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Tell me how you took a product from 0 to 1

Wendy-Lynn

In product management interviews, it is very common to get asked “Tell me a time you took a product from zero to one.” For some PMs, this has never happened.

Key Abilities Interviewer Seeks to Find:

  • Ability to Innovate

  • Scrappiness

  • Comfort with Ambiguity

  • Follow-Through

  • Problem Identification

  • Testing New Ideas with Limited Data

How to Open

Tell me what you accomplished.

  • How impactful is your product? (Think: Impact Customer & Company)

  • Who did you impact? (Think: Users/Customer)

  • How quickly did you accomplish it?

  • (Optional) What made it uniquely complicated?

How You Executed

  1. How I identified the new opportunity

  2. How I gain traction (Think: Get Funding/Support/Team)

  3. How I executed

  4. Measures of Success

An Example

When I started working at ABC wine shop, we only had a one-page website. As a retail store, it was easy to identify the need, the lack of an e-commerce site was hurting our ability to grow. What made this effort more complicated than a typical website is that our store experience was unique. We had custom display islands, detailed wine resumes, alphabetically organized data, customized POS, and much more. This website had to integrate with and complement the in-store experience. Since we were a start-up, I had to do everything on a tight budget.

Ultimately, I built out a website that was responsible for 12% of the company’s revenue within 8 months of launch. While I had a goal to replicate the in-store experience online, I sometimes had to make hard cuts to experience elements that were dear to the staff and loyal customers. Let me tell you how I did it.

I started by mapping out the user experience and prioritizing the crucial experiences while also noting the desired additions that an online experience might provide. While the developers worked on the core website, I had to address POS integration issues (which were more complicated than one might expect as APIs were not as popular as they are now). I ended up making tough compromises on the user experience, particularly painful was giving up real-time integration of supplies and sales to create a perfectly seamless experience between the in-store experience and online. But in the end, we won design awards in the wine retail press.

Our Vision

We had a dream that you could walk in the store, buy your wine and get home and see all relevant tasting notes on the website. We saw a world where inventory online was never behind the reality on the store. That was a particularly complex problem in an industry where:

  • Inventory was often put on hold for valuable customers

  • Bottles broke or were opened for tastings

  • Theft was a reality that was impossible to control completely

  • We had to share inventory, if we put aside inventory for just one side of the business, it limited the other

  • People would look online before coming into the store expecting if it was online it was in the store

My Learnings

It took about 18 months to get a viable product out the door. In the end, we had an online experience that mostly replicated the in-store experience. We had to give up on some of the highly-customized in-store experiences but were able to add a unique search function that no other competitor had. Some of my biggest mistakes that led to foundational learnings included:

  1. Get sign-off on the MVP early

  2. Real-time inventory is difficult for a multitude of reasons

  3. Be ready to ruthlessly prioritize some favorite features

A longer list of my learnings included:

  • After mapping out the perfect experience, get sign-off from leadership on the MVP.

  • Don’t let one developer be your bottleneck. (An agency is better than a single freelancer.)

  • Integrating websites and POS systems is a complex task. (There is a reason it costs $1M to do just the bare minimum.)

  • Real-time inventory control is nearly impossible when retail and e-commerce share the same stock but important for the ideal customer experience.

  • Technology evolves quickly, and new learnings modify your approach constantly.

  • Not everything in-store translates online and vice versa

If I follow the rule of three, my three most important takeaways - remember this was my first real product experience - were:

Grade Me

Can you find the following in my story?

  • Ability to Innovate

  • Scrappiness

  • Comfort with Ambiguity

  • Follow-Through

  • Problem Identification

  • Testing New Ideas with Limited Data

  • Importance of Product to Customer

  • Importance of Product to Company

  • How long did it take?

  • What made it complicated?

  • How did I identify the opportunity?

  • How did I gain traction?

  • How did I execute?

  • How was success measured?

  • Learning from my failures?

What if you never….

Note: If you have never taken a product from 0 to 1, that is okay. Don’t lie. You can say, my specialty is actually optimizing products. While I can’t tell you about going from 0 to 1, I would love to tell you how I identified an important but complex problem that I took from 0 to 1. Look at the list of key abilities they are looking for, and speak to where you have done something that requires similar skills.