life gets in my way
Week 1 Retro
TL;DR - I didn’t get everything done as expected, but I still accomplished a lot. Anyone who has been through interview prep before knows the routine. You have a plan, but then something comes up, you get double-booked, a partner can’t make it, you can’t make it. In the end, you don’t get the mock counts you want. The first week is a struggle to build a habit.
In reality, I completed the tasks below with noted modifications, but not officially on the right day. Maybe this coming week, I will me more effective at my goal of one solid mock interview per day.
I started with a plan for the first week (or so):
Day 0: The Setup
✅ Find an accountability partner
✅ Reach out to mock networks
✅ Set Goal: Interview Ready by November 29, 2025: two days after Thanksgiving
Day 1: Week 1
✅ Product Sense Mock 1
✅ Seek additional partners
✅ Clarifying Questions Drill or Exercise (Built quiz for subscribers/clients)
Day 2: Week 1
❌ (📚) Product Sense Mock 2
✅ Give constructive feedback to another
✅ Clarifying Questions Drill or Exercise (Built quiz for subscribers/clients)
Day 3: Week 1
❌ (📚) Product Sense Mock 3
✅ Clarifying Questions | Drill or Exercise (Built quiz for subscribers/clients)
🔄 Coursework (created aggregate post on clarifying questions)
Day 4: Week 1
❌ (📚) Product Sense Mock 4
✅ Clarifying Questions | Drill or Exercise (Built quiz for subscribers/clients)
❌ Plan 3 Tiers of Interviews (Focused on AI skills-building instead)
Day 5: Week 1
❌ (📚) Product Sense Mock 4
✅ Clarifying Questions | Drill or Exercise (Built 3 prompt exercise in Tally for clients)
✅ Listen to my own recordings (formatting YT entries requires)
Days 6 & 7: Optional, giving myself wiggle room for needing a break or something going wrong.
📚 Write out the answers for 4 prompts
Key Takeaways
When a partner bailed or I couldn’t find one, it was too easy to skip the mocks. To keep myself honest and somewhat on track, I spent 3 hours over the weekend doing a written walk-through exercise for 4 different product sense cases to keep my case work at 5 for the week. Working on them back-to-back was exhausting but easier to identify patterns. Here are the key lessons I learned:
Checking clarifying questions against facts is a good sense check on your biases. For example, I thought few people used a library but found out 54% of population uses them, particularly women — assuming taking kids to get them excited about new books.
No matter hows strong I am with clarifying assumptions, I can still freeze, even when just doing a simple exercise quickly.
Double checked my bias. i understood the fundamentals, but my descriptions were too sweeping and lacked specificity.
In one case, I think I narrowed too much. I want to redo the case at some point trying a different user segmentation.
Prompts Used in Week 1:
Enjoying art
Library
Borrowing/Lending Product
Buying Cheese
Crisis Management App
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