Homework: Ideate Every Day

TL;DR — You must ensure you display your product mindset during your interviews. Practice makes perfect. If you are reading this, you are probably struggling to come up with creative ideas during your product interviews in a matter of a few seconds. You can do a quick exercise in the shower or walk down the sidewalk. That's all you need.

Assignment:

Every day pick three random objects in your life and come up with three ways to improve it. Do this for 5 to 7 days a week.

It can be a door knob, the driveway, your food delivery service, your kids favorite toy, I don’t care. Think if who uses it and how you would improve it.

Why?

This is a low-stress way of stretching your brain and making solution development a habit.

Reading List

Thinker Toys — Skim it in general. I highly recommend focusing on the SCAMPER method chapter.

Lewis Lin — Most of his books on Product Management, the opening of this practice question book has a lot of good advice. Although, caveat, I find his frameworks too complex to memorize and thus use effectively. I suggest you consider the more paired down and specific one I map out here. But if you can find what works for you, this book is amazingly helpful. I also suggest Decode and Conquer.

Credit

Lewis Lin was the one who introduced me to the SCAMPER method. I didn’t need the whole thing, just a few prompts, and I was on my way.