This is part of a mini-series illustrating how to think creatively for interviews. It is also a way to build your product sense instincts.

Instructions:

1. See a problem.

2. Identify the quick problem statement/goal

3. Identify a user to solve for

4. Come up with three solutions

What you should avoid:

1. Overthinking

2. Being too grounded in reality

3. Trying to follow the rules of the typical product interview

Now let’s to dive in:

What is the problem: Look up a recipe. Make it. Love it. Then can’t remember which of the recipes you looked up or that you used.

Goal: Help people save and retain recipes they love for future use.

User: Busy person who cooks occasionally and loves to repeat recipes they love.

Three Solutions:

1. Recipe-Specific Search to increase accuracy: Type or Speech-to-Text option where you search for: Recipes containing X ingredients, not including Y ingredients last viewed during x and y time period. We do this today, but there is a lot of noise in the results. This results setting would focus on blocking noisy results that contain the undesired results. (Likely goes against current precision and recall settings that default when errors are acceptable.)

2. Search Add-On: Add a feature to Google Search that not only tells you when you last looked at a page but also how long you spent on it and your activity score. (I typically keep multiple tabs open, but I am more active on the recipe I follow).

3. Voice Activated Saving Imagine a web browser or app-connected feature that let you speak while cooking. Tell it to extract the recipe open on your browser, and note verbally any modifications you made while cooking - often food preferences or lack of ingredients. Then save it in your recipe app with a link to the original recipe. Allow it to be searchable by ingredients and general description for future use.

Note on Creativity: This was meant to focus on the improvement challenge. This narrow a prompt give you practice focusing on subtle changes that are more realistic.

If you don’t use a SUP, try picking a sport you enjoy and come up with a problem and three solutions. Maybe it is golfing or running. Go for it.