## Solving a Product Case ### About the product sense: - While interviewing for a Product Management role, its important to know the product(s) which the company is building, as its what you are going to contribute to. - In order to answer product sense question, be prepared with your homework of knowing the product, apply your systems thinking approach and try to communicate your ideas well. - If you are not aware about the product, in that case try to relate it to a similar product which you would have worked with or have known about, this would give you a common ground to start off with your entire process walkthrough. - Or maybe you might be asked to just improve a very own product which you use. - Designing a product for a specific segment. Like how would you design a new wending machine for blind people. # The Framework: ## The First Step: Information Gathering (3min) #### Constraints: **Case 1:** If the question is about the product of the company itself, you have a ground to start with. (Since in this case we are improving Holo-lens, I'm assuming I'm a PM for Microsoft, is that correct? and are there any other resources and time constraints that I should be aware of?) **Case 2:** If you do not know which company's product it will be, or in other words if the question asked here is more on the generic side, than its important to specifically ask which company am I the PM for? Why because, if you are a PM for a startup, then there will inevitably be constraints on budget and time, so your approach will vary. On the other hand if you are building this product for a larger company like Apple, or Google, where in you might have a dedicated R&D budget, the approach will be more comprehensive this time. > The idea is to take time and process the question thoroughly before answering. You should ideally ask: "For this case, do we have any time and resources constraints that I need to be aware of?" #### Goal: **Be specific with the goal**, but don't ask it up front for example, if we were to develop a vending machine for Google, you could say: "As far as I know, Google does not design Vending Machines at all, so in this case we are trying to enter the market with a new product, so I'm thinking increasing [[user adoption]] could be a good goal for us, is that okay? or do you have another goal in mind?" but what about revenue, or profit or user satisfaction? as long as the [[product metrics]] are related to your constraints and the product, it'll be okay. Pick one and confirm with your interviewer. #### Scope: > Setting a scope for the solution is really important. *using the example of the vending machine for Google:* The requirement for a new type of vending machine may be different depending on whether its going to be used for food or technology products or even Google products. Pick one and let your interviewer know why you choose it. If if you're not sure which one to go, you can ask your interviewer something like: `"thinking of vending machines it's likely that the design and the needs will be different depending on the type of content it will have like food versus electronics or even Google products and it can also be different depending on the locations that will be placed is there something in particular you'd like to focus on for this case?"` ` ## The Second Step: Setting the Context (3-5min) Talk about: - Competitors in the market - Your own experience with the product - Advantages and Disadvantages If the product is entirely a new concept in the market: - Talk about alternatives - How are the existing solutions in the market solving this problem today If asked, what's your favourite product? Recommendation: Pick a product that in uncommon and explain briefly to the interviewer why is it your favourite. ## The Third Step: Talk About Users (5-7min) ### List Users / Segments Before commencing, take a minute or two and brainstorm while jotting down all your insights on a notebook. Things like who all can be the target users for the product. #### How to brainstorm different users? - Avoid age ranges (e.g. Women between 23 and 45 years old) - Focus on characteristics | Life Stages | Occupations | Disabilities | | ------------ | --------------------- | ------------ | | Kids | Students | Wheelchair | | Young Adults | Working professionals | Blind | | Adults | Homemakers | | | Elderly | | | Now you can mix them and for groups of users. Eg: - young adults who are working professionals - part-time students - stay-at-home parents who uses a wheelchair - kids who are in school or high school students - Keep in mind that each group will have its own set of characteristics: - e.g. Working Professionals: - Multiple activities throughout the day - Reduced free time to spare > Brainstorm at-least three different groups of user. Even if the segment is specified and lets say you are asked to design a better ATM for the elderly, don't catalog them in just one big group, there will be more people using the ATM like adults or young adults. So ideally the approach should be about making the ATM accessible for all and not just focusing on just one aspect of it. So after all this thinking, pick any one segment based upon the one which makes the most sense for the case and make sure to let your interviewer know why you choose, the one you choose. eg. You picked this because: **Reason:** it represents the largest market share. **Goal:** Enter the market with the new product. ## The Fourth Step: User Pain Points (5-7min) ### Use Cases / Gaps >In these product case questions, you are asked to design or improve a product because there is a gap. There is something that the current solution is not solving for the group of users. Time to empathise. - Put yourselves in the shoes of the user segment that you selected and think of at least three pain points that are related to the product you're working with. - One thing to note here is that "you are not your user" ; you are empathising for the group of users whom you are designing the product for, don't talk about your own pain points, that's what empathising is, thinking about the needs and wants of others from their perspective. Jotting down the thoughts, there will be themes that are prevalent for each group that will be related to the pain points for example: - Working professionals will likely have less free time and if the product requires a lot of time to be used that's a pain point for this group. - Talking about kids you most likely will talk about parents and as you can imagine safety in any shape and form can be a pain point. - For someone who uses a wheelchair when designing physical objects you may need to think not only of the space but also on how a wheelchair moves. > One distinction of these pain points versus the previous step where we brainstorm our users is that we will not select just one of the pain points we will actually use all of them and try to come up with solutions. After processing all you brainstormed ideas, while deliberating, make sure to have a clean structure to make it as easy as possible for your interviewer to follow your thought process. Eg. Use: First, Second, Third. Now, at this point you should be able to understand the context of the problem, the target customer group for the product and their pain points, its time to improve or design our product. ## The Fifth Step: The Solution (5-10min) ### Features / Solve Gaps > With all this cohesive data, try to come up with three solutions. ### How to brainstorm solutions? #### Rules: 1. Make sure the solution solves at least one of the pain points. 2. Make sure the solutions are related to the goal of the prompt. `Eg: if the goal that you and your interviewer agreed on at the beginning was to increase the customer satisfaction maybe an improvement on reducing price might not be the best way to achieve customer satisfaction.` #### Suggestions: 1. Don't be afraid to add more technology to solve the problem (don't limit yourself to just the technology that already exists in the product). 2. Mix multiple products from the company if possible. 3. Have at least one moonshot idea (let your imagination run wild). Now finally, after discussing all the solutions, it's now time to prioritise improvements to the product. ## The Sixth Step: Prioritization (5-7min) ### How to prioritise features? There can be many approaches, like: - Prioritizattion based on visibility desirability and viability - Impact versus effort analysis - Any other framework to prioritize >There is no standard or perfect way to prioritize. #### Things to consider when prioritizing: 1. The Objective/Goal specified at the beginning 2. Choose pain points that help achieve the Objective/Goal faster 3. Feasibility and time 1. You can talk about prioritizing R&D for your Moonshot idea: you can say, while the technology is not available today you can prioritize R&D for that solution because it can give you a huge differentiator in the future once it's completed. 4. Prioritize physical changes in the product first (applies only to physical products because once a customer buys your product it's easier to change software than changing a physical component of the product). Make sure to let your interviewer know about your thought process while prioritising the features. Time to measure whether all the ideas were successful if they were implemented. ## The Seventh Step: Success Metrics (5-7min) Metrics to gauge success will depend on the type of solution being implemented. For simplicity of the interview, you can divide the metrics into two types: #### User Metrics: This will help us understand how users behave over time around our product. - Daily, Weekly, Monthly Active Users (DAU, WAU, MAU) - Retention Rate, Churn Rate - Feedback on app stores - No. of downloads - No. of active sessions - etc. #### Product Metrics: This will help us understand how the users are interacting with our product. - Time user spend on app or Website - Time it took users to discover new feature - Avg. time spent on a screen - Customer Journey and dropout ###### Physical Product Metrics: - No. of sales - No. of returns - No. of calls to customer support - Feedback on channels (websites) where product is sold (e.g. Amazon, Walmart, etc.) No need to mention all of these metrics at once, you can pick the ones that you consider the most relevant and let the interviewer know. Example for a mobile app: `Now that we've prioritized and implemented the features i mentioned before and since our goal is to enter this new market I would measure the improvements on the mobile app by looking at the number of downloads daily weekly and monthly active users and the retention rate and i think we can also track the amount of time that it takes to users to discover our new feature that can also help us identify whether there are any issues in the ux and how we implemented this feature and while there are other metrics that we can use to track success in the mobile app these are just a few metrics to get us started if you're interested we can talk more about different metrics.` At this stage, we are all done with the product case/sense question. Pat yourself on the back! :) If you want to leave an impression, you can ask the interviewer and quickly summarize the question, the goal, the product, the user segment you worked with, the pain points and improvements, the prioritzation you did and the metrics to track success of your improvements. --- Homework: Do some research on what are the most common or the most basic metrics to track for these different technologies that you might talk about. ![[Product Sense Framework.png]]