Win the Product Manager job

interview course notes

Module 1: Intro

Basics:

• Every job interview is a learning experience

• You have nothing to lose, you can only get experience and grand price – the offer

• You will fail, and fail a lot, and that’s ok. This course will help you fail less and learn from it

• Never build expectations nor hype, also don’t judge your performance until you get feedback

• You are in a loop of learning and performing better on your next job interview

• Remember, your mental goal is not get hired – your mental goal is to learn/rehears as much
as possible

• Thus, getting further into the process is a win

• Getting 2nd place is a win

• You need patience and understanding for yourself – stress, overanalyzing and thinking you
could have done better will give you disservice

General philosophy of answering:

• Often, there won’t a right or wrong answer

• Some questions actually ask for a different thing than they appear to. This course will help
with that.

• Be wary of time and structure. Like any good story, there should be a quick intro, core
answer and summary

• It’s very often not about the answer itself, but about your way of thinking – was is most
important for you when facing specific product challenge

• Try to keep a reply time between 7 and 10 minutes long.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for:

• Pen and paper

• Time to think

• Details if you have doubts

 • Be ready to be interrupted – It’s good, it means the interviewer heard what she/he wanted
to hear

• Since you have a set of questions, practice your answers in your free time in front of a mirror

• Try to ignore the face, the humor and your gut feeling on whether you are doing good or
bad. Focus on giving your best!

• Lean a little, don’t be afraid to make eye contact. Be relaxed, open your arms. Appear
comfortable – you are not there to be impress. It’s just a meeting to determine if you are a
match or not.

• Try to stay high level when replying, no time to dig into details/edge cases

• Be internally coherent with your answer

Facing a question, you were not ready for

• Don’t panic!

• Don’t rush the answer

• Ask yourself high-level questions about the problem you are facing:

• Does meet the mission/vision of the company?

• Who are the users?

• What are their needs?

• What do they want?

• What is the value to the user?

• What solution can I build that will address this problem

• Why this company?

• Where is the innovation?

• Is it practical?

• How much will it cost?

• Maybe it’s a question you practiced for, but in a different setting/users?

• Avoid details and edge cases to your answers

• Focus on the big picture

• Don’t rush to a solution – understand the problem and whether it’s worth solving

• Be data driven – figure out the metrics needed to measure the solution and data needed
initially
Job interview behavior

• Keep energy level and hand gestures on a medium level

• Lean slightly towards the person you are talking to

• Try to stay relaxed

• It’s ok not to know an answer

• Share a partial answer if you have one

• Take your time and focus on a test task if one is presented

• Never badmouth your previous employer

• Focus on the positive motivations

• Keep professional

• Even a bad interview might turn into a hire

• Brace to fail

• Make sure to receive feedback on your application

• Learn from each interview

HR/Salary

• Be chilled, be ready to answer about your availability (notice period), salary expectations
(NET!!! State Gross only if you are switching countries and didn’t investigate the tax situation
in next country. Make sure that gross amount is put on record if so).

• If job is in different country and you’d rather not relocate, talk about it ASAP

• Don’t stress about online culture/personality quizzes – no way really to prepare for them and
that’s OK

• Some basic PM question my pop up

Module 2: Career questions

Question 1: Tell me about yourself

• Real question: Tell me why you believe you fit into this company,

• To prepare for this, research the company and company’s culture

• Find aspects of your character and things you do that would match the company

• Same goes for company’s vision and values

Question 2: Tell me about your career

• Real question here: Tell us how your experience makes you a great candidate for this
position

• DON’T TELL YOUR PROFFESIONAL LIFE STORY

• Just like on resume, focus on maximum 3 last position, with biggest emphasis on the ones
that match the job ads’ requirements

• You can open with talking about your initial career track AS A LIST, nothing more

• Have job requirements in front of you (in imagination) and filter your career through them
(you have to match them since you are on a job interview)

• No need to explain your companies/products, focus on your responsibilities/impact

• You can mention your biggest success or moments that you feel were key to your career

• Don’t waste too much time here, keep it short and perhaps slightly entertaining.

• Focus on the positives – don’t mention the mistakes or bad managers that perhaps at some
point drove your career

Question 3: Why Product management?

• If you were asked about yourself, it would be great to somewhat relay that to why you like
Product management

• Avoid answers about cash, career – you know, the honest one

• I’d suggest saying something about positive effect to the users and ability to shape a little
part of the world

• Perhaps something about leadership and uniting people

• For me, it’s about trying hard to improve something and then having the thrill of seeing it
working by looking at the numbers

• Presenting enthusiasm and good energy with this question will go a long way. There should
be no doubt or hesitation here

• It can be personal, but try to put an inspiration vibe to it

Question 4: Who is a Product manager?

• Real question: Are you going to be OK with the Product Management duties we envisioned

• Some companies will want a PM, some pm and some a program manager – a mixture of both

• You should adjust your answer to the requirements of the job – saying PM doesn’t pm will
jeopardize your position

• Definition: „A Product manager leads a product that solves a problem, in a measurable way,
using a team of talented individuals and technology in order to deliver smiles (value)”
 • Textbook responsibilities:

• Shaping Product vision, strategy and goals

• Deciding what to build in the product (what problems to solve) and in which order

• Conducting research that justifies his/her choices

• Set and measure success criteria of the developed items

• Listening to users and clients and reacting to feedback

• Be on a constant look for new market opportunities

• Leading teams without authority

• Carrying for the financial health of the product

Question 5: What is your biggest success?

• Real question: What did you learn from your biggest success

• Success as big as it’s possible, show data proving it was success

• Outline the story of your contribution to the success

• It would be best if this was outside your regular scope of work

• Avoid stories where you put gigantic overtime

• Best to highlight your intelligence and being relentless rather than ones you worked your ass
off for others (Why didn’t you delegate this task?)

• What did you learn from it/teach others? Did it start something new in your previous
company?

Question 6: What is your biggest failure?

• Real question: What did you learn from your biggest failure

• Try not to highlight the actual biggest failure, perhaps you have some mediocre one to
present

• Be honest and not „sneaky” – don’t present someone else’s failure and you simply didn’t
prevent it.

• It’s about your failure

• Focus on what you learnt and what you would have done better?

• Perhaps this learning helped you prevent similar issues in the future? What was the gain?

• With biggest stress, it’s very similar, but you can choose a situation where you managed to
avoid failure in the final moments.
Question 7: How did your break into Product Management?

• Real question: Why Product Management and what skills you believe a PM has to have (and
you have acquired them)

• Similar to „Tell me about your career”

• Focus more on skills and PM experience you have acquired (and how data to back it up)
rather than tell your education/career story

• Spend a second if you had some learning decisions (i.e. 7k$ Product School course vs 15$ my
course) and how those decision panned out later

• Core skills to highlight:

• Data analysis and data driveness

• Problem identification focus

• A/B testing

• Examples of leadership

• Finding consensus, resolving conflicts, reaching a goal

• Backlog management / input

• Strategy/Vision management / input

• Roadmap management/ input

• Communication

Question 8: What makes a great product?

• Start with high level

• This is question without a single correct answer

• I would say that a good product is one that is appreciated by users (high NPS, 4.7+ reviews)
while maintaining healthy financial situation that allows growth and innovation

• However, going lower, a great product is one that can solve a problem it has set to solve
while being accessible

• You can add, that, „as a hopeless romantic”, it would be nice to look if a great product has
positive effect on their users and community

• An example here would be Google maps. Great, not perfect, accessible, financially healthy,
helps people get where they want effectively, helps business being discovered, helps to
consume less oil, keeps developing and innovating
Question 9: Why are you changing jobs?

• Real question: Can you reassure me you won’t leave us too early/are you a reasonable
person?

• Never talk bad stuff about your previous company/manager

• Focus on the positives: you wish to develop your skills/career further, but it’s not possible in
your current job

• You didn’t plan it, but the offer/product is worth to change the plans/recruiter convinced me
it’s worth a shot

• If you mention that you are leaving due to problems with your current position, you may be
driven to a corner: „What did you do to fix this issue?”

• I once heard the candidate manage to escape this corner, but no need to be put there in the
1st place

• If you are a job hopper, try to find a good reason for it, but it might not be a factor

Question 10: Why our company?

• Real question: „Did you invest time to prepare for this job interview”

• Reasons:

• I’m a fan of the company/product

• Company has high rating on „worth to work for” list

• Working for you appears to be a prestige/great learning possibility/opens the

possibilities for my future career growth

• I look for a challenge/change of industry as a PM and your company/product looks to

offer it

• Never talk about money or getting promoted -> if this is your primary motivation, keep it
hidden on Product interviews

• You can mention the product/company mission resonates with

• Perhaps the product/company was important for you at some point, and you’d love to be a
part of it?

Question 11: What changes would you make to our existing/your favorite product?

• Real question: Where would you look for sources of ideas to the product

• It is in bad tone to jump directly to an improvement idea

• Say you would dive into analytics, create, or evaluate the product funnel and try to identify
biggest drops in conversion which you would like to understand
 • Mention researching what was already tried and what ideas are there in the
company/backlog already

• Perhaps organize a brainstorming/design sprint activity to identify such a change

• Only after being interrupted or there is a follow-up about actual change, can you answer a
question directly

• Be modest – you are just a single user with a single idea, it’s not how PMs work

• Start with addressing the problem / pain point you observed and propose a set of 3-4
solutions based on your experience and general product knowledge and creativity

• Now, that is super imporatnt to give a few ideas: At least one them may resonate with the
interviewer

• It will also naturally lead to a „How would you evaluate which idea to pursue” and it’s a
question you can be easily ready for. You have now taken the stearing wheal secretly

Question 12: What do our competitors do better than us?

• Real question: „Did you invest time to prepare for this job interview in regard to the whole
market”

• Again, be humble – without access to product/market data and user interviews/feedback, it’s
not possible to know if the competition is doing something better

• Again – just like with the previous situation you can start by saying what would you do to
establish an answer

• User interviews, meeting with the support stuff, sales figures, comments and reviews (some
of that you can do as part of the interview prep), public articles, public competitors’ sales
figures

• If interrupted or ask directly, you can move on to what you think they do better – Phrase it as
a hypothesis that would require proving

Question 13: How would your first 90 days here look like?

• Focus on learning and meeting the right stakeholders

• You want to be able to jump to real work asap

• You’d rather be „on the field of battle” and learn on the fly, being helped by the team and
people around

• Read all available documentation, understand the current vision and strategy

• Start taking over the backlog soon – clean if needed

• Setup regular 1:1s with stakeholders that require that

• Evaluate the process and if needed, propose gradual changes

 • Understand the data structure and learn analytical suite. First month’s goal: Create your own
tracking dashboard with most relevant data

• Start looking for ways to improve the teams/company outside your regular duties, if there is
enough time for that

Question 14: How would you help your team grow?

• Evaluate the process and if needed, propose gradual changes

• Understand the data structure and learn analytical suite. First month’s goal: Create your own
tracking dashboard with most relevant data

• Start looking for ways to improve the teams/company outside your regular duties, if there is
enough time for that

• Start by actively participating in retro meetings – if they are not a part of the process, add
them asap

• Identify the core missing skills and weaker parts of the development and/or product team

• Lead by example – don’t tell people what to do; Show them!

• Look for the rights way to do it – invest into courses, lead them yourselves or simply
experiment sprint by sprint – LISTEN A LOT

• Make sure that all of that is done once the team trusts me and has confidence in my skills

• Jumping to changes might cause pushback. It’s better to be in a situation people want to
learn from you, not force them on the team

Module 3 - Typical Product Management scenarios

Question 15: What are the essential things to be taken into account before creating a product
roadmap?

• Business/product situation: Start-up? Pre-lauch? Developing? Corporate?

It’s good to start with defining/reviewing goals/strategy

• Next, I would advise to decide on feature/metric and/or OKR based roadmap

• OKR based roadmap in my opinion makes the most sense

• Next, regardless of the type of roadmap, I would decide on the goals the roadmap, and by
extend the team, need to achieve

• Next, I would check with Stakeholders/ToDo list/Legal compliance if there aren’t any
dependencies that need to be addressed. Separate – fixing cookie situation or adjusting to a
new law sounds like a lame goal

• This includes technical improvements/tech dept work that the dev team should be able to
request
 • Bonus: Building a roadmap:

• (KPI/OKRs) – decide when to work on those, present the rough ideas on how to
achieve those OKRs

• (Feature) – decide when to work on specific features

• Run the draft of the roadmap with the team, make high level estimation, get team’s
support – might be needed on the goal defining level too

• Prepare impact hypothesis for each item

• Request early/rough visual aids

• Put it all together

Question 16: Where do you find ideas for a product/product improvement?

• Your stakeholders

• Helpdesk staff and the support tickets

• Client interviews

• User comments

• News/blogs/website research

• Competitors/semi-competitors

• Company/Team brainstorming sessions/Design sprints

• Hackatons

• Own creativity

Question 17: How do you turn those ideas into reality?

• Start with writing a draft epic

• User story

• Impact Hypotesis

• Tracking draft

• Requirements draft

• Present the epic to the team – identify the milestones, rough estimate, plan + milestones and
decencies (design, APIs, etc.)
Question 18: How do you prioritize your backlog?

• Things to consider during prioritization:

• Direct metrics’ growth

• Preventing probable future drop in metrics

• Ability to track the impact of the work

• Growing stakeholders’ trust

• Increasing the speed of development

• Improving morale and joy at work

• Complying with regulations

• Finding the right perspective

Question 19: When would you say a product design is complete/MVP is ready?

• Difficult question, can depend on the person you are talking to

• This is a dilemma similar to crafting a perfect MVP

• Too little work and your experiment won’t give you the right answer

• Too much and you lost time and resources on excessive work

• Thus, I suggest starting with agreeing with the designer/design the requirements of the
design that needs to be crafted

• Those requirements should represent the state of the product which you believe will allow
you, as the PM, test your product impact hypothesis
 • You can mention about setting a deadline and frequent check-ins

• Alternative – you can setup team design review sessions and look for a democratic
stakeholder consent on when the design resonates with the crowd

• Final alternative – you can organize user testing with users/clients/employees and ask them
to use/mock prototype and observe their behavior. Make a decision based on that.

Question 20: You have a great idea for your product that appears to require at least 6 full sprints of
your team's work. What do you do?"

• Real question: How do you justify and communicate big work investments to stakeholders

• Most important: make sure you really need those 6 sprints with the team. Maybe there is a
smart way to test it quicker?

• Just a sanity step, this question presumes 6 weeks, and it won’t be less, if anything: more

• In that case you need data to prove it’s the best investment you can take in that time

• Have a strong research and impact hypothesis, for other backlog items as well

• Make sure it’s easy for stakeholders to access and understand the data, make clean and easy
announcement via tried and tested channels

• Try to include some visualizations, links to tracking dashboards, etc. – full transparency

• Harder version of this question: what if no data to proof your decision is available

• If so, you are probably not that likely to make such a call unless everything in the backlog
looks as mysterious and uncertain, which it should never be the case

• PMs job is looking for the best value, with minimal investment and risk. With such input
parameters the investment and risk are both high.

Question 21: How do you choose product metrics?

• This isn’t an easy question to lead, as all products are different

• In general: ask yourself what the products aims to achieve, how it’s doing it and how would
you measure if it is successful

• If you are being asked about the product you are interviewing for a position for, you can start
by asking about vision/strategy of the product. Better yet, you can bring it up if you found it
during your investigation

• Figure out the metrics that would describe numerically progress on that vision/strategy – if
possible. I.e., this wouldn’t work for Skype’s vision, but strategy is easily metric originating

• If not, you can go through the basic general well-known metrics and see if the fit well with
the product you are considering:

•
 • MAU

• WAU

• LTV

• CPA

• Session number/session length

• Number of registered/paid users (in relation to non-paid)

• Monthly income/revenue

• NPS

• App rating

• This is a selection of quite universal top-level metrics. However, just speaking abbreviations
is not what you want to do

• Instead select a metric or few and figure our what metrics would contribute to a selected
metric

• Glovo/Grubhub/Zomato – LTV -> number of orders per user per month + average worth of
order + expected time user will use the app

Question 22: How do you determine whether the product launch is successful?

• Similar question to the previous one with additional points

• Establish vision + strategy

• Consider soft launch or marketing push -> in that case marketing campaign cost
(CPA) will also influence if the product is successful.

• Select the metrics to measure the success

• Usage and engagement

• Monitor technical aspects of the launch

• Monitor initial opinions feedback

• You could create a metric of launch (day 1, day 3, day 7, etc.):

• Main metrics

• Technical metrics

• CPA

• Rating

• Retention

• Main product funnel visualization

Question 23: How would you price a new product?

• I like to start by looking at how the competitors charge and whether we can charge more for
a better offer value (perhaps start with charging the same or less for a better deal).

• In fact, charging initially less is simply a marketing/acquisition cost. It’s the upsell when you
can get your money back. Whether it is by additional services/products or by charging full
price in the next payment period

• You can impress by figuring out how to charge clients:

• Onetime payment for lifetime access

• Annual/monthly fee

• Free access with certain limits locked under a paywall

• Ads based monetization

• (For games) item/cosmetics shop (can go on top of other payment schemes)

• Things will get trickier, if the interviewer tells you that CEO just needs a number and you
don’t have competitors as a point of reference

• Few angles:

• Look for industry standards (like gaming industry)

• Cost per user (with marketing) + margin

• “Thing is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it” – perhaps A/B test in sign
up or Ask users in a poll/discovery process

Question 24: How would you communicate a release delay?

• Do it as fast as the delay is highly probable, but not yet confirmed

• This is building expectations and won’t take your stakeholders by surprise

• Be transparent on the reasons and consequences, but use language people will understand
(dumb it down)

• No finger pointing, it’s a team’s fail including yours, regardless of if you really had anything to
do with it

• If comms channel permits (video call, meeting) see if you can offer an alternative, i.e. timely
release with worse UX/UI or missing features

• However, stress that you have a recommendation

• Don’t put the burden of interpreting the option to the senior stakeholder/client

• You don’t want a situation where your limited alternative backfires and you will have a
manager scapegoat. Thus, offer alternatives you believe in, not ones technically possible
 • Promise (a search for) improvements in the process that will allow to avoid similar issue in
the future

Question 25: What makes a great MVP?

• Great MVP can confirm or disprove your Product hypothesis at the lowest possible
investment

• Invest too little time/effort and MVP won’t be able to answer the hypothesis. A great
business idea might be wasted cause MVP was poorly chosen or not polished enough

• Invest too much and you wasted time where product could already produce return on
investment or at the very least prove (disprove) further investment has merit

• You may notice I am avoiding specifics here. That is because different products/features will
need different MVPs. Some will take WELL OVER a year to develop, some of them will be
rather quick. Say, if you want to see if there is an interest in a certain new option in your
product, you can always develop an “Error MVP”. Add the new option in your product’s UX,
but when clicked it shows an error message: “This is not yet available in your region” or
something like that.

Question 26: How do you earn your stakeholders trust?

• Provide frequent, honest an open communication about the product

• Don’t lie and avoid difficult topic

• Share your future plans

• Keep your promises

 • Provide a platform which stakeholders can use to voice their opinions (and react to them) -
can be an email

• Acknowledge real issues and provide meaningful response

Question 27: How do you lead without authority?

• Find the time for your team

• Be transparent

• Keep your promises

• Listen to their needs, acknowledge their requests

• Don’t put yourself above your team

• Be sure to admit error and course correct

• Put great attention and detail to the documents you create for your team

• Never assume that any change is trivial

• Help your team reach their goals

• Never point fingers, take one for the team when needed

• Share the success

• Use the „we” narration

• Preview the team’s work results to them

Question 28: How do you deal with senior level stupid request?

• There are 4 options

• Reject and face consequence

• Ask for data proving stakeholders’ points

• Ask for time and schedule a follow-up

• Just agree and have it over with

• Options 2 and 3 appear best, and if stakeholder is Zebra (Zero evidence but really arrogant)
then 3 is the only option

• Prep a meeting showing the results of your investigation

• Show the backlog and the planned work and the value it is supposed to bring

• Stakeholder will either still disagree or will see the light

• Depending on his authority he/she can then push (or not) his decision

• If he can do it and does, don’t emanate frustration and make a bad boogieman out of him
 • Try to deal with the request quickly and if this keeps happening, consider open 1:1 comms
(“Did I give you any reason not to trust me and do my job?”) or escalation with skip level
manager

Question 29: How do get convince your team to an idea?

• Do the basics correctly: prepare a through, good epic

• Walk them through your research and impact hypothesis

• Where do numbers come from?

• How can they be applied to your product?

• Did anyone try this before? Was it successful?

• Show your idea in the context of currently planned initiatives – show the context of the
possible gain

• You may discover that an idea is a bad one

• Sometimes you will have to work on bad ideas, if say law demands it

• It’s also OK – it’s keeping the product alive!

• If the team is still not convinced find a way to prove you are on the right track at a minimal
cost

• Challenge them to modify your idea so they can believe in it

• In the end, it’s your decision what to take on to the sprint, but it’s way easier with team’s
support

Question 30: Buy or build?

• It’s all about the value estimate and investment needed

• I would like to say that it’s best to start with buying an existing solution and testing out
whatever this solution was meant to achieve

• This way you may spend more money short term, but you will get your value and answers
way quicker without any maintenance overhead

• This can be applied to software or whole products, say mobile app version of your product

• When buying, it’s way easier to back off if the experiment failed

• However, if successful, you can decide how can you optimize your long-term
profits/scalability/adaptability to suit your needs

• In that case you will have the investment gain clear, and you can hire/create a dedicated
team.
 • Of course, the purchased solution might be enough and will be too expensive to switch to a
custom one

Question 31: What are good strategies for growth?

MARKET PENETRATION

The aim of this strategy is to increase sales of existing products or services on existing markets, and
thus to increase your market share. To do this, you can attract customers away from your
competitors and/or make sure that your own customers buy your existing products or services more
often. This can be accomplished by a price decrease, an increase in promotion and distribution
support; the acquisition of a rival in the same market or modest product refinements.

MARKET DEVELOPMENT

This means increasing sales of existing products or services on previously unexplored markets.
Market expansion involves an analysis of the way in which a company's existing offer can be sold on
new markets, or how to grow the existing market. This can be accomplished by different customer
segments ; industrial buyers for a good that was previously sold only to the households; New areas
or regions about of the country ; Foreign markets

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The objective is to launch new products or services on existing markets. Product development may
be used to extend the offer proposed to current customers with the aim of increasing their turnover.
These products may be obtained by: Investment in research and development of additional products;
Acquisition of rights to produce someone else's product; Buying in the product and "branding"
it; Joint development with ownership of another company who need access to the firm's distribution
channels or brands.

DIVERSIFICATION

This means launching new products or services on previously unexplored markets. Diversification is
the riskiest strategy. It involves the marketing, by the company, of completely new products and
services on a completely unknown market.

Also, collect other Products’ growth stories to tell

Question 32: How do you keep stakeholders updated?

• Great communication is all about finding the right words to say to the right people at the
right time

• Thus, it’s all about mapping the stakeholders and planning the communications they require

• Next, decide the frequency, granularity, and time horizon of the updates

• Types of stakeholders:

• Users/clients

• Management
 • Development team

• Other teams (i.e. marketing)

• Investors

• Suppliers and Vendors

• Communities

• Goverment

• Types of communication:

• Emails (weekly/monthly)

• Webinars/presentations

• In person meetings

• Social network posts (internal/external)

• Communicator board posts (like Skype)

Question 33: How would you deal with a sudden drop in an important metric?

• There are a few steps to investigate this:

• Start with analyzing the product’s funnel. You need so see where the drop occurred

• If the shape of the funnel is unchanged, but the initial step has decreased you may be looking
at:

• Broken marketing (broken link?) / Bad press / Scandal

• Failed marketing

• New competitor

• Competitor’s push / Negative campaign

• Landing page/beginning of the funnel not working

• You may be facing previously unknown seasonality or bank holiday(s) on your key markets

• If however the drop occurs later in the funnel you may be looking at

• New bug/issue

• Failed increment

• API problems

• New OS/browser update that breaks your product

• You may be facing:

• Failed increment
 • API/partner/vendor issues problems

• New OS/browser update that breaks your product

• New laws/policies

• Filtering the funnel by OS/version or combination of those may uncover that the funnel was
broken for only a specific combination

• Ask client support for hints on where the problem may be hidden

Module 4 - Case studies

Question 34: How would you build a car for blind people?

• Start with a problem: Provide independent and safe transportation for blind people at a
minimal cost with ongoing availability

• MVP: Uber app with voice control, though you don’t owe a car, you are dependent from uber
drives, additional cost

• Tricky question: Is there a market that justifies the investment? Probably not, but most of the
inclusivity products/features are made out of compassion, not business logic

• Unique blind drivers’ issues:

• No vision of road

• No visual memory of where the car parked

• No ability to know cars’ status or speed

• Lack of knowledge of the area of your destination

• More… ?

• Solutions:

• Control: voice assitant + AI Driving

• App needs to guide to your car, be able to open doors and be synched with any
electric gates on the way

• Car needs to be able to take instruction on where to go and also make

recommendations based on its status, i.e.. Re-fueling, maintanance

• Phone synched with app needs to be able to tell you where you are and how long
until you will arrive, etc.

• Consider partnering with Google assistant/Siri not to rework already good solutions

• Car needs to be able to park on the handicap spot for you

• Car needs to open the doors so that you don’t hit a wall/other car
 • Finally, the phone needs to be able to guide you where you need to go exactly and
then back to your car

• Probably there are a few more issues, but this should be good

Question 35: Explain the cloud to a child

• Real question: Show me your communication skills. I want to know if you can easily relay
information OR show me you understand the Cloud itself

• This will have different version of technologies/products to explain, and it can have
kids/elderly people version

• In both cases there are few key focuses in this question:

• Make sure your hypothetical child/elder understands the technology’s value first

• In both cases there are few key focuses in this question:

• Use a metaphor close to the child

• Avoid any technical jargon

• Clear out any misconception coming from the name of the technology

• Cloud – nothing to do with sky or actual clouds

• Imagine you have drawn a fearsome lion

• At the same time the same lion is being drawn for you somewhere else, in fact few places
and is kept hidden and safe. Only you know about the copies and can use them

• Now, say you want to show the lion in your preschool, but you forgot the drawing at home

• This is where you can ask “the cloud” to restore the drawing for you so you can show it in the
preschool

Question 36: How many Google searches are done every minute?

• Other typical questions like this:

• How many people are currently online in Europe?

• How many windows are in New York City?

• How many iPads are sold in the USA every year?

• How much money is spent in the USA per year on GAS?

• How would you go about finding out the number of red cars in China?

• If you want to build the world’s most popular mobile messaging product, and you need to
estimate how much network bandwidth would be used in a year. How would you go about
doing this?

• Real question: “Show me how your mind works when estimating stuff”
 • While initially scary, this question is actually easy, as it doesn’t require you to produce an
actual real answer

• In fact you make numbers up as you go, as long as it is done with confidence

• Use phrases like “I believe”, “I recall”, “I think I read somewhere that”, “as far as I
remember” about the numbers you will be giving to one the one hand sound like you know
what you are doing, but at the same time admit those numbers can be (way) off

• You need to build a number funnel

• Say 8B people, 70% has access to the internet (~6B), Google is the 2nd most used site in the
world and has 85% of search market share (5B), average person spends 5h (25B) in the
internet per day. I would assume that in that time one uses the search 1 every 2-3h (25*2,
25*3), be it directly or via google maps or other similar services.

• So every day we would be having 50 - 75 B searches, so around 2B-3B per hour, so /60 gives
us 33-60 M searches per minute

• In actuality: 4M/minute

Question 37: Boss wants you to make a new product on a hunch. What do you do?

• This is a classic: Do not jump onto solution case

• Instead, I spend maybe 15 minutes devising ways to determine what features old landline
phones cover and how any new product/tech can be an upgrade that might change into a
profitable business

• I first made sure I got the request right, asked for many data („Why to you believe this is a
problem worth approaching?”, „Do we have any data?”)

• My speaker was intentionally (I believe) difficult with no answers to (probably) tricking me

into brainstorming solutions mode

• There was no obvious problem to fix

• I ended up on:

• Listing user personas: different types of hotel guests and staff

• Proposing a user research/discovery to determine how those personas use the

landlines, what limits they see and what more would they need to do between a
client and hotel staff

Question 38: How would you grow a respected fridge business?

• The way I approached this is by looking for industry that appreciates when the quality really
justifies the price

• There isn’t a single good answer here and my reply is just an inspiration

• I have gone with a car manufacturing business

 • Looking at how Toyota took the market basically by marketing their reliability without crazy
prices

• I believe this would also be easy to verify with a controlled rumor

• Let the press and internet speak up ahead of time whether an car produced by a famous
fridge factory would be welcomed with patronizing jokes or with excitement. Both are
equally possible

• Look at Elon Musk’s history. From PayPal to Tesla to SpaceX.

• Without looking at the person himself, his brands have a reputation which he uses to build
more of them (i.e., Boring company)

• As I got the job, I believe I have chosen the answer and arguments my speaker appreciated

Question 39: How would you justify the "verified" feature in Twitter?

• I focused on the value for the users and building company’s integrity and reputation and
thus, value for the business

• With the „verified” feature you can be sure users can trust the platform to connect them to
the content creators they wish to follow, not the usurpers

• This also protects company from:

• Lawsuits due to bad moderation

• Loss of confidence

• Being a host for potential scammers

• Long term success of the company

• Save money by having less false account reports

• Next element of this question focused on how to validate and measure the success of the
feature

• This one is tricky, as this change doesn’t really produce any immediate gain. It’s a future long
term protection

• Long term, north star metric would be, for me, LTV, or more precisely long term engagement
of the user

• I believe with this change it is more likely for a user to stick with Twitter, though we are
talking changing days into years for certain people

• The more short-term metric one could use here is:

• Number of fake/usurper account/scam reports (getting lower)

• Feature adoption (% of accounts with a certain number of followers rises)

• Number of negative client feedback due this issue (should go down from current
level and lower over time as more content creators become verified)
 • Number of fake/usurper account/scam reports (getting lower)

• Feature adoption (% of accounts with a certain number of followers rises)

• Number of negative client feedback due this issue (should go down from current
level and lower over time as more content creators become verified)

Question 40: Would you add podcasts to Facebook?

• This is about you making a call whether to add this to backlog, you should not craft solutions
nor speculate on implementations

• As you are in a job interview and can’t do real research, I propose you make a hypothesis
that this should or shouldn’t be added to Facebook

• Be sure to add clarifying questions:

• Here is where I advis you take a breather to think. Perhaps ask for 5 minutes to think and
take notes

• It might be a good list to create a „for” and „against” list and make your hypothesis based on
that

• Before that ask yourself (or the interviewer) – what is the current mission/vision of
meta/Facebook? Is there any strategy implemented to achieve that mission vision? Does
adding a podcast functionality align to it

• Moreover, ask yourself what Facebook problem is being solved with adding podcasts? Is
there even one that is being solved with this feature.

• What value would it bring and does it relate with value already associated with Facebook

• Would that be better than what competitors offer (Spotify, YouTube, etc.)

• Is there an appealing new monetization opportunity (India treats FB like internet)?

• What are the Facebook user personas for people that would create and listed to such
podcasts? Are they any?

• Pros:

• Similar to successful reels

• Ability to help content creators host yet another form of content

• Can help Group creators to popularize their groups

• Cons:

• It might be a non-successful feature, as it’s a lot of work to get it tested

• Facebook sessions are usually short (double check with the interviewer) and
podcasts require prolonged engagement -> double edge sword

• Facebook already has different branches with lost of features – a new one might be
lost in the crowd
 • Top podcast product, Clubhouse, failed within a year

• Based on the above I would not add Podcast, but it’s my interpretation, you may disagree
and provide a different answer

• It’s all about providing arguments for your answer and finding the right speculatory leads to
prove those arguments

Question 41: Why are there fewer Uber airport drop-offs than pick-ups?

• This question would be you brainstorming different scenarios on why such a thing would
happen and for each you need to complete a set of:

• Scenario’s explanation

• Data that would confirm whether the issue was identified correctly

• Potential solutions to mitigate it

• Solutions impact hypothesis and

• Scenario 1: Too long a wait

• While partner Taxis have dedicated, convenient for customers wait area, Uber need
time to arrive to pick up the client

• Confirmation: on sight inspection

• Action: Sign up Uber cars to the premium waiting location

• Increase in number of Airport pick-ups, increased revenue (depends on the cost of

the premium spot deal)

• Scenario 2: Too big of a risk for drivers

• Too big of a risk for drivers

• Uber drivers cancel airport pick-ups, as clients that order rides ahead of time need
time to leave airport (i.e. luggage pickup) forcing Uber drivers to drive around or pay
parking fee, making this ride potentially costly

• Check average rate of airport pickup driver rejects vs average rate for that city

• Add additional fee to the ride to the client if car waits more than 5 minutes (to cover
the parking fee and driver’s time)

• Increase in number of Airport pick-ups

Question 42: Why did Clubhouse fail?

• Actually, this final course question illustrates how well you know the world of Product
management and whether you read up on the current developments

• The fall of Clubhouse was quite spectacular

• So, in a way, it is a question: „Is Product Management your hobby?”

• Collect product success/failure stories to have good examples for your job interviews and
future PM work! Use a different one if needed

• But why did Clubhouse fail?

• Covid lockdowns eased up

• No revenue model

• Clubhouse didn’t really solve a big enough problem

• Great for high-volume creators, but not everybody else

• No ability to save, download or catch replays of conversations

• The issue of fake gurus and spammers on Clubhouse