If you’re in the middle of Product Sense interview prep, few things are more important than identifying solid pain points. To excel, you need to focus on the issues that matter most to the customer group you’ve chosen. Instead of simply evaluating which pain points have the most “impact” or “reach,” imagine yourself playing a round of Family Feud, where the category is the pain points of your selected customer group.

The dreaded “biggest failure” question is a staple of interviews, especially in product management. It’s tempting to approach it with a safe, generic story about a minor mistake or an early-career misstep. But if you do, you’ll miss a golden opportunity to showcase your growth, responsibility, and product sense.

Should your customer segments be MECE?

If you’re preparing for interviews at companies like DoorDash, Uber, or AirBnB, there’s a common thread running through their questions: paranoia. These companies thrive in high-stakes environments where minor benefits often pale in comparison to the catastrophic risks they must avoid. As a candidate, your ability to think like a product manager at these companies—focusing on identifying and mitigating worst-case scenarios—will set you apart.

When I work with candidates on success measurement interview cases, I often encounter two types of metrics: action-based metrics, like the total number of content views per day, and people-based metrics, like the total number of unique viewers per day. Both sound similar, but these two approaches provide vastly different insights into product health and engagement.

Take the case of Laura, a candidate preparing for a product management role at a well-known tech company. Laura’s task was to evaluate the success of a video-sharing platform, and she instinctively proposed measuring success by tracking unique viewers per day. “It’s logical,” she reasoned. “We want more people viewing our content, so more unique viewers means we’re growing!”

When tackling a product design interview, one of the key questions that often comes up is: Should I focus on multiple pain points, or just one?

The traditional advice is to pick one pain point and focus on solving it thoroughly. But this isn’t always the most intuitive approach, especially when you’re faced with a new platform or product, and there are a variety of issues that seem to need attention. Let’s break this down.

Interview responses are full of common tropes. You've probably seen them in interview preparation videos all the time. Today, we're going to talk about one of the most prominent of these, the clarification questions. These typically are added at the very beginning of case interview questions, taking up a lot of attention right from the start.

But are these questions useful? Do they improve your chances of getting an offer? And are you asking the right questions?

Let’s face it — there’s no universally agreed-upon definition for guardrails versus countermetrics.

Clear, functional customer segments form the foundation of a good product sense or product design interview.

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.

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.