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.

Most likely, your problem isn’t coming up with good solutions but rather coming up with good customer groups. In many cases, candidates struggle in this early part of the interview because their groups were overly broad, often as a result of an attempt to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). Usually, this comes along with a lack of people-centric thinking. Once you have a group as large and diverse as “middle aged people,” the likelihood of identifying a pain point that is specific enough to come up with a meaningful solution approaches zero.

If this sounds familiar, I’d like to offer my approach to defining customer groups that more reliably leads to clear pain points and solutions.

Single-Interest Groups: The Key to the Customer Section

So why is ‘middle-aged people’ a poor choice for market segment, anyway?

Let’s imagine what they might expect to see in a product to buy or sell cars. Well, they are middle aged, so they might be single, married, have children, like football, collecting cars, racing cars, be rich, poor, need a car immediately or not at all…

OK, so we have no idea what middle-aged people want. But why? It’s because the group is so diverse that there are few distinguishing characteristics of the group. As a result, we can only identify their needs and pain points as the most generic ones.

In short, a good customer group has well-defined needs and limitations because these characteristics are what result in clear pain points.

That’s where Archetypes come in.

Archetypes for Customer Groups

Archetypes are the Product Simply approach to defining customer groups. An archetype in product design is a relatable and one-dimensional character that embodies a specific need relevant to the product space. They might look like “Single Mother,” the “Socialite,” or the “Firefighter.” They are easy to remember and easy to imagine just from a couple of words.

Note how different these groups are from “middle aged people.” Although they are not MECE, they do have easily identifiable characteristics and elicit an emotion. This allows us to talk about how they might operate within the problem space.

As an example, let’s look at the same problem (“app to buy and sell cars”) through the lens of the Single Mother.

Let’s say that their motivation is to make a smart car buying decision without it adding to her stress — she has a lot on her plate already! This core motivation, without any further elaboration, gives you much of what you need to move forward:

• It’s plausibly a group you might prioritize

• It’s easy to think of reasons why the activity at hand would present difficulties for them

Since we already know the motivation of the Single Mother (make a smart car-buying decision) and her constraints (not enough headspace to think about it) we can more easily think about the things blocking her from getting what she wants. Those are her pain points.

Meanwhile, since we chose a highly evocative and sympathetic character, your interviewer will find it easy to remember the key attributes of your customer group just by hearing the words “Single Mother”. Humanizing your groups demonstrates empathy, which is a critical trait for product management.

Defining Archetypes

Creating archetypes can be approached in two ways: you can maintain a repertoire of stock characters that you “drop” into the problem space, or you can build them from the ground up by piecing together their motivations or constraints.

Let’s go back to the example of an app to buy and sell cars. We “dropped” the single mother into the space and thought about what her motivations and constraints might be. Here’s how that thought process might have looked:

1. The single mother is really busy, so she probably has time constraints

2. Actually, it isn’t really that she has time constraints, it’s that it’s a lot more to worry about

3. She might not be super familiar with cars and researching is time consuming

4. She has a child and might be very sensitive to safety

5. She has a child and no partner, so she might have budget constraints

That’s a lot of motivations, but we don’t include them all in our definition of the Archetype. Instead, we focus on one so that we can make the character clear and also so we can save the other ideas for other archetypes! For example, we can turn the 4th idea into the Value Buyer, and maybe we package time constraints as the “Newly Suburban.” They didn’t need a car when they lived in the city, but now they need one quickly.

Next Steps: Identifying Pain Points

In a future post I’ll explain how to build Archetypes from constraints, and also explain how to build a good customer section microstructure. And of course we will discuss how to define pain points and solutions.

Until then, send us your argument for why these customer groups are effective or not. What customer groups would you use for this question? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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