How to ace big tech Product Sense PM interviews (50-min)

0:00 all right well thank you everyone for dialing in for this lightning lesson about product sense interviews for product managers my name is Ben I teach a course on Maven around product sense and analytical thinking PM interviews I've recently decided to split up what used to be my lecture materials in the paid course into two separate lightning lessons that I'll be giving away for free this is the first of the two of them around product sense and I'm doubling down my course on

0:29 practice and a couple other things I'll mention later in this so hopefully this will make the the material a lot more accessible to people who either can't afford to take the course or just prefer consuming the content asynchronously on your own time this talk is being recorded and it's going to be emailed to you if you've never joined a lightning lesson from Maven before your email is now on a list and anyone who joins this or

0:54 signed up for this rather even if you're not here if you have to drop is going to get an email with the link to the recording thanks something like 24 to 48 hours after the talk video I encourage you all to keep it off if you're like me just want to consume the content comfortably go for it if you want to turn it on I'm probably not going to see you so it won't make a huge

1:15 difference I have kept all of you muted by default I'm pretty sure that if you want to unmute yourself you're going to have to ask for my permission and the reason for that is that I'm planning to use this recording as a pre-read for the course so I want to keep keep the audio pretty tight for people are going to be taking my course we will do questions at the end ideally using the chat sometimes people

1:39 can ramble a bit with their questions and I'm just trying to be mindful of everyone's time so if you have questions throughout the presentation please write it down and then at the end there will be time for for Q&A okay so the things that we're going to talk about today are product sense evaluation areas so you know if you go through interviews at a place like meta Google there's a bunch of companies these days that are using product sense

2:05 interviews as one of the interviews for evaluating product manager candidates we will go through what the evaluation criteria are that have become somewhat industry standard and then I will give you a bunch of personal advice on how to provide the right signals for the evaluation evaluation areas then we're going to walk through a product sense question an example following my template that I came up with and work through it I do have the content pre-populated otherwise

2:37 this would have taken a bit longer and then I'll give you some supplemental links for more practice and even give you a take-home I will not have the time to review everyone's submissions but I I think you should have the template to go through a question on your own and hopefully get a lot of value out of the practice and then we'll open it up for Q&A and have a little surprise at the end too okay so diving in here and let me

3:07 just make sure I can see the chat actually can't see the chat so when I'm done I'll see your questions but I'll just keep running through this all right so oh there it is perfect okay so if someone drops something I will see that okay so let's start by talking about the evaluation areas for the product sense interview and how I generally recommend spending time and then we'll get into

3:39 some of the more meaty topics here so at a high level a product sense interview technically takes 45 minutes there's usually five minutes of small talk in the beginning introductions five minutes at the end usually reserved for the interviewer allowing the candidate to ask them any questions they might have so you're really talking about roughly 35 total minutes to get through one of these interviews and there is a very clear set of signals that interviewers are looking to

4:05 get so they want to understand your ability to describe the product motivation so like why does this product even exist and we'll get into what that means then they want to know that you can take that and start describing the audience for the product who is it for what kind of segments might we consider I recommend spending about 10 minutes there taking one of the segments that you consider and then giving a rationale for why you would

4:28 prioritize that segment then you get into problem identification so tell me about some problems this segment might experience and then pick one of those to go deep on and have some good rationale for that 10 minutes there and then we finish with a solution development portion of the interview where you take the problem that you prioritized brainstorm some Creative Solutions and then pick one of those and that then you stick The Landing maybe even describe like the V1

4:54 or the MVP of that that's the the basic structure of these interviews and many of the companies that will be evaluating you on these interviews will always be will also be scoring you on your succinctness and your structured communication so this is not one of those interviews where you can like ramble and hope that you know if you said 10 things five of them were the right ones and hopefully they forget about the other five you do have to be

5:17 pretty buttoned up on these so throughout this today's lecture I want you to keep in mind a question like this okay so a question that you could be asked is let's say you're interviewing with meta for example build a product for gardening super open-ended right so we're going to think through how to answer this together and then I actually ran through this with one of my previous cohorts and I'll show you what a filled out template for this looks like so you

5:48 can have a sense of of how you might think through it so the first place to start is to describe the the product and the experience provide a basic overview of the elements touch on how it might tie to the company's Mission obviously that is going to be different based on which company you're interviewing with connect to something deep in the in the product or the experience like why is it actually something important or meaningful get a little you know

6:14 soft here tap into something a bit deeper and then you want to leave some kind of placeholder mission statement that you could use later okay so this is not a nice to have it's something that will actually play a role later and you want to ideally do all that in in a couple minutes 2 to three minutes okay then you want to get into target audience so here is where you're going to identify the key players in the

6:38 ecosystem you are going to group them in the highest level possible as people that have incentives or skin in the game you want to then divide the ecosystem groups into mutually exclusive subgroups that are really based on their primary motivations for caring about this thing I I will make a note here that the motiv groupings are probably more useful for this kind of question that we're talking through like a product for gardening it's a 0 to one

7:04 brand new product if you're being asked to like make something better like an existing product better this might be a little bit less helpful so but you do often get asked these super open-ended questions then you are going to Define segments based on theistic like lifestyle Behavior usage patterns budgets there's a bunch of things you can consider for thinking about how you might Define your segments you could certainly combine them with demographics but I would not go just with

7:32 demographics that's going to be pretty shallow and then you want to prioritize a segment by scoring ideally what I like to use is something like reach and underserved degree so reach being how big is the segment an underserved degree is how poorly served as the segment relative to that mission statement that we defined before and then you want to set some kind of persona so give them a name like paint a picture who is this person what

7:56 are they trying to do where do they live are they in a house are they an apartment like make bring them to life in a way okay how much time do they have once we've defined that Persona we want to go to the next part of the interview which is problem identification here we're going to outline the key steps of the user Journey that this person goes on obviously in the context of this experience or this product in our case

8:19 gardening and we're going to identify the problems that they might encounter at different stages of that journey to one make sure we're not missing anything big but two we want to be able to really identify unique problems and if you get stuck on only one part of the journey and you try to come up with maybe two to three problems and just one part of the journey it's going to be very hard for you to do something unique

8:41 so to show breadth in your creativity around identifying problems it's better to really map out that journey and to kind of pick problems that span a few different moments in that Journey the other thing I'll say is that people needs are not problems I need beautiful flowers is not a problem okay so it's hard for me to find the flowers that will be beautiful in my apartment that sounds like a problem okay so th those are those are different

9:08 things you will get dinged if you can't say like actual problem statements and then you want to prioritize Problems by scoring them on severity and frequency is my preference so severity is when this problem occurs you know how much does it hurt and then frequency is how often does this problem come up for this persona in this user Journey okay you ideally pick the problem that has the highest weighted you know

9:39 severity and frequency and then you get to solution development in solution development you want to really demonstrate creativity so this is arguably the part of these interviews where you will be most expected to show off how creative Your solution thinking are if you're artsy creative this is like where you want to shine on that okay so you do want to come up with different ways of solving the problem and you could think of moonshots

10:09 like really big bets but just so you know they don't count more than practical Solutions so the key is just solving the problem at hand and if you want to apply the latest technology I do recommend doing that I think it will you know kind of make your Solutions seem a little bit more novel creative relevant timely when you have your solution you're going to be expected to pick one if you can only identify one solution

10:33 that's not going to show enough breadth so you want to identify ideally at least two to three solutions and then you want to pick one of them by talking about the impact and the effort of bringing a solution like that to life if you have time usually if you do have like if you get through all of this in let's say 25 minutes or 30 minutes you probably have another five minutes 5 to 10 minutes at the end

10:55 unlikely but somewhere probably around 3 to 5 minutes if you do this well you could you could describe some kind of minimum viable product or a V1 and outline some key risks that you might run into that you'd consider as you contemplate a rollout strategy okay that's that's basically the product sense outline for these interviews and the approach to summarize is you're going to always think and pause between transitions between each

11:25 of these parts of the rubric you want to review the motivation Mission share that with the interviewer ask if it makes sense they say yes great keep going if they say no make sure you answer their questions they might need some clarifications then you want to describe the audience and craft a unique segment check in with the interviewer see if it makes sense to them if it doesn't do that back and forth until they follow your thinking then get into

11:51 defining the segment problems prioritize one check back in with the interviewer make sure they follow your thinking and finish with Solutions do the same exact thing again okay all right so now I'm going to and just as a reminder questions will be at the end so as you have questions please just write them down and be prepared to share them at the end if you share them now I will not see them okay okay so now I'm

12:17 going to go into some advice that's going to apply to kind of everything we talked about just now so the first thing is that you are driving the structure of these interviews and you're managing the clock if you rely on the interviewer to do that you will not do well in these interviews so after they ask you the question hey build a product for gardening don't just like start saying stuff okay it's not a regular conversation you're not having

12:39 coffee this is a a game that you're playing and you need to demonstrate that you understand this game so you state your assumptions and then you walk them through your plan for how you want to spend the time together I'll show you exactly what this means you don't have to ask clarifying questions if you don't genuinely need answ I would rather you state assumptions for the sake of time and don't be ashamed to show like you're really prepared so

13:06 if you have a real clear structure that's great and then throughout this interview try to be assertive but not aggressive don't get defensive but certainly behave like it's your meeting second thing I'll say here is you do want to embrace those awkward silences to think and they do get a little bit of getting used to or they do take a little bit of getting used to but each of those pauses that I mentioned can usually last somewhere between like

13:29 a minute to two minutes maybe that's okay it's really not a problem if the interviewer has to just sit there quietly while you're thinking in the product sense in particular if you fill that space by thinking out loud it will hurt you because it's going to hurt your succinct Communications course so while this is not about speaking my last piece of advice on this topic is to I really recommend against sharing your screen because once people start

13:56 watching your screen it's almost like they watching you think live so instead of thinking out loud verbally you're thinking out loud on paper on your screen and you're going to start like correcting typos and all this stuff you might have technical difficulties that is all really precious time that you cannot afford to burn I would instead you know if you want to use notes on your computer totally cool to go for it but just don't share your

14:18 screen just make sure you can do the work you need and then be ready to prepare a story to share or I'm sorry to prepare your answer to share back with the interviewer an anecdote that I will share on this topic is one time I had a candidate who I was interviewing when I was at Facebook and the candidate chose to share their screen and it took them two minutes to kind of figure out how to share and then

14:44 once they started sharing we were probably 5 minutes into the interview and they were just like writing a bunch of stuff so I'm like seven minutes into the interview and we haven't even started like a conversation back and forth that is a failure State okay so I just want you to to avoid that happening too the next thing I'll say here is that there is no right answer a lot of people that I help prepare for these interviews

15:06 think there might be some kind of like specific you know pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that they're trying to reach and and give the exact answer that gets them there I would say as long as you're making reasonable assumptions and the interviewer can follow your rationale you can really take this interview in whichever direction you want often interviewers will tell you that which is great but they're not tricking you there is really not a right

15:26 answer you do need to be clear you do need to be logical and you should not contradict yourself I would set those as guard rails and rules now if an interviewer happens to have some kind of preconceived notion of what the right answer is you cannot control that and you cannot anticipate it I like to talk about it like it's weather conditions okay it's out of your control and there's nothing you could do to prepare for

15:46 it but it's rare it's very very rare and most interviewers are trained to not do that okay the next thing I'll say here is that interviewers might nudge what that means is they might ask you to clarify or they might ask a followup it's it might feel like you're hanging out on a particular part of the interview a little longer than you expected or longer than you would like it feels like there's a bit of an

16:10 obstacle in the road to overcome this is usually because the interviewer is really trying to get the signal they need and they're struggling to get it so if they ask you a question that they consider a nudge it is really to help you and if they don't ask you these questions it's usually because you just already give them what they need so in my experience as an interviewer it's way more fun to do an interview when the candidate crushes the interview

16:36 in a good way because it makes it I don't have to do as much work during that interview it's kind of on it it's almost like on a happy path it's sliding down the hill and some skis you know it's it's all great the time goes by faster I enjoy it and and yeah so I just want you to know the interviewer is rooting for you because it's going to make this time more enjoyable for them an example to tie back to

17:00 problems let's say an interviewer asks you hey like are there any other problems that you might consider that's a nudge that the breadth of problems you proposed might not be not be wide enough or they maybe don't really agree with the way you're framing your problems so if and then when you get to solutions they might ask oh are there any other angles that you'd consider to solve this problem that would be another nudge to say hey like I need you to give me more

17:22 to work with here I don't have enough signal okay in general time management is so critical I cannot repeat this enough so I really do recommend that every single second and minute that you spend on these interviews is meant to give the interviewer the signal that they need and if something does not provide signals cut it for example there's an analytical thinking interview that is a completely separate rubric completely separate process than the product sense interview that one is where you should

17:50 showcase your ability to do metrics identify Northstar goals like those kind of things you you do not want to try to like fit goals and metrics into this interview I've seen some people try to do it sometimes and it just like derails the conversation I have to just be like hey I'm not really looking for that right now so just like don't don't do that sometimes people like to ask like hey like how many is enough like

18:17 how many segments how many problems how many solutions generally speaking I think you could sometimes get away with two but my rule of thumb is if you're in doubt about whether you're doing it well enough I would go with three for the number that you you s you kind of like consider and then I would evaluate them on two Dimensions where this goes really wrong is sometimes people come up with like four segments or like four

18:40 problems or five problems and they're like look how smart I am I can come up with all these problems the problem with that is that then you need to score them on there's like a lot more cells almost in your Matrix that you need to score so you don't want to do that and you definitely don't want to start extending yourself into like five problems and like three dimensions or you're going to go full-blown rice like you know reach

19:00 impact confidence effort now you've got like four dimensions and five problems you've got 20 cells in your Matrix to fill out it's way too much it's going to it's going to eat up your time so I would keep it simple and often interviewers might not even ask you to like walk them through every cell of that Matrix but you will want to be able to rationalize the segment you chose walk me through why you know that's the

19:20 segment and tie your rationale to the dimensions problem that you pick tell me about why that problem and then ideally walk me through rationale for the score you gave it along the key Dimensions you scored on the same res Solutions the next one is more philosophical conceptual for those of you who maybe like chess is that when you make a move in chess and just like this interview depending on how skilled you are you will anticipate The

19:48 Next Step Ahead and even if you're not great at chess I do want you to understand that this interview is like a game of chess and what I mean by that is that the segment that you pick is going to Corner you in to a set of problems a problem space and then the problem that you pick is going to Corner you into a solution space so as long as you are keeping mindful you you are continuing to be

20:12 mindful of that Dynamic and you don't Corner yourself into new to narrow of a space you should be okay but if you Corner yourself into a problem that really only has like one possible solution because it's like it's too narrow of a problem that will hurt you okay backtracking so let's say you made a mistake you're playing this game of chess you regret the move you made unlike in chess you can backtrack in an interview like this but it's really

20:40 important to call it out explicitly don't try to bury it say hey I was thinking a little bit more about the problems here and I'm realizing that I think the segment that I picked is probably not as specific as I would like it to be so I'm just going to take 30 seconds to a minute and just kind of reconsider some of my segmentation if that's okay with with you you can totally go back and do that call it

21:01 out ideally the sooner you backtrack the better because you'll burn less time you will not get dinged for that as much as you think okay quick time check we're 20 minutes in I want to now go into showing you some materials so the first one as I promised is going to be a filled out product sense interview template for the build a product for gardening I'll include this afterwards as a resource as well the second one is I'm going to give you a

21:31 product sense interview template that you could copy on your own and use for more practice the third one I'm not going to go into but it is a u publicly available link that meta shares with people interviewing there that includes a video it's not password protected it's just on their website but I do think it gives you a basic sense of kind of how they describe and there's also some small mocks between PMS there that I

21:51 would recommend watching and then something that I continually I'm I'm like so deep in this world but a lot of people don't know about this but ly has a question bank that's got like thousands of questions that continue to come in live every week from people going through interviews and they submit what they were actually asked and that that is I think usually the best source of practice questions so to start I see only one person actually

22:17 can I get a thumbs up from one person in the chat if you can see my product sense template I I see a thumbs up in the video awesome okay cool all right so let's talk about the template so I gave you a bunch of tips and now you're like cool Ben like how am I going to go and apply all this stuff in a in a real interview so what I would recommend is going into every one of your structured

22:38 interviews with a empty template that you will fill out as you go and you'll start by putting the question at the top and then I have literally written out the blurbs of things to say to make sure you don't forget them so this is what I this is how I like to start I want to start by reviewing the landscape etc etc I'm not going to read this out loud take 30 to 45 minutes to say it sometimes you'll be

23:03 asked about existing products sometimes you'll be asked about new ones it's good to just kind of anchor yourself at the start just pick whichever one they're asking about in this case a product for gardening feels like a new product as you get into assumptions here you are going to State key assumptions that you feel like are going to help you upfront just chip away at some of the ambiguity so in this case we ended up going with focusing

23:27 on the US focusing on keeping it within the Facebook family of apps like WhatsApp Instagram Facebook versus spinning out like a standalone product usually that's a great assumption to make and then targeting you can say hey like we're going to focus on like personal gardening versus you know botanical gardens or commercial uses so you can just State some upfront assumptions here to to narrow in on what you're going to focus on and then you want to think about

23:53 the product experience why it matters and then set some kind of placeholder mission statement okay so I'm going to zoom in here a little bit so what we came up with is just you know describing what gardening means what kind of process is involved General kind of like mindset about the people that do it and then State some kind of mission for this product connect people bring a world closer together you know like we can definitely make a case that

24:20 gardening can bring people more close together through Community things like that so this is you spitballing you don't have to say all this out loud to the interviewer but then ultimately you we land on something like you know bring people closer together and Empower them through a shared passion of cultivating plants fruits flowers and vegetables something like that so that gives you your mission statement then you want to go ahead and think about the ecosystem players around

24:43 this so you could consider like equipment suppliers nurseries Etc land owners pick one of those so you can think of maybe like the gardeners the consumers which is probably what meta would want to focus on think about the primary motivations like growing food de-stressing Beauty Aesthetics Etc then you can get into segmentation here istics like budget time constraints space types climate you know there's all kinds of different factors you can think about when you're trying to paint a

25:13 picture of who you're building for and then we came up with a few segments so like newbies looking to get into gardening passionate retirees people who just want to set it and forget it and not really think about it too much we had some really good debates this is kind of where I I'll go back to saying that there's not a right answer U this stuff as long as you can make an argument it's interesting so

25:36 we had some debates on like which was the bigger segment which was the one that was more underserved or less underserved and then ultimately land on a Persona someone who's maybe like an urban working professional who wants to like enjoy more time on the weekend by making the space more aesthetic something like that you can use a segmentation checklist if it helps you just kind of remember what to do and not do as you get into problem

26:02 identification you could talk about the user Journey so you're evaluating or exploring options what plant to buy should I do it should I do it myself or hire someone then you buy things you plant them you water them there kind of like a like a life cycle to gardening and then you end up you can come up with some problems so like you know one of the problems we picked was that the plants die because I don't know how to

26:22 care for them it sucks when that happens if you have ever gone through that and then we took some time thought about Solutions and ultimately landed on a solution to submit photos on a recurring Cadence to get feedback on how healthy they are from the community or from some kind of tech you know you don't get too prescriptive necessarily at this point and then I could ask you as an interviewer cool like what's the MVP for

26:45 this solution look like and it could be something like an a AI powered plant buddy that you could like send photos to using meta's AI assistant or AI agent it would analyze the image determine if it's what kind of plant it is what it's supposed to look like when it's healthy and if there's like Deltas it could surface them and then you could kind of call out some risks so that's a very very fast run through of the template

27:07 but I wanted you to kind of see how to apply some of this in an actual interview question context as I mentioned I will give I will give you a link to a version of this template that is blank that you can copy and this is the question bank that I was referring to so if you go all the way to the bottom you could see people dropping in questions from yesterday who had interviews at meta

27:31 yesterday someone at meta got asked a question build a podcast product in Netflix that's a real thing someone got asked yesterday so if you want to practice on those kind of questions you could do that too okay I'm going to take a sip of water so when you get my template if you want to get some practice you know one question of the thousands of questions you could work on but just to get you started is you could choose to

27:59 build a product for volunteering okay that's like a pre I just showed you build a product for gardening you could do something similar for volunteering this question comes up quite a bit all right so start writing your questions and we're we're going to open up for Q&A momentarily and while you're writing those and thinking about those I want to share something exciting so I have been playing a lot with Claude projects it's surprisingly good for exactly what I tried to do with

28:29 it okay so what I did is I trained it on all of my course materials and then I asked it questions from Lis Lin's question bank and it did the exact thing that a candidate that would Ace these interviews does I will give a more thorough demo of this in my course and help people set this up if you want to do it on your own you totally can just go to Claude you pay 20 bucks a

28:53 month for Claude projects give it as much of the publicly available materials that you like and resonate with you that are on the internet as a project knowledge and then you could start asking it questions from the question bank and that doesn't you know I I won't make any money off of you doing that but I think you could certainly do that on your own and see what comes back and I think it can really be helpful for

29:13 comparing what it comes up with versus what you come up with on your own chat GPT I just saw a question I don't I tried the same thing there and it honestly I'm not trying to bad mouth chat GPT it just wasn't as good it was nowhere close to as good it didn't take the pause is it didn't check in with me the same way so it kind of didn't really like internalize my materials as well okay a few plugs here while

29:37 you're writing your q&as and we'll then we'll stop sharing and I'll open it up so the first thing is if you want to take my course the next cohort starts January 7th it is two weeks long four live sessions two of them are really Hands-On required quote unquote and then two of them are optional where we'll work through more questions so the more practice you want the more time you could spend if you do want all of the practice that you can

30:02 get it's going to be four live sessions then there's also a take-home assignment that you'll be group you'll be teamed up with a couple other students in the same time zone and you'll work through an additional question together so you by the end of the the boot camp you would go through three product sense interviews and three product sense questions and then you'll go through three analytical thinking questions the live sessions are really more like case

30:25 style discussions which were really my favorite classes when I was in college and even in my professional career when I went to certain like events and talks if any of you know Gibson bid we worked together at Life 360 Gibb is known for doing these like super engaging Cas style discussions I try to kind of emulate the same Vibe by working through real questions in my course so if you like that kind of thing I recommend taking a look you will get

30:48 10% off with light PS as a promo code and this is the QR code if you want to scan it if you liked this lesson and wanted to do something similar for the other you know like the the sister interview of the product sense interview which is the analytical thinking one I am doing a lightning lesson on that exactly one week from today at the same time you can go and find that in maven's lightning lessons

31:14 and we'll just spend our time on the completely different content on analytical thinking but the same exact structure and then one of the things I would absolutely love if you do not want to take my course or do anything else with me I would really love feedback and I think my if you can scan this QR code I will also send a link to the NPS survey after the fact in the email with the with everything

31:36 else I would really appreciate some feedback on what worked and what could be better all righty so I'm going to now stop sharing my screen and I'm going to open the chat okay so I'm going to go as far up as I see the first question dropped all right so question one are there any key mistakes to avoid while choosing target audience and what is the depth level

32:08 of problems for a segment that is expected evaluated okay so the first question mistakes to avoid with choosing target audience making it not specific enough where you can end up with a segment Persona that's a big mistake the second mistake I would say is using overly superficial heuristics such as only demographic like if your if your segments are like purely based on age group for example like young people like kind of like young adults or like midlife

32:39 adults and then like elderly people and that's the only segmentation you come up with it's too it's too superficial you do need to be a little bit more thoughtful by combining some of these other things we talked through and then the level of problems there's really not like I mean the only mistakes are the ones I think I already touched touched on which are make sure that they are people problems not needs so like someone struggles with

33:04 something or it's really hard to do something or it really hurts when something happens like those kind of things or problems and ideally like I said cover a few different po points in the user journey to make sure that you're not giving multiple flavors of the same problem okay next question how do you balance depth and brevity and answers found that interview preference vary between go deep and stay high level which can be hard to sense which

33:30 approach suits the interviewer best reading between the lines is kind of like how should I be should I a on the side of being succinct or verose and I think that I would always start succinct obviously make sure you sharing like complete thoughts and complete sentences if the interviewer does not get what they need from your starting point give let them nudge and

34:00 let them ask it's better to air on that side versus eating up way too much time up front and realizing that the entire neighborhood you're in from a conversation perspective is off like they want to put you over here and you're over here and you just took up like 2 minutes or three minutes talking so I'd probably start there yeah let's see how much detail do you need to provide when explaining why you rank each parameter is high medium or

34:25 low great question so I've seen a bunch of candidates do this in different ways and some work really well some some don't sometimes candidates do such a good job explaining why their Top Choice was their Top Choice so like why they gave maybe something a high and a high or high in a medium and I can and they just kind of like can quickly touch on the other ones not scoring as well in those dimensions and we can move on so

34:52 that's one way to do it is just like spend the time explaining the rationale for the the option that you do pick and just kind of skip over or just gloss over the other ones I I've seen some other candidates too super sucin super quick in in their thought process walk me through almost like their Matrix they literally like I can almost like picture The Matrix on their paper where they're like this one got a like low medium

35:14 medium high high high for these reasons based on that I'm going to go with this one so you could do either of those I think it really does boil down to your own confidence and your ability to manage the time so if you think you can be succinct while covering all of those great and if not I would try to only cover the main one and if the interviewer is curious like sometimes I did I do nudge and I'm like all right

35:35 interesting like I think this you're choosing this segment but the second segment seems like it might be bigger am I missing something or could you walk me through you know your rationale so I might ask a nudge and that clears it up risks and tradeoffs tradeoffs are an analytical thinking and review question so you're it's going to be extremely extremely rare I don't think anyone I've I've helped over the last year or two has told me that they got a

36:02 trade-off question in a product sense interview we C certainly will go into trade-offs and analytical thinking and then risks are going to be primarily around the initial roll out so kind of like which markets would you start with how are you going to make sure that the results are not going to be really terrible for the initial audience like those kind of things are there any compliance or legal or copyright risks that you would need to mitigate

36:27 those kind of things you don't necessarily have to go into the detail of how you would mitigate those things in the interview but you can talk about how those are risks that come to mind for you and if you had time you'd probably think of more and you'd want to make sure you address them in these kinds of ways how do you signal your seniority level in product science interviews I get this question a lot actually you

36:50 know people saying hey like I'm I I want to get a level seven or level six how do I make sure that I perform well enough on these interviews to not get you know slotted into a level five so the short answer is this is a moving Target that is not there there's a lot of discretion that companies place on these decisions if you've ever sat in a company I am not speaking about Facebook I was not in the interview

37:19 committees at Facebook like chewing on how to level people so I I literally cannot speak to that at all but if you've ever been in any companies where they are interviewing candidates and trying to figure out the right level to bring them in at you'll know there's a discussion and there's a bunch of data points and the recruiter is going to present a perspective and one of the the main pieces of evidence that you'll have going for you is your performance in

37:39 these interviews and then another one will be like your resume those are probably like two big ones I would say the stronger you perform in the interviews the higher the level will go but to a ceiling like if the company just is not hiring level seven PMS right now you could get a five out of five on every dimension of the of every single interview you go through and the the ceiling for what you can get would be a

38:00 six okay so it's not like there's an infinite ceiling here and I will say that for the very very senior roles you know I'm thinking of like level seven might be there but I know for sure like directors VPS those kind of roles there are like additional panels of interviews that you'll go through these are the ones that I prepare for in my course product sense and analytic analytical thinking are kind of like the least common

38:25 denominator for what everyone has to go through anywhere from like a rotational PM who's going to maybe get their first PM role in their whole life all the way to someone who's maybe got 20 30 years of you know VP level experience everyone has to pass product sense analytical thinking and there's just like more for the more senior ones slides will be sent over email do we need to think through differently for existing products existing products will have just a a

38:53 little bit more of a narrow solution space so the user Journey for existing products is probably going to be a little bit more well defined too if I ask you to walk me through your user Journey for door Dash You're going to have like a lot more R rigidity and like the user Journey associated with something like door Dash and then the solution space for you for building something to improve door Dash is also going to be a lot more constrained to

39:19 that product I would say in open-ended questions you can kind of like talk a little bit more holistically about journey and then you also have a less constrained solution space so those feel like the the key differences the materials for the video that I shared I think the person asked that question just dropped but that that's going to be something I talk about in my course but like I said you can go and boot bootstrap your own claw project

39:49 using publicly available materials okay will there be more cohorts besides January and February yes those are just the only two I have open right now is this type of interview limited for a specific PM level I think we just talked about that are you sure we should not mention metrics interesting yeah whoever Dan if

40:21 you want to like email me I'm happy to like hear more about the kind of like Intel you have on how instacart does this but yeah you're things like talking about top level metrics like gmv or Maus are not things that would come up in a product sense interview at least the ones all the ones that I've I've been working on okay if you can't finish everything on time if you finish Solutions but

40:53 don't have time to discuss metrics metrics are out out of the scope for this so let's not that is not a problem that is a good thing but like risks and go to market those are bonuses I think there's a world in which the interviewer gets all the signal they need without talking about like risks of go to market or even the V1 maybe the the solution you describe is just like so cool and compelling and the creative

41:12 space you demonstrated with your brainstorming was so strong that they might not even need to hear about the the V1 or the MVP and they'll still pass you in the interview but if you can't get to the solution part of the interview you're not going to pass the interview so you do need to get to you need to get through every section of the interview to pass typical expectation for time to finish yeah I covered this in the

41:36 beginning you have about 35 minutes so five minutes intro small talk in the beginning five minutes at the end where they want to let you ask them questions the thing to train for is roughly 35 minutes time management techniques I covered those earlier in the slides so if when you get the recording you could look back but I would say it's mostly just about understanding the amount of time that you want to allocate to every section

42:01 and then being really succinct with your responses and making sure you take the time to think before you talk as long as you think before you talk for one to two minutes be succinct when you speak up answer any questions they might have for you or hint follow any hints or nudges and and kind of like correct the course you should be able to get through everything in 35 minutes for the one to two minute pause

42:25 do you call it out that you want to use that time to think yeah I would just say like I'm going to now take a minute or two to gather my thoughts about how I would do how I want to segment and then how I want to I want to take a couple minutes and think about problems for this Persona that we just defined now I want to take a couple minutes to think about solutions for

42:45 this problem we just prioritized you can totally say that and any insights on how smaller companies hire interview PMS yeah I would say you know like a lot of my experiences in the series a series B series C stage you are not likely to run into these kind of structured interviews at those earlier stage startups this is mostly like I went through these interviews when I joined attentive which was a Series E company at the time so that that scale where

43:13 you have like over a thousand people at the company I would definitely imagine some kind of real structure to start to emerge when they have you know like 30 PMS or something like that but if you're the first p.m 2D p.m. first 5 PMS at a you know smaller company unlikely to happen and that's going to be a lot more about fit culture like a lot of these like intangibles product intuition those kind of things since everyone's using the same

43:41 basic approach how do you stand out Beyond creativity and solutions it's it's such a good question because I think it underscore something I always tell people which is don't underestimate how hard it is to just do the basics in these interviews so just getting through every single thing we talked about and giving the signal at a satisfactory level we'll pass you the interview if a interviewer asks 10 candidates over the next week the same question and they get 10 different

44:12 responses that are the same and they are all good the same good response all 10 will pass so that's kind of how companies like you know these bigger companies that use structured interviews work is these interviews are meant to weed out bias so as long as people are consistent in the way they evaluate people the same exact answer should not hurt someone in the 10th interview if it came up also in the first interview all right I got a couple more

44:42 minutes if people have any other questions here last thing I'll say is if if you want more of this exercise and you want to be able to kind of like ask these questions on an ongoing basis I do make myself s also available to everyone that takes my course and give responses within 24 hours if not getting on a call to talk about it so one more one more reason to take the course what are your thoughts about a whiteboarding

45:08 challenge where one has to share their screen I'm so happy you asked this is something that a lot of so definitely the folks that I coach going through the meta interview process are told they could use a whiteboard if they want you don't have to and out of everyone that I interviewed when I was there no one did and the ones that did I think it caused probably more technical difficulties and it helped now if you have to share

45:33 your screen and go through a whiteboard challenge that is not going to be the kind of interview we just talked about it'll be a different kind of interview like maybe like a working session or let's work through a problem together in my experience those happen more often in smaller companies than these kind of like bigger bigger tech companies if you get rejected can you reapply yes I don't know what the time frame is though I've heard from some

45:54 people that the recruiter told them 6 months and some people tell the recruiter told them one year so I think it it depends maybe on the exact experience you have are best ways to utilize the last five minutes yeah I would I would the questions you ask the interviewer at the end of these interviews they're not going to really like change the score that you get on the interview like if you passed and you ask them like you

46:16 know quote unquote basic questions they're not going to like be like now you don't pass the interview and similarly if you bomb the interview and you ask incredible questions at the end you're not gonna it's not gonna change anything so it's mostly just a function of you learning and I like to tell people yeah like ask the questions that are really hard to Google like if there's something that you're curious about that that PM is working on or

46:37 what it's like to be a PM at that company just ask and or what's something you're really excited about right now that you're working on what's the last like publicly announced thing that you shipped and like where did the Insight come from you know like those kind of questions could be really cool okay how to get qu how to qualify I'm unfortunately that's really hard like these days it's a black box and how people stick out I do know there's

47:09 there's a Reawakening I think of hiring within Tech relative to maybe like a year or two ago recruiters are playing offense there's a ton of people on the market so I do think that you got to set up your LinkedIn to like be look really appealing ideally Network and get referred War warm introductions and warm referrals are probably the best bet you have for getting in the door at any company these days regardless of whether they do product sense inter rviews so I

47:34 would say like Network and just put yourself in a position to have someone vouch for you and make sure your resume at least gets seen internally those are probably the the biggest piece of advice I have the last question is about the interview rubric yeah we we'll cover this more in the course but I think I covered like the highle points around like the different sections what they look for and you'll get you know some kind of score you know between like one

48:02 star or five stars at most companies is how they do it or from one to four like a like a weak higher to a strong higher so I think the things we discussed are pretty much the rubric like showing the the types of creativity the depth all all those things well thank you all so much I know we're already five minutes over this was a lot of fun I hope you got a ton of value out of this and if you have any

48:25 questions feel free to email me benos 33@gmail.com and if you want to join the course I'd love to see you there thank you