A Common Mistake to Avoid in Product Interviews and as a PM

How Case Interviews Prep can Hamper your Product Interviews

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A lot of PMs/ aspiring PMs come from MBA backgrounds where they have prepared very well for the case interviews to crack management consulting jobs.

Many PM interview prep courses also recommend PMs to be good with case studies to sharpen their interview skills, all in good faith. Case interviews and guesstimates help in building a good business and analytical sense.

Case interviews and product interviews are similar because both require you to apply problem-solving skills and arrive at the solution to a problem for a business or an end user. So the skills should be transferrable, right? Assuming this, candidates apply the same skills for problem-solving in product interviews as they did in case interviews. But it ain’t so. And as Mark Twain wrote,

The Difference in Case and Product Interviews

There is a big difference between the case interviews and product interviews, which many people don’t even realize during the interviews. The distinction becomes especially important in the product design round.

• In ‘case interviews’, you are supposed to ask the right data points to solve the problem.

• In product interviews, you are supposed to make intelligent assumptions and narrow them down to the solution. In short, you can’t ask many questions in product interviews.

Sounds counter-intuitive? Let’s dive in.

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Let's start with an example. This is what a portion of case interviews looks like (ported from the book “Case in Point”):

Case: Yellow Stuff is a manufacturer that makes industrial cleaning solvents and pesticides. Recently, sales have been declining, mostly due to new EPA guidelines. Further evaluation of sales, both past, and future, indicates that the chemical industry has, and will, continue to grow slowly over the next five to seven years, with 3% annual growth. Management has decided to diversify. While Yellow Stuff wants to keep its chemical business intact, it also wants to enter an industry that has long-term, high-growth potential. Yellow Stuff has hired us to help determine what industry or industries it should enter.

Candidate: So, as I understand it, our client is a chemical manufacturer who wants to diversify outside the chemical industry into a high-growth industry.
Interviewer: That’s right.

Candidate: And you want me to come up with a strategy on how to find the best possible match.
Interviewer: Yes.

Candidate: Besides diversification and profit, are there any other objectives that I should know about?
Interviewer: No.

Candidate: What does the company define as high growth?
Interviewer: 10% a year.

Candidate: Well, the first thing I’d do is obtain a list of all the industries and eliminate the ones that are growing less than 15% or have a potential in the next year of growing less than 15%. How much risk is Yellow Stuff willing to take?
Interviewer: Medium.

As you can see in the example above, asking good questions in case interviews is of high importance. The reason for this is — as a management consultant, you need to ask your clients the right questions to cut through the noise and arrive at the right data points. Clients have the incentive and resources to provide answers to your questions.

As a PM, you need this skill of asking the right questions. However, you have no clients who will bring this answer for you. You have to get the answers yourself. And therefore, there is one more skill you need to do - product intuition or product sense.

Product Sense Matters a Lot

Product sense is all about

• understanding the problem space and its importance for the user

• building the right hypotheses to solve the problem

• using various data points from competitors, industry, and your product to reject and accept hypotheses

As a matter of fact, you would never have enough data to arrive at one final solution. So you rely on your past experience and intuition to make a decision. This is what interviewers are checking for.

So a product interview with Yellow Stuff might look like this:

Case: Mentioned above

Candidate: So, as I understand it, our client is a chemical manufacturer who wants to diversify outside the chemical industry into a high-growth industry.
Interviewer: That’s right.

Candidate: And you want me to come up with a strategy on how to find the best possible match.
Interviewer: Yes.

Candidate: Besides diversification and profit, are there any other objectives that I should know about?

Given that slow growth is a problem it can’t solve due to EPA constraints, the company has to figure out few long-term, high-growth areas. I am assuming revenue growth is the most improtant metric, and they don’t want to focus a lot on profit to start with.
Interviewer: That’s correct.

Candidate: What does the company define as high growth?
As such, growth of 10-12% YoY in most of the sectors is considered good. We can target this number for Yellow Stuff as well. Should I move ahead with that assumption?
Interviewer: Yes

Candidate: Well, the first thing I’d do is obtain a list of all the industries and eliminate the ones that are growing less than 15% or have a potential in the next year of growing less than 15%. How much risk is Yellow Stuff willing to take?

We can take a list of industries and see their growth rates. We can elimate the ones where growth is lower than 10%. One thing to note though is that high growth rates usually come with high risk. High risk can usually be taken by companies which are doing extremely well in their core business, and can afford few setbacks. Yellow Stuff isn’t there, so we should only consider low-to-medium risk businesses. Do you have anything to add there?
Interviewer: No, that sounds reasonable.

As you can see above, the above interview showcases you can make intelligent assumptions, and have a good sense of how to move from the problem space to the solution space on your own. This doesn’t mean you are forbidden to ask good questions in product interviews. Just don’t try to get all answers from the interviewer.

So just as a case interview tests whether you can be a strong management consultant by looking at the quality of your questions and ability to problem solve, a product interview tests your product sense and intuition required to do the job effectively. Sounds good? I would wrap the post with this.

See you in the next one :)