Notes from my Product Management Interviews Part 3: Product Thinking/Product Sense
This story is written as part of a seven-part series under the topic ‘Notes from my Product Management Interviews’. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
In Part 2, we looked into the do’s and don’ts of Product Management in terms of story-telling and keeping your enthusiasm tuned well enough for a Product Management role.
The following topic forms the central idea behind this post:
Product Thinking/Product Sense
To be clear, Product Thinking or Product Sense are just names given to interviews where the interviewers test your understanding of the role and very thoroughly assess your thinking as an aspiring or an experienced Product Manager. Questions primarily revolve around Product Design, Product Launch and Product Improvement. But before we dive deep into these, let’s try to understand what it means to be a product thinker.
The Product Thinker
As humans, we enjoy thinking through different paths, adding a mix of creativity and logic with elements from our emotional capacity, wherever applicable. We have multiple thinking tools at our disposal and this helps us achieve short and long term goals, and navigate through complex problems — big or small.
As a Product Manager, there are many different prescriptions available on the internet that encourages how we should structure our thoughts when we work through a product-oriented problem.
However, the best way to think is to combine two methodologies: 1. First Principles Thinking , and 2. Zooming In/Zooming Out.
First Principles Thinking is basically breaking a complex problem to smaller problems, finding solutions to those smaller problems, and then assimilating those solutions from ground up in order to reach the most optimised and original solution for the initial complex problem statement. I will talk about First Principles Thinking in detail in the next part. For now, let’s focus on Zooming In/Zooming Out.
You are great thinker if you can structure your thoughts. Consequently, you are an excellent Product thinker if you can structure your thoughts around looking into a problem, define and refine the problem statement as clearly as possible (by removing as much ambiguity as you can) and then, diving deeper into the elements of the problem statement (by Zooming In), while ensuring that you do not lose your focus and your overall control over the problem statement (by Zooming Out). Zooming/Zooming Out should be iterative so that you can keep a strong focus, but not redundant so that you end up wasting too much of interview time. That’s all!
Now, let me tell you in advance that while this is very easy to understand, it is easier for an interviewer to trap you into some confusion if you have a ‘zoom in/zoom out’ way of thinking that’s less practical and more bookish. Hence, I strongly recommend you to practice through various kinds of product problems and sharpen your overall product thinking to a point that it becomes your second nature to think this way.
Now that we have discussed how to think, let me share some quick notes around Product Thinking/Product Sense questions that I have faced in my interviews so far. Towards the end I will also share some of the Product questions that I was asked across various interviews.
Product Thinking/Product Sense Questions: Quick Notes
- You will be given a Product Design/Improvement question around a product or an idea that’s almost always outside your comfort zone/your known areas. Don’t let this rattle you up — the more you keep an open mind, the better!
- As soon as you are given the product problem, make a note of it slowly, so that while you do that, you can in parallel think of possible ambiguities or gaps around the problem statement. Once you are done writing the problem statement down, ask clarification questions so as to appropriate the scope of your problem statement — do this mainly for the ease of the discussion to follow, as opposed to merely impress your interviewer. Most of the times, your interviewer would suggest you to make your assumptions. When this happens, lay down the assumptions clearly, in short points, and communicate these to the interviewer
- Employ parallel thinking — always remember to make the interview a discussion rather than a Q&A session
- There’s no one-size-fits all approach to solve a Product Thinking/Product Sense question, but a standard ideation technique is to ask — what is the problem and who are we really solving this problem for. This is called adding granularity in your approach and is an excellent way to start the discussion around solving the question. Half your battle is won by starting well — if you don’t start well, you will be beating around the bush towards the mid-section of the discussion as your interviewer might throw rapid-fire ideas from their end to see if you are getting trapped in a limbo. Using a Zoom Out technique in such scenarios helps you to get back on the same page as the interviewer
- Ask for mini-feedback points every step of the way instead of expecting feedback only after you have finished solving the problem. This will always help in course-correction if required
- While thinking about the user groups who will be impacted by the problem, clearly write down what define these user groups. The next steps will always be defined by the details around the definition of your user group. Eg- for a cab service problem, a work-commuters user group can be defined as: “those users who commute to work using cabs”, or as: “those users who commute to work using cabs, and expect the cabs to arrive at a fixed point of time daily, so that they can reach their workplace on time” . While this is just an example, but the more details you add (while ensuring you don’t add too many details- only relevant ones!), the stronger your proposal becomes to solving the problem
- Employ creativity towards the end, that is, when you are suggesting solutions to user problems — add as many solutions as possible, employ quick thinking, make notes of your solutions (so that you suggest only unique solutions without any overlaps). A good Product Manager uses creativity as their secret sauce which is bound to influence everyone in the team to build something great
- Never let impostor syndrome compromise your thought process. Gentle reminder: Confidence is the key and in that short span of interview slot, clouds of self-doubt shouldn’t be entertained!
There are many good blogs and articles available on the internet that talk about the frameworks that you can use to solve a Product Design or a Product Improvement problem, but I like the following the most. These are more structured in the way they approach a product-oriented problem(using BUS framework of course, but again, not bookish but more practical).
For Product Design: https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/product-manager/product-design-questions#questions
For Product Improvement: https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/product-manager/product-improvement-questions#questions
I am also adding links that address how you’d go about addressing a favourite product problem, however, I think the basic essence to talk about a favourite product is to talk about it not only as a user, but also as a Product Manager. Which is, to express both the usability aspects (what delights you, what makes you use the product again n again, and so on) as well as the possible/expected company goals (revenue-based goal such as to see increase in average revenue per user by 10% in 1 quarter, or user-focused goals such as to get 100K new users on the app in 10 months, and so on).
Favorite Product:
- https://medium.com/stellarpeers/what-is-your-favorite-product-and-why-fc495757f1b6
- https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/product-manager/favorite-product-interview-question
Lastly, I will add some of the Product Thinking/Product Sense problems that I have faced in my interviews for various kinds of PM roles.
List of Product Thinking/Product Sense Questions
- Swiggy’s Chat feature-set is not seeing the desired amount of traffic. As a PM for Swiggy’s Chat feature-set, how will you go about improving it?
- You are a PM for a new food delivery app launching soon in the market. Looking at your competition, you have identified that a Discovery feature is the key to a food app’s success. How will you design the Discovery feature for your app?
- Travel industry domain: We have both a mobile app and a website to serve our customers w.r.t. exploring and booking hotels for stay, across India. As a PM, how will you assess if we even need the mobile app or not?
- How will you design WhatsApp ‘turn off Chat history’ feature?
- How will you improve Spotify app?
- How will you design a refrigerator for visually impaired people?
- Design a music streaming service for the elderly. Think out loud on how will you approach the problem, and then the solutions.
- How will you introduce a review system feature-set ( that allows users to star-rate a product and write a review text for the same — in order to successfully submit a review, star-rating is mandatory and review text is optional) for an e-commerce platform (the platform currently has search and product listing features available).
- Design Ola Outstation Share feature-set.
- Design a search engine for kids.
- Design an ATM for 5-year olds.
So that’s it for this topic! I hope you have enjoyed reading this and I also hope that this post will serve as a good reference for sharpening your skills to ace those Product Thinking/Product Sense questions that you face in a typical PM interview.
Feel free to reach me at contactsoumyam@gmail.com for feedback, questions or ideas. If you liked this post, do add claps below — it is a nice ‘vanity metric’ for me that I am doing things right with this series. ;)
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: credits to all images used in this post are attributed to the original source in the captions. The author takes no credit for the awesomeness of these images and consequently all copyright claims should stay within the original source’s boundaries
