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”.