Essential Product Designer Interview Preparation Guide

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Most companies have more than one product. You have to define the new product’s location and its relationship with your other products. You can handle this by using a Product Matrix method.

I don’t mean a professional copyright slogan, but one sentence that accurately defines the essence of your product—the main value of the product. You won’t believe how helpful a slogan can be to focus a design work.

It’s crucial to nominate a product design project manager—someone to be in charge of everything, from product briefing to production. You really don’t want an R&D manager who passes the stick to a manufacturing manager that passes it to a marketing manager. It’s a multidisciplinary process, but there should be one manager.

The same methodologies apply, as Sean Ellis has said before growth hacking comes only when you have put thought into the whole customer experience. I have been running marketing and strategic campaigns for almost a decade and I gotta tell you that growth hacking in offline

You never know about it all in advance. A product design is a process of asking questions and answering them concurrently. Asking the right question is halfway to a solution. The product brief should also include questions that you’ll have to answer down the road.

Developing a new product takes a lot of resources. Sometimes you can achieve the same (or nearly the same) results for a much lower cost. Upgrading an existing product or even changing the marketing strategy sometimes can do the trick.

You have to know who are you working with. Normally, a new product development team should include four to six people from management, R&D, marketing, manufacturing and logistics.

I have been an Administrative Assistant off and on for years. I have dealt with demanding deadlines and have been successful.

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Defining KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is crucial. You have to define the product’s quality and performance expectations in advance. It will save you a lot of work, time, and confusion.

That got me right back on track, and I made a quick mental note to focus on the design. Another important thing to remember is to not blabber away, but try to have more of a conversation in this part. The recruiter will always have questions, so try not to go on with a saga, but leave room for questions in between. A free flowing conversation will leave more room for you to correct yourself, come back on track, and get cues as to what the recruiter is expecting to hear.

For a pricing question, Lin suggests triangulating between the customer’s willingness to pay, competitive pricing, and cost-based pricing. Understanding the cost structure is a good basis, but won’t get you all the way to the answer. Consider what alternatives the customer has and what type of demand and supply dynamics there are in the market.
If you are targeting a heavily business-oriented product management role, you will need to have pricing frameworks in you back pocket so that you are not a deer in the headlights at the whiteboard.

It is a question of using your "gut" with guidance. Data needs to be understood and applied within context anyway, that is where the human factor enters. So when your gut is giving you ideas, think of it as a new direction worth exploring.

It is most important to understand in advance whether you have the knowledge and the technology needed to develop your product. When the answer is no, you have to define what is needed to achieve the missing knowledge.

Strategy questions require that you put aside product-level considerations and focus on the business and available market opportunities. This type of question is frequently amenable to a diagnostic approach which begins with an assessment of the current state, identifies gaps, and proposes a future state solution. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats analysis can be a good place to start.
Focusing on financial metrics and broad market needs (versus individual user needs) will enable you to uplevel your answers. Competition and partnerships come into play more prominently in strategy questions than they may in product questions. A CEO will not be thinking of individual products and perhaps not even product lines. Overall company value proposition and market segment needs will be the right level to consider for this question.

Schedule-wise, I get in fairly early, usually shortly after 8am. I’m able to leave when I see fit, usually between 4 and 5pm. I used to be rigid about refusing to work on my “off” time — past experiences have compelled me to value and protect personal time — but now I’m comfortable going home and finishing up a thing or two in the evening if needed or prepping for the week on a Sunday.

Every project and product should have preliminary main boundaries which define the playground zone. These boundaries should be wisely defined—they have to be big enough for innovation opportunity, but not so big that you lose focus.

For me, it’s been crucial to consider developers as my design partners. We work in a fast-paced environment, and products are often designed and built simultaneously; we don’t work in silos. Rarely is there a formal hand off of final designs and specs to a developer team. The best teams work collaboratively. We sometimes might have entirely different skill sets, but they’re always complementary. Often, we have overlapping expertise and interests.
I do my best to bring my engineers in early in my design process so that they can share ideas, feedback and constraints with me.
Likewise, I want to be involved in the development process so I can connect research and share the intentionality behind design decisions, and ultimately help the product get to the best state possible.

Start with Audience Design. Many great resources will turn up searching for this topic.

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Process, What my role is, resources and support I need.

It's much like the people that work for you. Adventurous, fun, and conscious about environment.

We are invested in our design teams and the design community. We value inspiration, connection, and innovation.
Our design team hosts the Facebook Design Lecture Series where we bring in speakers from diverse perspectives that aim to inspire, elevate, provoke, and educate our entire Facebook community. We host our Artist in Residence program in which we bring in artists and designers to create installations in our workspaces. Our Analog Research Lab offers poster-making, screenprinting and woodworking, and they brings in external classes like TypeCamp. We have meetups like Draw Club, where anyone can come in and join an informal drawing class. We have quarterly hackathons—a permanent part of our product and design culture—where anyone can bring an idea to life and propose it in a few short days. We invest in building and teaching designers the best tools for the job like Sketch, Origami, and Framer.

I operate numerous businesses in niche fields and I know several Life Coaches and Self-Development coaches. From what I see with all of these examples, firstly your customers will be buying into YOU so make sure you have a unique and relatable story and experience to draw on.

This common product management interview question is meant to test your ability to propose impactful changes to an existing product. Weak answers will either be one obvious improvement or a rambling set of changes which do not move any metrics. A strong answer starts with identifying the goals of the product and the target customers. A key metric or metrics should be identified by which to measure the improvement.
From there, a set of use cases can be identified which will lead to a set of alternatives for product improvements. An important skill to demonstrate when answering this question is the ability to prioritize. From the set of possible personas, use cases, and improvements, select the ones that most closely meet the goals and metrics identified at the outset. Presenting several alternatives at each level is a great opportunity to show creativity and your ability to think outside the box. In some cases, linking to product strategy will be critical to providing an on target answer. Answering this question without building the links between strategy, business metrics, and user needs will result in a random response that will likely miss the mark.