Hey there!
Welcome to “Breaking into Product” - post #3.
If you are planning to enter (or have recently entered) the Product space, you will love our posts! With this series, we aim to share exclusive content and insights on preparing for product management interviews, common Q&A, interview preparation strategies, etc to help you ace your interviews.
“How would you improve this Product?”
That’s how usually these questions are asked during interviews - very casually and making it seem like a general question. But it is far from that. Structuring your answers is again very important but since these questions themselves are not very chaotic, remember to stay organized. Organize in your head and on your paper/document and it will get easier.
The Framework
While curating answers for these questions, first understand if the interviewer wants you to concentrate on a certain aspect of improving the product or wants to see in general how you would improve it.
Note: It is not mandatory to stick to the steps jotted down below. Every question is different. Tailor your approach accordingly.
Step 1 — Understand the goal of the product
Understand what your product does, who, and what it solves for. Note that a product could be solving multiple issues/consumers at a time and you need to jot down all of them.
🧐 For example — The interviewer asks you “How would you improve Whatsapp payments?”
Here, the goal of Whatsapp payments is to make peer-to-peer payments easier and seamless.
Step 2 — Find the problems with the product
Next, you need to outline what problems the product is facing. You could ask relevant questions to the interviewer to find these out or you could write them down yourselves. If you have access to the product, you could also quickly go through it once to pinpoint the pain points.
🧐 For example — The interviewer clarifies that you could focus only on improving the adoption of Whatsapp payments to increase Whatsapp’s market share in UPI payments.
Step 3 — Solve the problem
Now that you have figured out the problems, rank these problems and settle down on one. Give an explanation as to what method you used to rank those and how you narrowed down your choice. Once finalized, brainstorm your ideas to solve this issue. Ask your interviewer to give you a minute or two for you to write down your points. Once you are ready share them with your interviewer. Also, highlight the potential hurdles with your solutions.
Note : In real life, product managers do not take such quick decisions. They do not simply pen down solutions in a matter of seconds or take unilateral decisions when it comes to their product. What the interviewer is trying to see here is your critical thinking and how realistic your answers are.
🧐 For example — Think about the end-to-end steps involved in the adoption of Whatsapp payments. These steps are:
A user should notice that such a feature exists
A user should know how to use/which payment modes are accepted
The user should be given the motivation to use
The user should ultimately try the product
Solution for point 1:
You could give prominent entry points (make the feature easily visible)
You could do an ad campaign about the feature (Whatsapp is ingrained in users’ minds as a messaging platform - so focus on bringing payments out strongly)
Solution for point 2:
Onboarding should be extremely simple i.e. a no-brainer to the user - Since this is UPI-based, users should be shown/given a walkthrough of how to activate UPI here
Solution for point 3:
There are a lot of UPI payment providers. So Whatsapp should do one of these:
Incentivise via rewards to make users start using payments
Make the whole experience much simpler than competitors - identify the problems with GooglePay/PhonePe and solve for those
Solution for point 4:
Onboard a set of users with a good number of active chats/groups/contacts on Whatsapp
Focus on making this set of users use Whatsapp payments even if the receiver does not have Whatsapp payments activated
As more receivers notice, this can bring in network effects (simply put, making Whatsapp payments more valuable as more users start using it) to make them active
Step 4 — Discuss the implementation
When you are discussing the solution and its hurdles, you might realize not everything that you are suggesting can be implemented the way you want. This is the time to show how “scrappy” you are. Highlight what can be done immediately and what can not and propose a short-term alternate solution. You are basically discussing the phases in which your solution will be implemented here.
🧐 For example — To make entry points more prominent, you could say that you will send a broadcast message or place a Whatsapp status to your existing users about the feature
Step 5 — Validate your solution
The last step is an important one. Discuss with the interviewer, what metrics you would use to gather how well your solution is working.
🧐 For example — You could say that the metric you will track is “The percentage of users who started using payments after seeing your message/status”
While this article highlights the solution to approach such questions, I will be writing more on the frameworks and metrics used to answer such questions. Follow along to get updates as in when I post them.
We hope this helps you approach such questions better. Feel free to reach out at thehustlers2021@gmail.com for any questions or guidance.
Will come back with another interesting case study. Bye!