Dissecting: Customer Obsession
I am currently preparing for Amazon interviews. As part of my interview process, I will share with you how I approach studying. This is part of a series of “dissecting” Amazon leadership principles.
This is important because Amazon is the Gold Standard of product management behavioral interviews. If you can land Amazon interviews, you can land all other behavioral.
There are two key reasons Amazon interviews are tough:
You can’t repeat your stories.
Interviewers WILL poke to see if you really did what you said you did.
Because of this, you need to prepare 25+ stories, and they ALL need to withstand poking.
TOO many people make the mistake of practicing one or two stories for each leadership principle and then get completely caught off guard when the question has slightly different wording. Think about the principles from different angles.
My Methodology
You will see I work t flesh out my stories at the highest level using the following rough framework:
Feedback from Customer: Working Backwards Setup
Company
Product
Customer
Innovation/Want/Need/Going Above & Beyond
Love or Concern: Thinking about prioritization. I will not keep all stories listed.
This that in mind, let’s dive into Customer Obsession.
From Amazon
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Let’s keep that in mind as we dive into some of the more common Customer Obsession prompts/questions:
Give me an example of a time you used customer feedback to drive improvement or innovation.
Tell me about a time a customer wanted one thing, but you felt they needed something else.
Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a customer.
Big Picture thinking:
All customer-focused solutions start with imagining the ideal state for the customer and then helping them reach it.
Good product managers anticipate needs that aren’t always expressed. Sometimes it comes from the data, other times from empathy, or both.
Since a product manager is always focused on the user, it can be difficult to think about above and beyond, as even that is in our job description. You can think about advocating when there was pushback, doing extra research to find the problem (discovery), etc.
Breaking Down to Core Elements
I will now walk through the process I follow and core elements of my answers to the three standard prompts listed above.
Prompt: Give me an example of a time you used customer feedback to drive improvement or innovation.
Feedback: We need proof people are listening to ads before we can sell audio ads. Vision: Leverage what we learned in video measurement and apply it to audio measurement. Company: Google Product: Ad measurement platform Customer: Advertisers & sales teams interested in music and podcast listeners. Innovation: Audio Measurement on a video measurement platform. Required working with partner teams to modify existing platform. Seems simple now but within the organization and team it was scary because it meant the video experts had to partner with audio experts to solve the problem. I came into the team without being wed to video. Why I love or hesitate to leverage: I can’t dive into the technicals because I owned selling the concept to get signoff, not the actual building.
Feedback: Text ads are boring. More people searching TikTok for recommendations. Company: Google Product: Local Search Ads Customer: People searching locally and advertisers looking for Innovation: Pushing the envelope on local search. Why I love or hesitate: Launched creative exploration and then left.
Prompt: Tell me about a time a customer wanted one thing, but you felt they needed something else.
Feedback: I need more time, I can’t possibly finish by the deadline, too much running against us. Company: Google Product: Privacy Sandbox Customer: Kantar Want vs Need: They wanted yet another extension, I helped them solve their problem immediately so they could modernize. Why I love or hesitate: Not a product more of an approach to managing a stressed out partner.
Feedback: I need to see a good answer to know what to do. Company: intrico.io Product: Coaching Customer: Manager looking to share strategy Innovation: Curiousity to drive solutions Why I love or hesitate: not a product.
Feedback: We want and need to maintain our private analytics team. Company: Yelp Product: Behavioral Analytics Customer: Consumer Products Team Innovation: Bring their team into a company-wide organization. Why I love or hesitate: internal not external
Feedback: I want data-driven decision-making. Company: Yelp Product: Annual quiz with lessons Customer: Data Science/All Product Insight: People didn’t know what they didn’t know. The quiz was low-friction way to teach experimentation best practices and sparked debate amongst the team leading people to learn while also having healthy disagree and commit discussions. Why I love or hesitate: Shows ability to teach but not a standard product feature.
Prompt: Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a customer.
Feedback: I need more time, I can’t possibly finish by the deadline, too much running against us. Company: Google Product: Privacy Sandbox Customer: Kantar Going Above & Beyond: Taught them how to measure progress weekly and set out plans to accomplish goal rather than see it as impossible. Advocated with team to go the extra mile to meet them halfway, even convincing an engineer to work directly with their team to identify the source of small technical issues they were having using the privacy sandbox installation. Why I love or hesitate: Not a product more of an approach to managing a stressed out partner.
Feedback: Being successful on the Amazon platform is difficult, we are little and don't know what to do. Company: Amazon Product: Automation vs. Customer Support Customer: 3P Sellers Going Above & Beyond: Found a team within Amazon working with ML, took a small internship project and leveraged the learning to run tests with Sales team. Why I love or hesitate: Shows I can think outside the box. Was a long time ago, forgot the details.
Additional prompts:
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer.
See above on when a customer didn’t know what they needed.
Yelp Unblocking ads and consumer tests. I was just tasked with creating a platform, but I knew finding the biggest bottleneck and solving for it was the best focus area after the MVP proved out what we could do. It meant taking on documenting the biggest problem first was the priority. I owned making sure it happened while the team worked on the formal roadmap.
Most of us at one time or another have felt frustrated or impatient when dealing with customers.
See above Kantar story
Clients looking for me to hand them the answer. >> Use curiosity to help them discover they have the answers within them. Thus empowering them.
Can you give me an example of when you’ve been able to see around the corner to meet a customer need or delight a customer with a solution or product they didn’t yet know they needed/wanted.
Yelp Experimentation standards for Ads. I focused on the biggest bottleneck, even though no one was asking as it had become the norm and no one thought it could be better. Changing how they approached measurement. Ads team didn’t see the value we would bring. But when the product launched they were so excited they pushed my product on everyone, saying it was their new requirement. Further down the road, Consumer team was delighted because Ads stopped blocking them.
Drills product. Taking a big problem and breaking it down. Creating a course that lets clients focus on simple wins. Building up their confidence.
Group Coaching. Identifying that the big need was communication and how to help at scale.
To try to meet the high expectations of our customers, we sometimes promise more than we can deliver.
Bottlerocket. Promised integrated inventory. Ended up having to roll back to good enough, not hourly but daily. Not what I promised leadership or customers, but worked for 95% of use cases.
Yelp North Star Metric. This was when I learned the importance of getting buy-in before meeting with executives. Lost trust. Worked with coach/mentor to start building political capital before going into the room.
Tell me about a time when you had to balance the needs of the customer vs. the needs of the business.
Entrepreneur. I tried a number of products that never took off. I had to make the difficult decision to shut down course/services even though I had a handful of loyal users because it wasn’t profitable.
MMM. The customer wanted data immediately but we needed to build out the solution to be able to serve more than 1 or 2 customers. We came up with a stopgap, splitting the efforts of the development team. Letting one person field the emergency - think on-call, while allowing the rest of the team to keep building the solution.
In your opinion, what is the most effective way to evaluate the quality of your product or service to your internal /external customer?
Align goals and metrics/measures. What gets measured managed. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals with clear measurements before you start working. Each product is different, so you need to establish how you can best measure success based on what you can measure. For Google, it was ad revenue, if we didn’t increase that, we knew our new product wasn’t helping either side of the market. For Yelp, it was number of experiments run and number of unique connections. Eventually, number of experiments run with failures — the teams hadn’t really been leveraging metrics for decision making.
What changes have you implemented in your current department to meet the needs of your customers? What has been the result?
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