Define customer segments with Archetypes
Clear, functional customer segments form the foundation of a good product sense or product design interview.
Picture this. You’re a candidate for a product management role at Google and you’re doing your 6th product design mock interview of the day. Once again, you’ve come to the solution section and realize that you can’t think of a single good idea. “It’s already what’s out there,” you think. “I’m just not creative enough to think of this stuff on the fly,” you say.
It might be counter-intuitive but the issue is probably not your creativity. Your solution was just a product of your pain points, which in turn stemmed from the customer groups you defined at the beginning.
Let’s learn how to avoid this by using a deceptively simple segmentation technique which I call “Archetypes”.
Reduce Case Interview rambling with Triple Anchors
Public speaking is hard, especially when you have little prepared in advance. Take a case interview, for instance. With so much to cover, there’s plenty of room to ramble and confuse both yourself and your interviewer.
For cases, it’s helpful to have a structure for your answer. In a product design interview, that structure is goal → people → pain points → solutions. Candidates practicing this style of interview memorize this structure and step through it methodically, being sure to only talk about “people” things in the people section. This structure reminds the interviewer to include all the content needed for the answer and organize that content into easy-to-follow sections with a clear purpose.
For most candidates, that’s as far as “structure” goes. Of course, it’s just as easy to omit important details and ramble when discussing things at the paragraph level as it is at the section level. It’s even easier when stepping through a series of related ideas, such as in a list.
If this is a problem you have, you can use a technique that we at Product Simply call the Triple Anchor. It’s designed to give structure to the smaller ideas in your discussion and ensure that your content is comprehensive and well-organized.
How to reliably define a product goal for a design case
Goal definition remains a challenge for a lot of candidates. In this discussion, we’ll talk about what makes a good goal, how to put one together, and how to weave it into the rest of your interview.
