Solve your product design challenge by defining good customer segments— PM Interview Tips
Having trouble coming up with good solutions during a product management interview? You might be worrying about the wrong thing.
Picture this. You’re a candidate for a product management role at Google and you’re doing your 6th product design mock interview of the day. Once again, you’ve come to the solution section and realize that you can’t think of a single good idea. “It’s already what’s out there,” you think. “I’m just not creative enough to think of this stuff on the fly,” you say.
It might be counter-intuitive but the issue is probably not your creativity. Your solution was just a product of your pain points, which in turn stemmed from the customer groups you defined at the beginning.
Most likely, your problem isn’t coming up with good solutions but rather coming up with good customer groups. In many cases, candidates struggle in this early part of the interview because their groups were overly broad, often as a result of an attempt to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). Usually, this comes along with a lack of people-centric thinking. Once you have a group as large and diverse as “middle aged people,” the likelihood of identifying a pain point that is specific enough to come up with a meaningful solution approaches zero.
If this sounds familiar, I’d like to offer my approach to defining customer groups: defining “archetypes”.
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