Strategy vs. Design Frameworks

Most people come to me for help with strategy questions for Google. Hands down the two biggest problems are:

1. Using the Product Design Framework

2. Brain Dump

Product strategy questions are different from design because the first thing you need to focus on is the company. BUT you don’t want to lose track of the user.

Let’s tackle each problem and why it is problematic.

Product Sense Framework

There are three common reasons people jump to Product Sense frameworks when answering stratetgy questions:

1. They don’t realize the question is strategy and think they need to build a solution rather than address the strategic twist

2. It is the only framework they know and they think it will work for all answers.

3. They can’t remember a strategy framework and figure any framework is better than none.

Brain Dump

The brain dump is used for three different reasons:

1. Spray and Pray: Not sure of the answer so figure lets share everything I know and if I hit something right I will pass

2. Paralized by Choice: Too many frameworks out there and can’t figure out what to use so try stacking frameworks

3. Don’t Get the Twist: Candidates who can’t figure out what is really being asked don’t know how to answer.

The six common causes of bad strategy answers can be mitigated by doing drills.

Take a list of strategy prompts and try to guess :

• What is the point of this question

• What framework should I use

  • What are the pros and cons

    • positives vs. negatives

    • strenghts vs. weaknesses

    • yes reasons vs. no reasons

    • great reason vs. tradeoffs

Resources

• Here is a list of strategy prompts to practice.

• This is an example of a drill.