An unconventional guide to better product sense interviews
Why we jump to solutions and how to best practice decoupling it with problems for better product sense interviews.
A year ago I became the poster child for unoriginal, “Uber for X” product ideas. I was preparing for product manager interviews and I found myself coming up with the same time-worn ideas again and again. “Facebook for groceries”, “AirBnb for books”, “Uber for education”, etc. etc.
I understand if you want to pause and roll your eyes for a second, I did too.
Back to the original story. While I knew that I won’t be solely judged on the creativity of my solutions, it was a sign that something wasn’t working in my approach. I was using a strong framework to crack product sense questions but I still wasn’t getting the outcomes I hoped for. What was I doing wrong?
Identifying my problem: utilizing two distinct mental functions simultaneously
I realized I was doing two diametrically opposite things simultaneously: problem identification and solutioning. I was unravelling user problems and thinking of solutions at the same time. My ideas were born right at the start of the process instead of at the solutioning stage.
The first problem with this method was that my solutions were almost always run of the mill obvious answers. The second problem was that because I got anchored and attached to my early ideas, I didn’t end up solving the actual problems I was identifying, instead I was doing the unthinkable — pigeonholing the problems to my solutions. Because of this I failed more than a dozen practice questions (thankfully they were practice ones!).
This is famously known as divergent and convergent thinking, two distinct mental functions. Dr. George Land, creativity researcher, brilliantly describes its effects as the following: divergent thinking is open and creative like an accelerator in a car, while convergent thinking is about evaluation, judgement, and choice, acting like a brake in a car. When we do both at the same time, the power of our brain is drastically diminished leading to a drop in creativity, just like a car couldn’t go far if you hit the accelerator and break at the same time.
Working through problem identification requires convergent thinking because we are trying to narrow the scope of the question in a logical manner. It requires structure and a strong focus on working through the framework to be able to get to a concrete problem to be solved. Whereas the solutioning phase requires us to break free from structure, be spontaneous and follow a non-linear process to generate ideas, i.e. divergent thinking. Both done at the same time diminishes the quality of answers of each step in the framework.
Finding the solution: deliberate practice to decouple my thinking
When I noticed this, I started consciously decoupling the problem and solutioning steps of the process by “shooing away” ideas until the idea generation step of the framework. Every time I saw an idea forming in my head, I’d set it aside on a separate piece of paper and bring my attention back to the step at hand (just like bringing your attention back to the breath during meditation). I practiced this conscious decoupling for at least 20 practice questions until it started to become a habit. Even then, the pattern of jumping to ideas was so deeply ingrained that it didn’t fully go away until about 50 practice questions of deliberate practice.
The other trick I utilized was to practice the two stages of the framework separately. For several consecutive questions, I focused only on identifying the problems to be solved and stopped there. Just like an athlete that focuses on perfecting only one aspect of a move, like a tennis player practicing the backhand for several serves. Then I focused only on coming up with ideas I hadn’t thought of previously and discarding all unoriginal ideas. Practicing each step of the framework separately helped to deepen the habit of separating problems and solutions and get rid of my previous reflex.
Over time the ideas I generated started to solve problems in a novel way and I was excited to see what new interesting things I could come up with. I showed up to each practice with renewed vigor and this made the process fun for myself as well as the interviewer. It became clear to me: practicing barricading your mind from solution pollution up front will lead to more creative ideas and better outcomes to product sense questions.
“So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.”
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