Product Design

Mastering Product Design 

When interviewing for product manager positions at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, candidates often face challenging product design questions. If you lack prior experience in product design, these questions can seem daunting. This guide aims to share strategies and insights to help you tackle these problems effectively.

Embrace User-Centric Design Thinking

Big tech companies rely heavily on user-centric design thinking for product development. Adopting the same approach during interviews will align your answers with their expectations. Product design problems typically test a candidate's problem-solving, critical thinking, analytical, and creative skills, making them a comprehensive way to evaluate potential hires.

Steps to Breakdown the Problem

1. Understand Business Objectives

Begin by breaking down the problem into its components. The first step is to understand the business objectives. Determine what the company aims to achieve with the design or improvement. Are they looking to increase user registrations, enhance user retention, or boost daily active users (DAU)?

If no specific information is provided, consider the product's lifecycle:

- For new products in new markets, focus on customer retention and ensuring users find the product valuable.

- For products in established markets, aim for user acquisition and activation to drive growth.

- Once these goals are achieved, the focus usually shifts to revenue and active users, though discussing revenue during interviews is less common due to the user-first approach most companies follow.

2. Identify the Target Persona

Designing for everyone is impractical, so narrow down your focus to the most attractive market segment and Personas. Evaluate potential segments based on:

- Likelihood of using the product

- Ease of reaching and acquiring these users

- The segment's need and reach

From the target market segments, create user personas. User personas are crucial to identifying the target users, empathizing with them, and creating a focus for our product and design. For creating personas, follow the below template:

3. Identify Use Cases and User Pain Points

Understanding user pain points is crucial. This can be done through:

a. Functional Pain Points:

- Analyze the current user journey and identify issues at each step using the 5Es framework: Entice, Enter, Execute, Exit, and Extend.

- Consider the primary problem the product solves and adjacent issues it might address. This helps in creating solutions that are significantly better than current offerings.

b. Behavioral Pain Points:

- Apply Fogg's Behavioral Model, which states that Behavior (B) = Motivation (M) * Ability (A) * Trigger (T). Addressing motivation and ability can help in designing solutions that users find easier and more appealing to use.

Finding and Validating User Pain Points

Finding a pain point is an experimental process. I look into both qualitative and quantitative data to identify probable pain points, then perform hypothesis testing based on the pain point. To test the hypothesis, we create an MVP and gather data from real users—both qualitative and quantitative. We need to cluster and segment the users, then target specific segments. Deeply engaging with users helps us understand their intent while using our product. My focus is on identifying what we are trying to solve and for whom. It’s challenging, as PMs are often engaged in execution, but we need to go out and talk to customers. Find patterns in the words and phrases used by customers, synthesize what is being said, and understand the underlying customer problem. A PM is not an order taker. Finding pain points is extremely hard; if it were easy, every startup and business would be successful, and you wouldn’t need me. Discovery needs to be well ahead of development—at least six months. By thinking far ahead and planning meticulously, we avoid reacting to competition.

4. Prioritize Problems and Solutions

After identifying pain points, prioritize the most impactful problems that align with the business objectives. Consider the latest technologies like AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Mobility, and Cloud to brainstorm solutions. For motivational challenges, Yu-kai Chou’s gamification framework can be very useful. When addressing user ability, focus on simplicity, considering factors like time, cost, physical effort, mental effort, social acceptance, and routine disruption.

5. Evaluate ROI

To determine which features to implement first, think from a user-centric perspective and evaluate the return on investment (ROI) in terms of customer satisfaction and development effort. A table listing the ROI for each solution helps in making informed decisions.

Discuss product strategy by aiming to make the product significantly better (10x) than competitors. This approach, known as Blue Ocean Strategy, involves eliminating and reducing features to simplify the product while raising and creating new features to add value.

6. Choose the Right Metrics

Select metrics to measure the success of your solutions:

- Focus on One Metric That Matters (OMTM) to keep the team aligned and reduce wasted efforts.

- Ensure the metric is actionable, providing clear direction for improvement rather than just being a vanity metric.

Conclusion

Preparing for product design interviews involves a thorough understanding of user-centric design principles, breaking down problems methodically, and prioritizing solutions based on impact and feasibility. By following these steps, you can confidently tackle product design questions and demonstrate your ability to think like a seasoned product manager.