the market lease or though of the market lease versus buy unless they're living in the city for a short time so you know leasing is typically thought about for folks kind of a set time period maybe like one to two years um but you know if I'm going to plan on living potentially you plan on living in this apartment for four years or more would this still be the right product for me or how would you think about kind of packaging something different for

those users yeah so I think that's a really good question and I think the data point second cult you kind of informed my answer is basically the popularity of apartment complexes over the popularity of condos and while there are pricing differences like most people camp I can't put a down payment for a condo aside is that the the benefits of apartment complexes is that you sign leases for 12 months and from anecdotal evidence and also just like the trend of how new grads now think about their job and career is that most people really think

about it in like two year timespan and yes there are people who are planning on moving to one city it's really staying there but those people are also probably looking at really just buying something you're buying a condo really shortly after they new so the target market we're going after are people who are more unsure in their career and from what I've seen and read about this particular market and how people view jobs it's very much the majority of the population also you don't have to move to a different city for the process of moving

of hauling your furniture to a new place of packing it all up finding boxes they enough refined the boxes re buying things things getting damaged to move all those problems are the same whether you move across the country or down the street a place that she prevents that is like two doors down so people will kind of for the convenience um what kind of look we're catering to that so even if people are gonna be stay in the same city in the same job for multiple years you may not be necessarily staying in the same

place and since they're a new grad you know probably you probably did your best to do your apartment search but maybe you didn't consider x y&z scenario and you just want to move up and down the street totally totally makes sense um I think it's fair I think also it's worth just you know there are different types of furniture right there's like big furniture that I wouldn't want to move with me and then there's certain items that totally I would want to buy and like keep with me for a long time too so I think

that's there's a difference there too I mean I think our you're targeting go ahead ten yeah and also I think this is where like as a tech company obviously I think everyone talks about this you have data and you have data on the customer behavior and everyone trying to sell that as a differentiator for the particular startup and try to sell that to the convention think about selling back to westbound two Wayfarers IKEA but I think that data is actually something that you would actually use to inform yourself how you actually think through these different

user segments so you can really iterate on this product idea and business model if you see in the data showing you that's in cake so for example your customer attention really is more than twelve months which is what I would assume it to be you would think about maybe if people sign for longer leaves you know they move they can kind of carry that lease over if it's within the same city or within the same plan so this is where you can kind of be a little bit more data-driven about it because you have the

specific data on a different item so for example if you add a feature where someone who can switch out specific pieces but still stay in the same plan you can kind of look at thighs engage metric so that's a feature that we can add so basically you can lease a gray pouch for six months but if someone like switches it to a white couch in the next six months that and then they're like high-touch kpi where you wouldn't want to look at as well to see if you want to switch up your plans or extend

it or allow people to cool awesome thanks thanks for that answer Dhruva or thanks for that question dream and thanks for that answer Jen um true I think we kind of did answer the other part of that question as well so I want to move on to just one more question and before we kind of recap a bit I'll give some feedback and my thoughts what the answer which overall I thought was great by the way Jen and then we'll will kind of do those five tips that gentleman in the beginning so thanks for reminding

us then well just wanting to move on to the next question which rush me is asking so and I think this is the question of making it's almost like a question outside of the bounds of this interview question Jen so we can maybe I kind of wrap up this question and kind of talk a little bit more strategy about that question and then I'll be back and so this question is the goal of the question was improved and so rush me the asking should there be some question to check out a solution already exists so

you know like what would you do if you were in this interview question you got an improved question and would you actually think about like would you ask the interviewer again like what exists already or how would you think about the existing solutions so I mean that's actually a really great question so when I was thinking about this question I realized it really touches on one of the key core things so you need to deal with when you're working as a TM like on the job and that is dealing with ambiguity and I think that's

very much the case for a lot of different types of questions but I think this because it was so broad really emphasized that so um with that the person that you're talking to the interviewer or your dev team when you actually do become a PM they don't have all answers so and I think you kind of have to kind of ride the fence on asking if there it is existing products out there already I think what you have to do is kind of make I guess make assumptions on what the incumbents in the market are

so like for example in my answer I tried to do that and thinking about people can buy furniture so people can buy furniture from Ikea Wayfair so on and so forth or people can find furniture and state sales you kind of think about what it's already out there by how your user does this right now without your product instead of worrying about actual competitors and things like that because it's really not like I'm sure there is a furniture rental company but also they do it differently like actually I think I've looked this up before or

like I've seen this on YC but they don't work with the apartment complexes it you don't remove the friction of the rent like little bits and pieces like that but I think what you have to care about is what your user behavior is now currently without your product and what the user behavior is one thing use your products and if you know that I think you will kind of take care of the Oh what if theirs are easily out there yep I think it's a great answer I don't have too much tied to that you

know I think just like what are people currently doing you know and if people are currently having this problem then the current solution isn't good enough you know and it's not like reaching people enough and also actually when you deal there are some wicked problems you deal with that's a TIA like I'm thinking about the product project I'm working on now on Azure and sometimes some days you're like oh this is like not probabl like you can't really build something to solve this but what you have to remember at the end of the day is

that users are solving that problem right now it's just really painful like really really painful but if they are finding a solution you'll be able to find a way to build a product to make that better for the user or faster or more efficient to make the user more satisfied so I think that's the light and then the tunnel whenever you're in those times yeah absolutely awesome okay so I just want to kind of now take some time thanks to all for watching I'm gonna take some time to recap and to kind of give some

feedback and thoughts about how the interview went and then we will jump to those those five tips that Jen mentioned in the beginning so overall John this is like a phenomenal interview you did such a great job so congrats like this is really really good and well thought through um I wrote down some thoughts overall I thought you did a great job with enumerate and summarizing throughout the interview you know in p.m. lessons course we also really is that like you know breakdown the question one two three and then summarize at the end like what

did we just say what do we just discussed and you know every transition point is a good opportunity to say what you just said and then to move on to the point that you're about to make and and kind of provide that transition so I think you did an excellent job with that I think one area that I thought you know we picked new grads as a segment and I think while your experience is totally a valuable reason to pick that segment or even tons of new grads like from a market perspective you know I'm

kind of talking about the point we were picking which user we were going with and like yes absolutely you have this personal experience but like there's a huge market there's a huge need a lot of confusion for those kinds of users so I would say that not only is it the personal relationship but also just the magnitude of the problem and I could have emphasized even more justified more why we think that segment I loved the home concept like the idea that like we are trying to give someone a polite feeling of being home right

um and I think we could have even played that up more in the interview and just kind of tied that back in at multiple times like you know later on we talked about how the product could be customizable and you know just like a home would be like a home should feel unique - you shouldn't feel like a cookie cutter kind of template of everything else so tapping into that feeling is really awesome as like a you know kind of laying out the product vision and the product sense that you have there I thought you

did a great job with creativity on this interview - like really creative ideas really cool insights the influencer piece was really interesting the idea that people want something unique but new you brought that up you know also like I think that's a really key insight so I thought you did a really short job with kind of a philosophy around this problem and kind of a thinking around that problem and then yeah I just wanted to say that the KPI conversation was great also I love that you tied that back in from the beginning like what

are our goals and then we check at the end like are we hitting our KPIs are we hitting our key performance indicators for those and you don't know that's KPI and kind of just making sure like okay yeah we are accomplishing our goals this is the point of our whole exercise today and then lastly I just thought it was a very conversational and you had some humor in there and just like it was a good style host like wrap him interview it wasn't too rehearsed or to kind of like distant from the interviewer you were

kind of communicating I think I think you could have maybe asked a little bit more questions to me or like pause a little bit more and checked in with me as an interviewer but I also understand this is on the live Facebook interview and kind of a contrived situation overall so I'm sure in an actual interview and be a little bit different and again to viewers if you guys are enjoying this video please like us it helps encourage us and make sure that we think we're doing a great job and you know if you thought

this is helpful it's helpful to us Jen did you have any reactions to the feedback or any thoughts about how the interview went for you yeah you're interesting because I feel like I've never like I've done mock interviews with other people but like never I guess I'm just sitting and I think every time I do an interview there's always like so much room for improvement so even like being a PM for a year and eight months doesn't mean that I like always means I can be better so I totally think I agree with you I

picked a customer segment that I actually thought was kind of controversial because everyone designs things for Millennials nowadays and I was actually scary for me because I think it would have been naturally more interesting probably to an interviewer especially considering who the interior is like if there's someone who wasn't a Mondeo or it's someone who like doesn't really like the fact that there are a lot of startups going after this segment that seems that everyone is going after it that was actually scary for me and that was something that I picked to go with but

I stuck with it because I do feel like there is a market there but I was actually something where I think there are equally as good answers across the board and something that I actually think was like a challenge because once after I think that so I think that's something something okay and evaluate just as I've been there like I think one of the good things about what you did is that you really honed in on a specific problem and it made it more palatable that like you picked the money'll segment as opposed to just

like yeah we're gonna do a comprehensive since like community building platform or something you know it's like okay like what does that look like like there's 50 of these things out there why do they just use Facebook but we really like came to a big problem you narrowed it narrative narrative we got to a really specific stage of a problem and I thought that was that was really well done so that was great they see them yeah I think that was definitely I felt like that part took a huge chunk of our interview time so

that leads to the second thing that I think I could have done better I really think user experience user interface is so important as a p.m. like that's something in my current project is super critical that's when you down the whiteboard with your devs and really draw things out like screen one the user will select out of these three boxes you do that once you click on it this will pop up I think I could have really expanded on that and I think like I know we're running out of time so on and so forth

but I think if you're actually in an interview setting with me and you in the same room with a whiteboard I would get up there actually walk you through what this looked like walks you through draws screen for the influencer depart draw a screen for how you serve out the gray house for the white couch draw a screen for how you add this to your lease that I think is very critical to product design and user experience in general so I think that's something that you all should really hone in on when you do and

on site when you have a whiteboard really really talk that through yeah yeah I think that was me and then also I love your point about the home away from home like when I first brought it up I realize like yeah that's like the emotional connect you always want to have them will connect to talk to you so the other person even if they are not anywhere close that user like they not that user at all they always identify with an emotional connect and that is true for any product whether its business business this is

consumer something that's really heartfelt something that's really technical that end of the day is what people remember like people remember how you make me make you feel and not what you say what I'm give you same goes for products so I do wish I kind of went back to that a little bit more because I think that would have been a really good tagline for the future vision all right totally but I mean overall Jenna and I think these are great points too but overall it was like a rockstar interview I think you did a

phenomenal job like those super super good just wondering plays like all those watching as well like this is a great model of how to do an interview and so um I want to transition in just a bit but you know if you guys want more content than folks listening what more content like this check out p.m. lesson comm for more mock interviews just like this one where we kind of walk through a mock interview give feedback have all these live videos as well as lots of lessons online about how to think about product management interviews

and how to prepare to them um and so if you're watching on YouTube we're gonna be splitting this video now and the next video will be the video with James