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.
Building a Better Structure with Triple Anchors
The Triple Anchor is a simple template for a series of ideas that you need to explain within a broader section. Consider the “people” section of the product design interview. As part of this discussion, candidates must identify groups of people that might make for good target audiences for the product they are designing.
After defining great people groups, candidates have to actually explain to the interviewer what those groups are. Even if they have come up with great content, it won’t land if it’s disorganized, has irrelevant details, and isn’t well-justified. To address this, the Triple Anchor imposes structure on how each of these people groups is described.
As the name implies, the Triple Anchor has three parts. Here’s how it works:
The Triple Anchor is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Label. This is an easy-to-remember 1–2 word phrase (usually a noun) that clearly encapsulates what the idea is all about. The label is important because it makes it easy to refer back to the idea later in the discussion by improving recall by your audience or interviewer. The more memorable and accurate it is, the better the recall.
Description. This is where you explain the key details about the thing you’re talking about, being sure not to overwhelm your audience with extraneous details. The description is important because it gives definition to the idea and sets up later discussion with details that will be used to further your argument.
Why it matters. After describing your idea, you must explain why it is meaningful, important, or worth including so your interviewer can understand your reasoning. Since most candidates don’t do this consistently, doing it yourself will make your arguments clearer and more persuasive than candidates who don’t have a similar approach.
In our article about customer segmentation, we discussed a product design scenario about making an app to buy and sell cars. In that article, we talked about the “Single Mother” and how we can define them effectively. With the Triple Anchor, you can take that content and structure it to make it easy to understand. Here’s how you might do that:
The Single Mother. A single mother is someone who has a very busy schedule with lots of competing priorities, and the last thing they want to do is worry about which car to choose, where to get it, and how to handle the transaction. I think this group might be a great potential audience for our product because in addition to being a common group that might be underserved, the constraints they face in terms of time and stress might make buying or selling cars especially challenging for them.
As you can see, we’ve managed to package the group with a pithy, memorable noun, explain who the group is in human terms, and explain why the group is particularly useful. This Triple Anchor delivers the most important information for advancing the argument in a logical sequence that leaves little doubt that the group might be a reasonable one to choose for further discussion.
Next Steps
Now that you’ve learned how the Triple Anchor works, give it a try in your next mock interview or presentation. You’ll find that the structure is easy to remember and repeatable, which makes it a reliable way to step through a series of ideas even if you haven’t done much preparation.
Give it a try today. How many customer segments can you Triple Anchor for the “buy and sell cars” example? Share your best ones in the comments. Like this post? Give us some claps!
Want to take your skills to the next level? Head to ProductSimply.com and schedule a one-on-one coaching session today.
