Cracking the Product Management Interview — Product Questions
In this post, I will be listing the techniques to answer product questions during a PM interview. These techniques are given in Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Mcdowell and Jackie Bavario. In the book, we’re given three broad categories of product questions and an appropriate template for each category. These categories are:
- Designing a Product
- Improving a Product
- Favorite Product
Let’s briefly discuss a rough template for answering such questions and then provide answers to a sample question in each category.
Designing a Product
This is a straightforward question where you’re simply asked to design a product for a given set of users. “CUSTOMER and/or USERS FIRST” (CUF) is the perfect slogan to remind yourself how to answer such questions. The subtle distinction between the customers and the users is that the former pay for the product and the latter usually use it for free. The general approach to answering such questions is to ask questions to understand the problem better, identify the users and/or the customers, identify the use-cases, and apply a structured approach to provide solutions to the use-cases. Here is the general framework provided in the book:
a. Ask questions to understand the problem,
b. Provide a structure,
c. Identify the users and the customers,
d. What are the use cases? Why are they using this product? What are their goals?
e. How well is the current product doing for their use cases? Are their obvious weak spots?
f. What features or changes would improve those weak spots?
g. Wrap things up!
Let’s answer a sample question from the book using this framework.
Q) Google Maps is launching a version for schools. How would you design this?
A) This is a clear design question. Let’s use the framework listed above to answer this question. Below, each paragraph corresponds to a subheading in the framework above.
We can ask a few questions to get a better understanding of the problem. Is it for colleges, high school, or middle school? Is it exclusive to students or could the faculty also use it? Let’s assume the interviewer tells us that the app would be for colleges and only for students.
We will organize our answer the following way: identify the users/customers, identify the use-cases (needs), discuss if there exists a product that serves the mentioned users, if yes then discuss how the current product is failing to facilitate the use-cases, and finally suggest ways/improvements to serve the use-cases.
The users are students. If it’s a paying service, the customers could be same as above or maybe even school administration.
Let’s list the use-cases now. Generally, the students may want to use Google Maps for schools to locate the academic buildings (more useful for colleges scattered in the city), locate offices within the buildings (vertical view of the buildings or slicing of buildings to show a blueprint corresponding to a floor), check operating hours for buildings/offices, locate events (exams, free food, rsvp, etc.), estimate the traffic in any part of the university, etc.
Currently, we have Google Maps, Apple Maps, Baidu Maps, etc. These maps provide a more macro view of any part of a city and do not specifically cater to schools.
Let’s suggest the improvements/design for this product. To make the experience private for each college, only allow students of college XYZ to have access to the map of college XYZ. This could be done by having a separate domain for the registered colleges. On the login page, the student enters her college email ID and password that could be verified. This is similar to how colleges use Gmail services where students can log in using their college email IDs. Once the students log in, they can see the map for their respective school. Students can then type in the name of an academic building, a professor, or a faculty member to locate them. Once they see the building, students can tap on a building to obtain a 3D view of the building. This could be done in two ways: one, there exists a blueprint for each floor and two, students can navigate the building in a VR fashion. To make the implementation simple, let’s stick to the former — blueprint for each floor. Students can then get general information about any room/office in the building. Students should also be able to search for events happening at the campus and rsvp using the application. This means that the student body should also be able to create events on the map and allow for rsvp. Finally, the app could keep the students updated on the general traffic around the campus. This is easy for the buildings and different areas, however, it is challenging to give the traffic information for each floor.
Improving a Product
This sort of question is very similar to the design question. The subtle difference is that in such question, you pick an existing product and suggest improvements. You can easily tell if a question is an improvement question when the interviewer mentions a specific product and asks you to build on it.
Always try to answer these questions in an organized fashion. The general template given in the book is as follows:
a. What is the goal of the product?
b. What problems does the product face?
c. How would you solve this problem?
d. How would you implement this solution?
e. How would you validate your solution?
Let’s answer a sample question from the book using this template.
Q) What would you change about a supermarket to make it better for college students?
A) This is an improvement question as we are asked to change XYZ product to make it better. Let’s answer it. Below, each paragraph corresponds to a subheading in the framework above. We are told that the customers are the college students so we will answer keeping the customers in mind.
The main goal of a supermarket is to allow customers to buy quality products they need at reasonable prices. Having defined the goals, we can list the use-cases as well that is why do college students to go to a supermarket. The students go to supermarkets to buy groceries, buy furniture, sometimes unknowingly buy things not allowed in the dorms and buy school items.
From my experience as a college student, I believe the issues with the supermarkets are as follows. One, the deals are not very visible to the students and often it’s hard for students to navigate through the clutter of deals, out of which many are usually expired. And two, college students often struggle with buying healthy food items since the supermarkets don’t do a lot to inform the students on products’ nutrition.
To solve the mentioned problems, I suggest the following improvements: possibly have a mobile app or a Slack channel to communicate with the students about the valid deals, make use of the students’ college id by having deals that are only accessible on that id, make an effort to let students know which products are and are not allowed in the dorms, show students products sorted by price and/or quality, make an active list of most popular things bought by college students as this can help international students or any student better understand their needs, and provide product delivery to the dorms.
We can implement the mentioned solutions by asking the college to facilitate communication between the students and the supermarket via an app or a Slack channel. This is important because school is generally responsible for the well-being of students and for defining the rules inside the dorms.
To validate my solutions, I suggest the following: track usage of the app, track how often students read the messages being sent on the app, track how many coupons/deals are redeemed weekly or monthly, track the number of college students visiting per week/month, and track how many products are delivered to the dorms. Comparing these records periodically is a good way to gauge the efficiency of my proposed solutions.
Favorite Product
This type of question is similar to the improvement question but is approached in reverse order. Instead of starting our discussion with the weaknesses of an existing product, we start our discussion with the strengths of a product. We discuss why we think it’s an attractive product and how does it stand out. again, a structured approach is very important when answering this type of question too. The general template we can follow is as follows:
a. What problems does the product solve for the users?
b. How does the product accomplish these goals? What makes it neat? What makes users fall in love with the product?
c. How does it compare with the alternatives?
d. How would you improve it?
Let’s answer a sample question from the book using this template.
Q) What is your favorite business tool? Why?
A) Personally, my favorite business tool is Slack. I will now analyze the product in detail. Again, each paragraph below corresponds to the respective subheadings listed above.
The problems I believe Slack solves for its users/customers are as follows: makes the communication faster, makes the collaboration more effective, makes the process of checking important messages/emails less boring and allows people to identify most frequently discussed topics within a company.
Slack solves the mentioned problems in numerous ways. The features it provides are as follows: send instant messages instead of emails, instantly share documents between teams, communicate in organized chat rooms (channels), search chat history, search text in a file since all linked files are indexed, have a bird-eye view of the team for the company management to analyse how the sentiments are changing over time, see where particular discussions are happening, access and discuss files directly in your channels (by syncing with Google Drive and Dropbox Paper), communicate outside your organization, set reminders for important tasks, add Google calendar app, subscribe to RSS feed to share industry news and information with your team, and use many integrations to facilitate day-to-day tasks
Slack achieve the above goals by using many state-of-the-art technologies. It uses Machine Learning in a very smart way to personalize the whole experience for you. Its recommendation system algorithm is called the Work Graph, which is a collaborative filtering technique used in Slack channels and suggests users different channels of interest. Slack also uses Natural Language Processing techniques to assist the users in identifying the most important messages by ranking them in order. This solves the problem of a clutter of messages that comes with instant messaging so the user can only browse through the important messages. There is a margin for error here. Moreover Slack uses integrations to allow users to use other apps within the Slack environment e.g. Google Drive, Google Calendar, Statsbot, RSS, etc. All these features combine to make the intra-team communication process interesting — essentially, these features make Slack function like your ruthlessly organized, multitasking assistant who knows everything that’s going on and keep you briefed on only the most salient events.
Applications that work as an alternative to Slack include Cisco’s Webex Teams, Facebook’s Workplace, and Microsoft teams. They have the advantage of an already existing large user base. However, Slack is more focused and provides more functionality. Perhaps, this is why Slack has more daily active users
If I have to suggest further improvements to make Slack even more convenient, they would be as follows: threading — to keep track of topics being discussed instead of just a bunch of incomplete topic discussions, better search since some reviews have emerged in the past complaining about insufficient search results, better security — allows company an option to decide how long it wishes to keep its chats in the archive, allow the users to keep away from Slack when they are working on something else, can use NLP to provide people with a conversation summary so far. To be a bit more technical, can use ML algorithm like LDA or Random Forest to list all the topics being discussed in the chat or maybe even order them in priority. Can also allow tasks like sentiment analysis, detecting crisis in text, detecting urgency, etc.
In short, for all the reasons mentioned above, I believe Slack is a pretty impressive business tool that has the potential for further growth.
Conclusion
In this post, we have discussed three broad categories of product questions — designing a product, improving a product, and describing your favorite product. I have provided rough templates from the CTPMI for each type of product question. The most important thing is to always identify the users/customers, identify the use cases, and provide solutions for the use cases. If you answer these things using a structured approach, you’ll do well. You can find practice questions on Glassdoor. Other than Cracking the Product Management Interview, I also really like Decode and Conquer by Lewis Lin.
