Lesson 1: Product Design Overview

If you hadn’t already guessed it, the answer is no. While problem-solving is a baseline skill for getting to a reasonable answer, a high-quality interview relies more on empathy. To excel at this type of interview, you need to deliver a compelling argument not just about the who, what, and why of what to build, but also a clear message to your interviewer about your ability to step into the shoes of people very different from you.

In this overview, we’ll explore the basics of how to answer product design cases and discuss ways to incorporate empathetic thinking throughout. Later lessons will expand upon this piece by piece. Let’s start by getting oriented around the types of questions you might get in one of these interviews.

The 3 Types of Design Questions

Here they are:

1. New Product/Feature: You’ll imagine yourself as a PM that is responsible for a broadly defined product space. Your task? Come up with an entirely new product or a significant new feature of an existing product. Example: You’re a PM at Google. You’re asked to build a new feature in Google Maps for parking. What do you build?

2. Improvement: You’re asked how you would improve some part of an existing product. Example: You have to improve Instagram’s feed. What do you do?

3. Favorite Product: You’re asked what your favorite product is. You may be asked how you would improve it, how you would build a competitor for it, or simply be asked to explain why it’s your favorite.

These questions are similar but vary by how broad or narrow the problem space is. The broadest question is the New Product in a wide product space. An example would be “Build a new product in the healthcare space.” These questions can be the most challenging since it may be difficult to know where to start.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Improvement type. These can be difficult because they have a narrowed solution-space, especially for a product that is very mature and isn’t evolving much. These constraints can make it hard to identify a meaningful change to propose.

The good news is that it’s easy to practice these questions because they are so formulaic. You can imagine a realistic question easily by using the formats above and just substituting different product spaces or products, plus you can use essentially the same approach on all of them.

Let’s talk about that approach.

The Standard Approach

There is no single correct structure for any case interview, but there are usually patterns that are worth starting from. Interviewers have specific expectations about your answer based on their experience and their “calibration” against company standards. Failure to cover an area will result in a rejection of your candidacy or a “call back” in which you are asked to do the interview over.

So, let’s begin with the standard approach and from there customize it to your needs and the needs of your company. If you deeply understand the underlying logic of this approach, you will likely find success even without further customization.

Here’s the basic form:

1. Goal: Understand why the space matters to people (and your company) then define success criteria. This is important because, in order to succeed, you need to define what success is.

2. Customers: Identify a variety of potential target customers and choose the best customer group to focus on. This is essential for a variety of reasons—for instance, it’s more effective to go to market with customers that you think will be interested in a new product in the space.

3. Pain Points: Discuss your target customer’s pain points and choose the best one to focus on. You have to do this because addressing these pain points are your opportunity to add value to your target customers.

4. Solutions: Identify a variety of solutions to the pain point you chose and decide which solution best solves the problem. This closes the loop and should clearly demonstrate that you accomplished the goal you identified at the beginning.

Parts of each Section

You can think of these parts as sections of an essay that you are writing. Each section itself has component parts:

1. Section header. You will begin each section with a “section header” that introduces the section. You’ll take the opportunity to explain why the section is important, or what its goal is.

2. Context (sometimes optional). You may choose to include additional content that is important for your task within the section. Some of these may be obligatory, such as identifying whether the problem space is a two-sided market. More on that later.

3. Candidates. A variety of options appropriate for the section (groups of people, pain points, solutions.) Each is structured as a Triple Anchor. Each must be credible.

4. Prioritization. The best candidate is selected based on an assessment of the various options against some set of criteria. This is the “output” of the section.

Each body section (customers, pain points, solutions) follow the same pattern, with the particular varying across each.

The Standard Approach is an Argument

In Deliver the Message, we discussed how your job during every interview is to plant an idea about yourself directly into the brain of your interviewer. In the product sense interview, the idea we want to plant is that we are good at using empathy nature to build products that resonate with people.

The important thing to remember when learning the standard approach to product design interviews is that the structure itself is the form of the argument. It is not a script, and it isn’t a formula for how to answer the question. It is simply a very effective argument about how to build products in any scenario.

Here’s one way to articulate that argument.

Q: What do you think is a good way to decide what to build?

A: The way I like to approach building any product is to first understand why I’m building it, and what success would look like if I did. When I ground myself this way I ensure that I’m going in a direction that makes sense. After that, I explore the people in the space—what they need, what they care about—and choose from among them a group that we might be bring a lot of value to. Choosing is important because it lets me focus on a highly engaged core audience that we can build on over time. With our focus on that group, I can then identify a pain point that really animates them—this is my opportunity to add value. Once I’ve done that, I’ll find a solution that solves it and turns my target audience into product champions and start thinking about ways to expand my product’s reach.

Presented this way, you can see how the framework is actually an argument for what to build in general terms, for all possible products. When we answer the case interview, we are simply going to do the activities the framework implies because this is a sensible way to choose something to build. If you can come up with a better, different argument, do that.

Either way, do not attempt to memorize the approach. Internalize the argument. Explain to yourself why each part of the approach is correct in your own words. Throughout the interview, you should be able to explain why, now, it makes sense to talk about customers and what the goal of that discussion should be. Run your show.

Delivering your message with confidence demands that you have independently defined your own reasons for proceeding with the structure as defined. Once you have fully internalized it, you will likely feel significantly more self-assured and ready to give good explanations for your point of view.

Communicating Empathy

Demonstrating your empathy is critical in the product design case because there are few better opportunities to do so in the typical interview loop—certain behavioral or leadership questions may be an opportunity, but strategic questions, prioritization, tradeoffs, analytical…they do not. So it’s important to take the opportunity here, when the subject matter is intimately tied up with the product. Modern product approaches enshrine empathy because this trait helps us gather information about our customers by imagining the world from their point of view. This makes empathy very valuable, especially given its rarity.

Here are some things you should keep in mind as we dive deeper into the product design question:

1. Early and Often: Focus on people as soon as possible and refer back to your customers when you are making arguments about what things are important. You may have other considerations, but discuss people problems first.

2. People beat Business: If you want to discuss the business implications of your problem, you are welcome to do so. However, product development should start by understanding and solving the needs of the people. Only after a problem has been solved should we seriously consider other factors.

3. Be personal-ish: Talking about your own personal experiences can be useful up to a point. It’s more useful to talk about the personal experiences of other people—your aunt, your neighbor, anyone.

4. Actually care: Do your best to think about people that might really care about the space, or who have a lot of trouble. Can you picture them? Can you imagine where they live, or what they like to do? Can you imagine them hurting, feeling sadness, or joy when confronted with the problem space? The best way to demonstrate empathy is to experience it, so do your best to be there.

Now that you’ve got an overview, your next step is to define a goal. See you in the next lesson.