In the world of product sense interviews, customer segmentation is a crucial skill. You’re always tasked with defining groups to target with a product, feature, or solution. For many interviewees, the default approach is to use MECE—“mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive”—categories, an approach popularized by management consulting. Many people online insist that customer segments must be MECE. But is this really the best way to segment customers in a product sense interview?

The Problem with MECE in Product Sense Interviews

MECE segmentation has its roots in creating logical, tidy buckets that cover all possibilities without overlap. For example, a MECE segmentation might divide the world by age group: 0-18, 19-35, 36-55, 56+. At first glance, this seems reasonable. However, there are significant drawbacks:

1. MECE Categories Are Arbitrary: Why divide by age? What about people of the same age who have vastly different needs? A 35-year-old urban professional has different priorities than a 35-year-old parent living in the suburbs. Linear variables like age, income, or geography often miss the nuances that drive customer behavior.

2. MECE Lacks Insight into Real Motivations: MECE may tell you who people are but rarely tells you why they do what they do. Understanding customer motivations is far more important for building great products.

3. It Can Lead to Generic Thinking: When you rely on broad, MECE categories, your analysis becomes surface-level. You end up with insights that sound like, “Millennials value convenience,” which is both obvious and unhelpful in an interview.

MECE groupings are most helpful when you don’t have much information about your customers. and you are trying to make inferences based on limited data. Gender, age, and location can help you guess whether someone is who you’re looking for, but in a product sense interview, you don’t need to guess at all.

Why Motivation Matters

In product sense interviews, the goal isn’t to create a flawless taxonomy of the world; it’s to identify groups of people with distinct needs, challenges, and desires that your product can address. Segmenting by motivation helps you do that. In a way, this short circuits the model above—instead of attempting to guess at someone’s motivation by virtue of their demographics, you just choose the group you really want instead.

What Does It Mean to Segment by Motivation?

Rather than dividing people into demographic or geographic categories, think about why they care about the problem space in the first place. For example, if the product is Google Maps with a parking feature:

• Motivated by Convenience: People who don’t want to waste time searching for parking.

• Motivated by Cost: People who need to find affordable parking.

• Motivated by Knowledge: People who don’t know what parking will be like at their destination.

Each of these groups has distinct pain points and behaviors that are meaningful for product design. Once you have identified a motivation based on a constraint, you can fully define the customer segment.

Example: Parking Feature for Google Maps

MECE Segmentation:

• Urban drivers

• Suburban drivers

• Rural drivers

This segmentation is neat and exhaustive, but it’s not helpful. A rural driver may have no parking challenges—groups that would never be picked are not even worth discussing, as they aren’t candidates to be the selected group. Meanwhile two urban drivers might have completely different priorities, making the group overly broad.

Motivational Segmentation:

• Time-Savers: Want to find parking quickly and avoid delays.

• Cost-Conscious: Look for the cheapest parking options available.

• Knowledge Seekers: Need guaranteed spots for critical trips (e.g., airport pickups).

This approach highlights specific pain points and actionable insights, making it easier to prioritize solutions in your response.

Why Motivation-Driven Segmentation Stands Out

1. It Reflects Real-World Product Thinking: Products succeed when they meet people’s needs, not when they fit into tidy categories. Segmenting by motivation demonstrates user empathy and product sense.

2. It Clarifies Pain Points. The constraints that underpin motivational segments lead naturally to pain points, ensuring consistency and coherence.

3. It Drives Prioritization: Motivational segments naturally lend themselves to prioritization based on the size of the group, the urgency of the need, and the potential impact of your solution.

4. It Helps You Avoid Traps: MECE thinking often leads candidates to over-complicate or misdiagnose the problem. Motivation-driven segmentation keeps the focus on solving real user pain points.

Meanwhile, you can make any mutually exclusive (ME) group collectively exhaustive (CE) simply by defining a category of everybody else. You can do this during an interview, and say “I’ll bring the product to this group in the future.”

The Bottom Line

In product sense interviews, MECE segmentation is overrated. While it may be useful in certain analytical contexts, it doesn’t align with the real-world task of building products that address customer needs.

Instead, focus on motivation. By understanding why customers behave the way they do, you’ll be better equipped to design meaningful solutions—and more likely to impress your interviewer.