Ask HN: How to pass a “Product Sense” interview? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to pass a “Product Sense” interview?

18 pointscgb2236 comments

I'm a Product Manager who's been applying for jobs recently and have had a good amount of interest from companies that I would be excited to work for.

Each time I make it through the initial recruiter interview, then the casual chat with a PM, and then fail at the "Product Sense" portion of the interview.

Now, I'm not new to being a PM, I've been operating in a Senior role at a Big-N tech company for 5 years, and over the course of that time brought multiple products from 0 to 1 to v2.0 that has netted us high 9 figures.

So I'm in this weird place where I know I'm a decent enough PM, but for whatever reason the structure of the interview just isn't conducive for me showing my best self.

These interviews are very open ended.

The interviewer will suggest a hypothetical product or market that a hypothetical company wants to be successful in, and asks how you'd go about building that product, getting information about that market, and how you would prioritize features based on information you discover....and that's it, then its just up to you the interviewee to ask questions, discern information, and try and make calls. The interviewer will often not give specific answers to your questions at all, so you have to make up your own answers, and then build on those.

For whatever reason, my questions, answers, and plans (most of which come from my real life experience) dont seem to be satisfactory.

How do I do better at these?

There isn‘t really a correct answer for these type of questions. My best guess is that either this is chance and you just need more interviews or that you are applying for a different stage of company where processes are different. I have interviewed a fair amount of PMs for early stage startups. If you want to do a 20-30m mock-interview (with only that question) then I am happy to provide honest feedback. My email is in my bio.

I agree. The answers are all subjective. And sometimes even if you give good answers, if you dont project an aura of confidence, it might sound like a guess. Just keep interviewing

I happen to be really good at passing the product sense part of PM interviews. There's a bit too much to cram into a single comment, but the general outline is:

A - make sure to really understand the question, the constraints. Write down the question, and ask about every word. Have a cheat sheet of questions to ask. E.g. what's the timeline, what's the target OS, what's the goal, etc.

B - segment the different possible users. Use MECE for this. The more insight the better.

C - pick a segment and explain why, e.g. not well served by the market. As a bit of a trick pick a community that's generally not well served. Never segment on age, that's boring.

D - segment their pain points, again using MECE.

E - pick a pain point, describe why.

F - brainstorm solutions, pick one, explain why. Make sure to only pick one!

G - talk about how you'd measure success.

... and there you go. There are lots of online services that can give you practice. I used Exponent, seemed reasonable. It's not crazy to spend $50-100 bucks to get better at this given the return.

> Now, I'm not new to being a PM, I've been operating in a Senior role at a Big-N tech company for 5 years

How did you get your current job? Have you interviewed other PMs as part of it?

There's lots of PM material out there like Cracking the PM Interview for example, and many youtube videos on how to answer product questions.

Some things which worked for me:

- Align on how he perceives success. It can be a framework or Metrics. This thing will help you always align with the person at any point of time. If the topic deviates, you can always use the success definition as a point to bring the discussion back to track.

- Having multiple perspective. This helps you build holistic thinking around product and builds confidence in the conversation - Engineering, Business, Finance(Unit economics), Marketing etc shows that you can work across the teams and structure

This is obviously a very wild guess, but could it be that what works for Big-N doesn't work for these smaller companies you apply to?

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