Answer Case Interviews on your Feet with Triple Anchors — Interview Core Skills
Do your answers feel like a ramble? Here’s the best way to make sure your interviewer follows what you lay down.
Public speaking is hard, especially when you have little prepared in advance. Take a case interview, for instance. With so much to cover, there’s plenty of room to ramble and confuse both yourself and your interviewer.
For cases, it’s helpful to have a structure for your answer. In a product design interview, that structure is goal → people → pain points → solutions. Candidates practicing this style of interview memorize this structure and step through it methodically, being sure to only talk about “people” things in the people section. This structure reminds the interviewer to include all the content needed for the answer and organize that content into easy-to-follow sections with a clear purpose.
For most candidates, that’s as far as “structure” goes. Of course, it’s just as easy to omit important details and ramble when discussing things at the paragraph level as it is at the section level. It’s even easier when stepping through a series of related ideas, such as in a list.
If this is a problem you have, you can use a technique that we at Product Simply call the Triple Anchor. It’s designed to give structure to the smaller ideas in your discussion and ensure that your content is comprehensive and well-organized.
Building a Better Structure with Triple Anchors
The Triple Anchor is a simple template for a series of ideas that you need to explain within a broader section. Consider the “people” section of the product design interview. As part of this discussion, candidates must identify groups of people that might make for good target audiences for the product they are designing.
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