Product Sense Best Practices

The goal of Product Sense interviews is to determine if you can take an ambiguous problem and break it down into an actionable solution that would satisfy the problems that the team cares most about.

Framework:

  1. Goal
    1. Ask clarifying questions to ensure you’re approaching the problem correctly
      1. Am I working for a certain company
      2. Is there a goal in mind
      3. Is there a certain market or group of people we’re focused on
    2. Speak to the overall position the company, product, or team has in the world
    3. Use this to set the Goal of the company, product, or team
      1. Talk through the people problem
      2. Talk through the behavior you want to push for
      3. Talk through a metric you’d want to use to track this
      4. Quickly recap your goal and metric
  2. People
    1. Ask clarifying questions to ensure you’re focusing on the right set of users
      1. “Are there any groups of users we care most about?”
      2. “What life stage is the product in? Brand new or it’s been around?”
    2. Talk through personas of different types of people who might be using the product or need this product
      1. Talk about who they are and why they’re coming to the product/company
      2. Set a criteria for how you should pick a group of people
        1. # of people
        2. Opportunity (competitive landscape)
      3. Use the criteria to select a group of people and explain why it works
        1. Circle back up to the goal
  3. Use Cases
    1. Dive into the group of people further
      1. Explain what their current solutions might be
      2. List the top problems they face currently
      3. Explain what they care about (setting criteria)
        1. Tied to goal
        2. % of target group
        3. Pain of problem
      4. Use the criteria to select the top problem that we’re solving for
        1. Circle back up to the goal
  4. Solution
    1. List out solutions that might work for this problem
      1. 3 solutions that are pretty good
      2. 1 solution that’s super out of the box/wacky
    2. List out criteria for how you should choose a solution
      1. Mission/goal
      2. Impact (metric impact, revenue)
      3. Effort
      4. Risks
        1. If you find yourself thinking of a serious risk, ask the interviewer a clarifying question
    3. Use this criteria to select one of the solutions
    4. Mock up your solution
      1. Walk through the mock and explain how it works
      2. Circle back up to the goal
      3. Re-address metrics that you care about it
    5. Talk through any risks you see with this product and how you might mitigate them
  5. Metrics
    1. Usually adoption/top metric
    2. And then retention