Last year before PM I was only a viewer of this channel. I would have never imagined being on the flip side. Thank you to the Exponent crew for letting me contribute. Feedback from the viewers is always appreciated 🙏🏻
Feedback point 1, take your time to focus in on your user groups. IMHO, you gave good logic in selecting Gen Z as your target population, however, there are SO many users that fit into Gen Z, you have New content creators, Content watchers who post regularly, Content watchers who don't post regularly and of course, the advertising companies that target the Gen Z population. By spending more time to develop your Gen Z category, 1, it shows the interviewee that you are able to develop sound & rationale users that fit into Gen Z & 2, the more defined your users, the better you can define their problems & 3 the more defined you have your user groups, the better the products features you can come up with to solve the problem. for example, let's take Gen Z Content Creators - we can say something like " We know that short form content us currently the rave, as a result we see more Gen Z content creators on multiple services such as TikTok, Snap and Facebook/instagram stories. One of the problems could be that our content creators do not get as much engagement (likes/follows/comments) as they do on the other products, so they give up on our platform and move to another. As a result, our content dries up which has a knock on effect downstream. By having this detail, you can then build better products such as a feature that gives new content creators a temporary increase in engagement, and then, when the engagement drops off, we give them another bit of engagement which keeps them on the platform and keeps them using this product and creating more content. Feedback point 2 - NEVER focus on the business problems - ALWAYS focus on the Customer problems. Companies like Facebook & Google want to see you be empathetic to the customer and create solutions for the customer . Feedback point 3: Clarification questions were somewhat iffy. Should look to ask questions such as "What problem has the business observed which has driven us to want to improve instagram stories" , "Are we working to any time constraints ?" "Are we targetting a specific platform (asked)" etc
Agreed, I had the exact same views. The interviewer tried leading her to the right pain points but even the updated ones weren't very customer specific.
My humble opinion: I would start with north metrics, engagement or revenue etc. Then have some trade offs about why we diving into engagement. Then go with the user segmentation: 1. Top content creators who post stories frequently. 2. Waist users who sometimes posted stories. 3. Users who barely or never posted stories I would guess the 3rd type of users takes around 50% of the user base. Features could be how to lure them start posting stories etc.
I couldn't agree more. The flow should be business goal -> product goal. Why we want to improve ig stories? It must be aligned with some business goal/problems first
The start was great. But it went downhill pretty quickly. The 2 things i liked most were: - How she clarified the scope of ig stories and gave a short user journey before starting to think about the question. - The fact that she wrote down the mission of the company as well as the mission of the team. The 2 things that could have been better were: - real user pain points rather than ig pain points - Better solutions (maybe one moonshot?) because this was a video shoot and am assuming they practiced or thought about it before
I love you guys’ content, but can you please start adding feedback at the end of these sessions too like what went wrong in the interview and how could it have been improved.
I would probably also like to understand why do we want to improve? and how do we define improvement?/business objective before moving on to the users and pain points
As the interviewer kept reiterating, first two pain points sound more like business pain points, and not user pain points. GenZ as a segment does not care about decrease in usage or revenue, Instagram does. Interviewer did keep hinting towards that, and how to connect competition with user pain point would have been how user has more options in terms of interactive elements with TikTok, and not so much with Instagram.
@Surb Singh Same pain point can work for multiple segments, but deep diving into multiple segments is beyond the scope of a 45 min interview. That is why, as a strategy, one segment is prioritized over the others.
Also PM at Microsoft, it feels like a missed opportunity to specify business objectives first of Instagram stories first and foremost, and ask clarifying questions that are relevant to what was asked such as "What exactly are we trying to improve here: user retention, new users, increased revenue per active user, etc". I'd also say the users are not specific enough and do not illustrate an understanding of those that are engaging with this feature.
These pain points seem more like business (IG) pain points for selected user group. I would list consumer pain points something on the lines of - 1) cannot re share stories 2) i see duplication of content in stories and in my feed 3) i cannot see stories anywhere other than top of the feed page etc.
Really helpful content! However, there is one major flaw in this interview - the goal to improve was not discussed. I feel the clarifying questions and the entire case for that matter would have a much better direction and end result. This is just a note for the viewers of this video. Keep up the good work, Exponent team :)
Maybe she was not up to the mark but the way you are providing feedback,I feel sorry for your product squad that you will be working with. It's always easy to criticize,would have been better if you would have provided some constructive criticism. Learn some humility!!
Thank you for sharing the insights. My feedback is that she focused more on the business pain points, whereas I would prefer to empathize more with the users and their experiences. Additionally, I was surprised by her assumption that stories are created solely for connecting with friends!!
Does it make the most sense to segment users by age group? I was thinking more along the lines of user types 1. celebrities 2. content accounts 3. influencers 4. regular users (within this high/low/0 frequency posters). Will perhaps prioritize the low/0 frequency regular users group to increase postings/engagement
it is SO hard to get a product manager role at Microsoft, and I am really surprised that the interviewee, with her flawed approach, could get a role. - she totally missed the bus on user paint points: this to me is the biggest gap. a product manager for consumer products cannot mix user pain points with business pain points - she missed asking what "improvement" would entail? engagement, retention, monetisation, growth its one thing to memorise a structure and its one think to do justice to the structure. Still surprised how she could get into Microsoft. Sorry for being harsh but there are enough and more people who are much more qualified and still donot make it to the likes of MS
Other than confidence, this falls short. The segmentation especially - when designing for an optimized experience, best to utilize existing users who are producing a certain kind of story, along with given level of engagement instead of just basic geo/demo data?
This interviewee has no idea what she is talking about. Inexperienced and just following a structure. The biggest thing about product design is solving customer painpoints and all the painpoints discussed were business. Not the right mentality for product management, do not follow this method, there are several other great Exponent videos you can refer.
There's a logical fallacy which you need to be aware of. If you are building something for special events, there can't really be an improvement in the engagement. It would become an use and throw feature than a daily usage feature. So the solution doesn't really address the problem
I think there is a clear confusion in the presenting the pain points. This is a good example of what NOT to do in interview. The pain points are supposed to be for the targeted user segment: Gen Z, not the business pain points. Maybe we can add a pain point like: Users cannot reshare the stories. @tryexponent I would suggest you to add some feedback points at the end of the video of what went well and what didnt went well, so that viewers wont do such mistake in their real time interviews.
FAANG PM chiming in here... i'm not sure if I agree with Kevin Wei's interview style. He comes off as super robotic and unapproachable. While you may encounter this style in management consulting interviews, tech interviews are different in the sense that it's a collaborative discussion. Kevin doesn't really offer much when Janine asks questions, and he only replies with "mhm's and yeah sure" when she wants to deeper dive on some topics. He doesn't seem open to brainstorming with her on topics, and at times he responds to her questions with another question. I've watched a few videos, and seen him do this a couple of times. I think some adjustments should be made as I don't believe this is an accurate representation of what a candidate would encounter in a FAANG PM interview.
Wow! This is honestly one of the poorest mocks I’ve seen here. Apart from writing the obvious structure properly, explanation of points in that structure was just blah. Nothing against the interviewee, but she took assumptions without any justification. Idea was to improve stories and never did the interviewer mention improving stories = increasing revenue. No focus on the user just on the business which again was an assumption and her biases completely screwed this up. 1. Looking purely at 2021 for answering the question. 2. Again, 2021 and rise of Tick - Tock there off. Even if it were a basis, logical route would have been to mention why people are moving to Tick Tock and see if that can be solved by IG? 3. Assumption that stories are created by people to just connect with their friends. This just blew my mind. Really.
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Last year before PM I was only a viewer of this channel. I would have never imagined being on the flip side. Thank you to the Exponent crew for letting me contribute. Feedback from the viewers is always appreciated 🙏🏻
Your performance is one of the strongest that I've ever seen, kudos!! You killed it.
Go Janine!!
Yours is one of my favourite mocks! Very detailed and thorough 👆🏻
So great to have you on the channel!
The way you structured your ideas was great!
Feedback point 1, take your time to focus in on your user groups. IMHO, you gave good logic in selecting Gen Z as your target population, however, there are SO many users that fit into Gen Z, you have New content creators, Content watchers who post regularly, Content watchers who don't post regularly and of course, the advertising companies that target the Gen Z population.
By spending more time to develop your Gen Z category, 1, it shows the interviewee that you are able to develop sound & rationale users that fit into Gen Z & 2, the more defined your users, the better you can define their problems & 3 the more defined you have your user groups, the better the products features you can come up with to solve the problem.
for example, let's take Gen Z Content Creators - we can say something like " We know that short form content us currently the rave, as a result we see more Gen Z content creators on multiple services such as TikTok, Snap and Facebook/instagram stories. One of the problems could be that our content creators do not get as much engagement (likes/follows/comments) as they do on the other products, so they give up on our platform and move to another. As a result, our content dries up which has a knock on effect downstream.
By having this detail, you can then build better products such as a feature that gives new content creators a temporary increase in engagement, and then, when the engagement drops off, we give them another bit of engagement which keeps them on the platform and keeps them using this product and creating more content.
Feedback point 2 - NEVER focus on the business problems - ALWAYS focus on the Customer problems. Companies like Facebook & Google want to see you be empathetic to the customer and create solutions for the customer .
Feedback point 3:
Clarification questions were somewhat iffy. Should look to ask questions such as "What problem has the business observed which has driven us to want to improve instagram stories" , "Are we working to any time constraints ?" "Are we targetting a specific platform (asked)" etc
You are on spot 👌🏼
Who are you and why are you so wise in the ways of product management
This comment was more insightful than the video itself
Agreed, I had the exact same views. The interviewer tried leading her to the right pain points but even the updated ones weren't very customer specific.
There were more business problems than user problems. I would suggest viewers to take note of that as a downfall.
I feel too.
My humble opinion: I would start with north metrics, engagement or revenue etc. Then have some trade offs about why we diving into engagement.
Then go with the user segmentation:
1. Top content creators who post stories frequently.
2. Waist users who sometimes posted stories.
3. Users who barely or never posted stories
I would guess the 3rd type of users takes around 50% of the user base. Features could be how to lure them start posting stories etc.
correct, we didn't go into the goal for the improvement
I couldn't agree more. The flow should be business goal -> product goal. Why we want to improve ig stories? It must be aligned with some business goal/problems first
The start was great. But it went downhill pretty quickly.
The 2 things i liked most were:
- How she clarified the scope of ig stories and gave a short user journey before starting to think about the question.
- The fact that she wrote down the mission of the company as well as the mission of the team.
The 2 things that could have been better were:
- real user pain points rather than ig pain points
- Better solutions (maybe one moonshot?) because this was a video shoot and am assuming they practiced or thought about it before
I love you guys’ content, but can you please start adding feedback at the end of these sessions too like what went wrong in the interview and how could it have been improved.
I would probably also like to understand why do we want to improve? and how do we define improvement?/business objective before moving on to the users and pain points
As the interviewer kept reiterating, first two pain points sound more like business pain points, and not user pain points. GenZ as a segment does not care about decrease in usage or revenue, Instagram does.
Interviewer did keep hinting towards that, and how to connect competition with user pain point would have been how user has more options in terms of interactive elements with TikTok, and not so much with Instagram.
@Surb Singh Same pain point can work for multiple segments, but deep diving into multiple segments is beyond the scope of a 45 min interview. That is why, as a strategy, one segment is prioritized over the others.
Also PM at Microsoft, it feels like a missed opportunity to specify business objectives first of Instagram stories first and foremost, and ask clarifying questions that are relevant to what was asked such as "What exactly are we trying to improve here: user retention, new users, increased revenue per active user, etc". I'd also say the users are not specific enough and do not illustrate an understanding of those that are engaging with this feature.
These pain points seem more like business (IG) pain points for selected user group. I would list consumer pain points something on the lines of - 1) cannot re share stories 2) i see duplication of content in stories and in my feed 3) i cannot see stories anywhere other than top of the feed page etc.
Hey Aditya! Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!
Really helpful content! However, there is one major flaw in this interview - the goal to improve was not discussed. I feel the clarifying questions and the entire case for that matter would have a much better direction and end result. This is just a note for the viewers of this video. Keep up the good work, Exponent team :)
I'm not surprised about the quality of Microsoft Teams
Irrelevant clarifying questions, no goals discussed, random user segmentation, pain points which are nowhere close to being pain points.
Arey bhai bhai😂
What according to you should have been the approach ?
Maybe she was not up to the mark but the way you are providing feedback,I feel sorry for your product squad that you will be working with.
It's always easy to criticize,would have been better if you would have provided some constructive criticism.
Learn some humility!!
@@waattzup Or maybe humility is in accepting criticism & improving through it? Why should criticism be always sugar-coated? :P
Thank you for sharing the insights. My feedback is that she focused more on the business pain points, whereas I would prefer to empathize more with the users and their experiences. Additionally, I was surprised by her assumption that stories are created solely for connecting with friends!!
Hey ShoaibMahmudOfficial, thanks for your feedback!
Does it make the most sense to segment users by age group? I was thinking more along the lines of user types 1. celebrities 2. content accounts 3. influencers 4. regular users (within this high/low/0 frequency posters). Will perhaps prioritize the low/0 frequency regular users group to increase postings/engagement
it is SO hard to get a product manager role at Microsoft, and I am really surprised that the interviewee, with her flawed approach, could get a role.
- she totally missed the bus on user paint points: this to me is the biggest gap. a product manager for consumer products cannot mix user pain points with business pain points
- she missed asking what "improvement" would entail? engagement, retention, monetisation, growth
its one thing to memorise a structure and its one think to do justice to the structure.
Still surprised how she could get into Microsoft. Sorry for being harsh but there are enough and more people who are much more qualified and still donot make it to the likes of MS
First two pinpoint are not use a painpoints, but they are business Painpoints
Other than confidence, this falls short. The segmentation especially - when designing for an optimized experience, best to utilize existing users who are producing a certain kind of story, along with given level of engagement instead of just basic geo/demo data?
Very helpful content, please continue focussing on PM-related discussion. Thank you!
This channel is super helpful! Check out mine as well, would love feedback
Would have liked if she could have used prioritization metrics for selecting Pain points
She is really good. Very good thinking.
shes good but i feel like she didnt really talk about the user pain points thouh
This interviewee has no idea what she is talking about. Inexperienced and just following a structure. The biggest thing about product design is solving customer painpoints and all the painpoints discussed were business. Not the right mentality for product management, do not follow this method, there are several other great Exponent videos you can refer.
Can you link the google doc in the caption?
Great content guys! Extremely helpful and insightful
So glad you liked it!
I need an explanation what improving IG stories got to do with hardware?
YOU KNOW, the structure and flow is good. but there's a crazy amount of YOU KNOW used...
Sounds good
Pain points could be better, it should be specific to users
I'm new with this interviews but i think maybe it would be better to ask "improve Instagram stories" not "design Instagram stories"
Why skip over Gen X? We're too busy doing all the work?
There's a logical fallacy which you need to be aware of. If you are building something for special events, there can't really be an improvement in the engagement. It would become an use and throw feature than a daily usage feature. So the solution doesn't really address the problem
I think there is a clear confusion in the presenting the pain points. This is a good example of what NOT to do in interview. The pain points are supposed to be for the targeted user segment: Gen Z, not the business pain points. Maybe we can add a pain point like: Users cannot reshare the stories. @tryexponent I would suggest you to add some feedback points at the end of the video of what went well and what didnt went well, so that viewers wont do such mistake in their real time interviews.
Hey girishkumar2626! Thanks for leaving this feedback. We'll look into it!
FAANG PM chiming in here... i'm not sure if I agree with Kevin Wei's interview style. He comes off as super robotic and unapproachable. While you may encounter this style in management consulting interviews, tech interviews are different in the sense that it's a collaborative discussion. Kevin doesn't really offer much when Janine asks questions, and he only replies with "mhm's and yeah sure" when she wants to deeper dive on some topics. He doesn't seem open to brainstorming with her on topics, and at times he responds to her questions with another question. I've watched a few videos, and seen him do this a couple of times. I think some adjustments should be made as I don't believe this is an accurate representation of what a candidate would encounter in a FAANG PM interview.
gen x always left out :D
Wow!
This is honestly one of the poorest mocks I’ve seen here. Apart from writing the obvious structure properly, explanation of points in that structure was just blah.
Nothing against the interviewee, but she took assumptions without any justification.
Idea was to improve stories and never did the interviewer mention improving stories = increasing revenue. No focus on the user just on the business which again was an assumption and her biases completely screwed this up.
1. Looking purely at 2021 for answering the question.
2. Again, 2021 and rise of Tick - Tock there off. Even if it were a basis, logical route would have been to mention why people are moving to Tick Tock and see if that can be solved by IG?
3. Assumption that stories are created by people to just connect with their friends. This just blew my mind. Really.
Didn't she did all year's work here only
microprokey
Not a great performance IMO.