Product Case vs Real Life
When I first started practicing for Google and Facebook interviews, I used to go on long rants about how it wasn't reflective of my job as a PM. But the more I coached people, and improved myself, the more I realized it was making me a better PM and was actually testing a lot of the fundamentals.
The problem is that most recruiters don't realize one needs practice, that PM interviews may test our basic skills, we need to hone our process every time we try to venture out into the job marketplace again.
Three of the important traits/skills of a PM are: Communication, Curiosity and Data-Driven Mindset. Product Case interviews test all of these attributes and more.
I have found the following aspects of the product design/sense case questions do test your PM skills.
1. The Clarifying Question - Asking good questions is communication. No good product manager would take over a new product or initiative without asking questions and/or interviewing users or prospective users. If you start with the fundamentals of the prompt, you will do a mini-version of everything you do all day as you try to develop product strategies or solve problems.
2. The Strategic Assessment - PMs are responsible for understanding user trends and technology trends. When they propose a great new product idea, they do so to solve a need for a user or category of users that hasn't yet been solved. To find Product-Market fit (PMF), they must understand user needs and business models strategies. They must defend their ideas with strategic analysis. Not all strategies solve all problems. Understanding the key stakeholders shows a grasp of the strategic landscape.
3. User Empathy - The act of identifying segments of users and then walking through user journeys to identify their key pain points is the heart of what PMs must do day-in and day-out.
4. Solutions or Features - PMs need to listen to users and their engineering counterparts and come up with unique ways of solving user pain points while allowing for improvements in technology. PMs must think about both MVPs (minimum viable products) as well as moonshot ideas that break new barriers.
5. Prioritization - PMs are naturals at prioritization. Over the years they have learned to balance goals, user complaints, and engineering requirements as well as strong personalities to make key decisions for their teams and products. And while the quick overview or mini-grid approach are not always realistic, they show that PM's can stretch that muscle no matter the prompt. In a case, you need to prioritize which users to focus on, which pain points that
6. Metrics for Success - One of the most important traits of a PM is to be data-driven. Listing three quick metrics that help you measure your ability to meet the goal you stated as part of your case is a mini-test of your propensity to be a data-driven PM. For Facebook/Meta, don't forget that Counter metric.
That was all a long way of saying, the Product Case question does actually test real skills and though processes. I personally prefer more behavioral questions, but when product sense isn't clear in behavioral questions, I find the case format exceedingly helpful to assess PM candidates.
