Interviewing for a Product Manager position is never a piece of cake. It takes experience, spectacular communication skills, and extensive prep. In this session, you’ll hear about the golden rules of interviewing that will help you score your dream job. Main takeaways: - Deep understanding of the problem and users - Define a framework that works to solve the problem - Ace the product sense interview

1. Cracking the Product Sense Interview
by TikTok Product Leader
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2. Accelerate your Product Management Career
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5. Siddharth Ray
Cracking The Product Sense
Interview

6. About me
TikTok DoorDash PlayStation Northwestern Mutual

7. Today’s topics
● Typical Product Manager Interview Structure
● Product Sense Round
● Framework
● Example
● Things to keep in mind

8. Typical Product Manager Interview Structure
● Product Sense (1-3 rounds)
● Execution/analytical (1-2 rounds)
● Behavioral (1-5 rounds)
● Case Studies or presentations (1 round)

9. Typical Product Manager Interview Structure
● Product Sense (1-3 rounds) - typically 45 minutes each round
● Execution/analytical (1-2 rounds)
● Behavioral (1-5 rounds)
● Case Studies or presentations (1 round)

10. Product Sense Round
● Very common across companies
● Evaluates your ability to think, break down and solve a problem
● Your structure is more important than the solution

11. Examples Of Product Sense Questions
“You are a PM at <company>. Build a
product for <demographic>”
“What is your favorite product? What do
you like about it and what would you
change?”
“Build a product to <solve something>”

12. Examples Of Product Sense Questions
“You are a PM at <company>. Build a
product for <demographic>”
“What is your favorite product? What do
you like about it and what would you
change?”
“Build a product to <solve something>”

13. A Framework That Works

14. Example question
“Build a gardening product for Facebook”

15. Asking clarifying questions
● Understand the problem more deeply
● Get clarity - that will help you solve better
● Who are your users? Anyone specific?
● Why should we build this (e.g strategic advantage, new ventures)?
● Where should we build this (country/region, etc.)?

16. Talk about the Mission
● One line Mission
● Don’t spend too much time (few seconds to a minute)
● Shows that you know the company well
“Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and
bring the world closer together”

17. Set a vision for the product
● Take a few seconds to think
● Vision should be a one-liner
● 1-2 sentences on why you think we should build this
“Make a gardening product for Facebook community’s plant enthusiasts. It
falls in line with our Mission to connect people of various backgrounds and
interests”

18. Set a goal and define a North Star
● Think about the goal of the product - what should this product drive?
● Drive user engagement or revenue or retention or something else?
● Why would you choose this goal?
● This sets the tone for next steps
“People maybe passionate about gardening as a hobby or a professions.
Goal is to increase engagement. This would be a new product if launched
and will give more reasons/opportunities for people to engage with the
Facebook community.
My North Star would be user engagement (likes/comments/shares with
respect to the product)”

19. Who are the users?
● Think of potential users of this product
● Come up with 3-5 user groups
● Prioritize 1 user group - give a reason for choosing this user group
○ Scope of the problem
○ Size of the user cohort
● Try to be specific and not too general
“I think of users into two groups: 1. People that are plant enthusiasts 2. Businesses
In the first user bucket, I think users could further be divided into 3 groups based on
their level of expertise:
1. Beginner
2. Intermediate
3. Expert
I would go for the Beginner user cohort as I think most FB users would fall in that
bucket. Bigger size cohort and scope”

20. What are the user group’s pain points?
● 3-5 pain points
● Think of all the things users can find to be difficult. Be creative
● Focus on prioritizing 1 pain point - you are being judged on this!
● Prioritization matrix:
○ How painful is it?
○ Frequency of the pain
● Spend some time in this section
“Here are some pain points that the Beginner plant enthusiast user group could
face
- What to plant?
- Not having enough guidance/feedback
- Share posts
I think getting guidance/feedback for beginners is very important and I have
experienced this myself as well. Without proper guidance my plants could die very
quickly and there are not enough intuitive solutions out there. This is a big problem
for the beginner planter community and with dying plants this is a very critical
problem to solve”

21. Provide solutions
● Come up with 3 solutions (3 is the magic number here)
● Show creativity if possible
● Prioritize a solution for your MVP based on
○ Cost
○ Impact
○ Is it solving the pain point + does tie back to your product vision
○ Is it scalable?
● Take the interviewer through the user journey
“I can think of 3 solutions:
- Chronicle "plant life" or "watch it grow"
- Tell me about my plant
- Ask an expert
I will create a product around asking an expert. I will post a question and it would
be a flash on my newsfeed where subject matter experts from across Facebook get
notified. They can then comment on my post and address the solution. This will be
my MVP.
The next phase of the product would have some AI capabilities like…

22. Tradeoffs
● Don’t have to spend too much time here
● Most likely you won’t have a lot of time by this point but at least ask the
interviewer if they would like to know about the tradeoffs
● Provide 2-3 tradeoffs and possibly a workaround
“The tradeoffs here would be:
1. May not be very quick in the beginning. FB could show web results or results
from other public forums
2. Privacy issues for SMEs. They may think that FB is looking at their posts.
Educate them that their data is not being shared by any unknown user. Give
them an option to be anonymous if they prefer that”

23. Metrics
● Some interviewers may ask for success metrics - so be prepared!
● Make sure you are defining your North Star based on your goal you
defined in the beginning
● Provide a breadth of metrics - this could be a dashboard that you would
use as PM of this product
“Some metrics I want to define to measure success:
1. Adoption: % users asking questions
2. Engagement: # of questions asked per user per week, # of responses received per
post, # of reactions per post, time spent on post vs overall time spent on FB
3. Retention: daily/weekly retention - are users that posted a question the previous
day/week, are they coming back to ask more questions.
4. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) metric”

24. Things to keep in mind
● Don’t jump into solutions!!
● You are being analyzed on your structure not on your solution
● Pause as needed (very important) - but don’t take over 90 seconds
● You will be cross questioned - be ready to be interrupted
● Don’t get flustered - stay on course!
● Practice!!

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