Hands down, the most common struggle for product managers interviewing with the case format is knowing when you need to segment and how to segment users.

Unfortunately, candidates get so obsessed with segmentation that they forget why user segmentation is important. In this article, I am going to dive into why user segmentation is important to case interview success and what interviewers are looking for, even if they can’t articulate it.

So first of all, let’s talk about why segmentation is important.

Most interviewers, believe it or not, are not actually working off a memorized framework. They are trying to listen to see if they can find signals of product sense. They aren’t grading you on the framework for framework’s sake, like we do when preparing. They are looking for signals that you have strong user empathy and can narrow down to core pain points as well as prioritize between a number of options.

If you don’t segment properly, the interview typically falls apart. Some companies and interviewers are more particular about users and pain points than others. Those who are particular have typically had to struggle to listen to candidates who missed the mark and so they learned to obsess over the different parts of a product case interview.

Most interviewers are looking for problem identification. In order to identify the problem you’re focused on, you need to understand the user. After all, the same problem can be seen differently by different users. For example, the overarching problem of finding content on Netflix can seem universal at first, but if you are a single person binging you have different goals than on date night and so your search issues are at once both universal but different in nuanced ways.

Big Picture

User segmentation is often the first level of narrowing of the pain point. Most great user segmentations come from a common narrowing of the pain points.

Think about the quintessential prompt: Design an app to find doctors.

Level One: Finding Doctors

Level Two: Primary Care vs. Specialist

Level Three: Cardiologist, Dermatologist, or Hematologist

Level Four: Insurance vs. Out of pocket payments, near me, reviews, proof of work, etc.

If I narrow this way, I go from the Finding Doctor challenge to Finding a dermatologist who has visual proof they solved this problem before.

Now, I can come up with solutions. These solutions might lay the foundations for the previous options, but it lets me land a problem before trying to expand broadly.

To get to this point, I need to understand the problem, show empathy with the searching process, show that I can narrow enough to solve a unique problem, rather than a generic one.

If I follow this process, coming up with specific solutions becomes much easier.

Common Pitfalls

Where can one get tripped up:

• Your interviewer needs to follow your logic

• You need to identify tradeoffs clearly when delivering your story

• Your pain points need to be specific to your user, otherwise, why bother narrowing

• If you solve a more generic need, you need a strong justification.

Summary

In order to narrow down as I did above, I had to display user empathy that finding specialists is difficult, and that search criteria are different depending on the type of doctor you seek. To get to the specific pain point I want to focus on, I need to identify the most frequent or severe pain for the specialization I selected through a prioritization process.