Empower Your Business with the Easy-to-Use Solution that Leads to Customer Conversion for Product Management

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hello everyone welcome to desker's youtube channel my name is sora one of the co-founders at desker in this video we're going to look at the product management take-home assignment product management interviews can be tough and demanding you know there are lots of different stages each state has a very specific focus if you're somebody who's been interviewing for a product management role chances are that you've already written some of the product management take home assignments uh i have done that too i've been there i have actually written a lot of product management taken assignments i've also been on the other side where i had to make assignments uh to test and evaluate potential hires so i'm going to use that experience of being on both sides of you know writing the assignments as well as creating it to try and list out all the different things that you should keep in mind while uh attempting these assignments so in this video we're going to look at the following we're going to talk about what exactly is a product management take home assignment you might already know it so you can skip that part if you want what the goal is of the take-home assignments and it is sometimes one of the most misunderstood uh parts of the assignments you know you work really hard you spend a lot of time but you really aren't sure what the goal is and hence it shows in your assignment the different types of the product management take home assignments how you should structure it and what the different topics you need to make sure that you touch upon in your assignment we're going to look at an actual example as well go through the entire solution step by step and in the end we're going to look at some of the common mistakes that people make while attempting these assignments i made them what is the take home assignment this is an exercise that product managers need to do on their own you'll most likely get the assignment after you've spoken to the hr team or the hiring manager you'll get an email which will contain the description of the assignment how much time you have to do it format and guidelines that you need to follow what are the expectations of the high team when it comes to the deliverables as well as the due date for the assignment every company has its own format they will tweak it to their needs some might provide you a lot of information some might provide you a little bit of information others might provide you absolutely no additional information and would like to you to make assumptions as you seem fit what is the goal of the take home assignment through this exercise the hiring team is trying to find out how you will tackle problems that you'll face on the job the goal is to see how you break down a problem into manageable chunks questions you ask options you evaluate the option you choose the reasoning behind your decisions and how you structure and communicate your final presentation the two types of product management take home assignment questions the first one is new product or service this question will be presented to you in the following format you are a product manager for xyz corporation and tasks with evaluating and launching a new product what product will you choose how will you go about the opportunity and launching the first iteration of the product the second type is where you're asked to update an existing product or service that the company already has uh the question will look uh something like this you're a product manager for x product tell us one feature you'd like to implement to improve it as we've talked about earlier some teams like to keep the questions open-ended they provide you minimal information they want you to make your own decisions others provide you more information and structure and provide you detailed deliverables that they'd like to see in the final presentation the questions that we discussed above are more open-ended questions now let's talk about one of the most important parts of this video how do you approach and structure your take home assignment what are the nine things you need to keep in mind while writing your assignment number one start with questions you've got the assignment you've read the email please don't start brainstorming ideas yet when you read the assignment there will be questions that will come to your mind jot them down frame them in a concise and easy to understand manner and send it over to the hiring team well you can choose to skip this step and make assumptions on your own but let me ask you this would you do that in real life at your current job if you're not sure about something do you not ask people your managers or your peers you know do you not ask questions to understand the problem better you do right so why not ask questions about your assignment as well once you've got the answers to the basic questions you can move on to the next step number two define the problem explain the problem you're going to solve with the new product or update to the existing product keep your description short and crisp number three who is facing this problem is everybody facing this problem or is it limited to a subset of users define the user persona that is facing the problem number four why does it need to be solved no product or service is perfect or solves all the problems why do you think it's important to solve this problem over everything else why would you prioritize spending time and resources on this versus other things number five how does it align with the organizational goals what is the vision of the company does the product team have goals that they need to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months does this align with those goals you can gauge the organization's goals by looking at the public roadmap website releases or while talking to the interviewers in case the assignment is about a fictitious company this may be included as additional information in the questions number six what is the proposed solution how will you solve the problem you have described above first describe the actions that will solve the problem then give a short description of the key aspect of the feature or product that will enable users to take those actions i would encourage you to put some wireframes along with the description this does not mean you spend hours building high fidelity mockups absolutely not create simple wireframes you can either use a piece of paper and draw a rough sketch with hat or use tools like balsamiq which is simple and easy to use number seven what are the risks associated with these changes can your solution cause any unwanted issues for the users or the team is it going to make somebody unhappy think about all the different stakeholders that your update will impact once you have identified the risk try and outline what steps you will take to mitigate them this section doesn't need to be crazy long as long as the hiring team knows that you've thought about it you're good number eight how will you measure the success of the release this is the place where you will list out all the metrics you will follow in order to gauge the success or failure of the release it is one of the most important sections of your assignment and carries a lot of weight but don't go overboard here more is not always better think through which metrics truly reflect the performance of the product or feature stay away from vanity metrics with each metric add the following information name of the metric definition of the metric units used to measure the metric why you chose this metric any assumptions you have made to be aware of when looking at the metric do you have the capacity in the team to measure the metric what does it mean when you say that the metric is performing well is there a value or a number you're targeting with the release number nine the assumptions you make you'll have some data to get answers during your assignment but you won't have all the data you will have to make assumption but that's okay in fact that is going to be the case every time you launch a new product or service in real life so remember to state all the key assumptions clearly in your assignment you can do that as a separate section or highlight them whenever they are relevant i hope you found the nine things we discussed helpful now let's try and practice them through an actual example here's the background you just cleared the screening round for your dream company amazon for a product management role you get an email from the recruiter to somebody to take home assignment you need to complete it looks something like this you're the product manager for the amazon app what new feature will you add to improve the product great on the face of it it looks like an open-ended question but that doesn't necessarily mean it is and that you start brainstorming the coolest idea ever and start trying to pitch and work on the idea please don't jump the gun yet be a little patient another way this uh question can be presented is you are the product manager for reviews on amazon recent feedback from customers has shown that they're not happy with how reviews on the site work how will you go about solving this issue this one requires you to look at a particular section of the platform okay so we've got a question now so let's start building out the solution for this assignment for the purpose of this example we'll just use the open-ended question where you only know that you're the product manager at amazon and you need to build something cool you have no other information so first things first let's let's think about what questions come to mind and send them over to the team so when i think about uh this question what comes to my mind is is there a specific goal for this feature for example like do we need to increase revenues or improve repeat purchases or reduce drop-offs or you know improve nps okay so that sounds like a good question let's type it out the second is is there an organizational push in a particular direction a larger vision or goal that everyone is working towards yeah i think it would be good to know the answer for this as well what else what are the new features required to improve the product do we have any surveys data or in size that make us believe that we need to invest in new features hmm yeah i think that is good information as well what else i think i have two more questions that i would like to ask the hiring team one is are there a particular group of stakeholders either internal users or external customers who are dissatisfied and are asking for new features and the last is what is the cause of that dissatisfaction now you have got these five questions you send them over to the hiring team and you might get some additional information or not let's see what happens they might send you some hard data or insights on which you can base your assignment or they might come back and tell you to make your own inferences okay so we've heard back from the hiring team and this is what they have to say our data shows that reviews are an important part of customer conversion in fact listings with more than more reviews are five percent more likely to sell than the ones with less however recent surveys have surfaced frustration among users with how reviews work we don't have any other information besides it to share regarding the assignment all right so this information answers some of our questions not all for the remaining like we discussed we'll make assumptions and state them clearly so let's start building out our assignments step by step as we discussed earlier number one define the problem users find it difficult to browse through reviews on amazon we have to keep the problem simple short encrypts is what we said that makes sense number two who is facing this problem all users are facing this problem we are assuming that this problem is not limited to a particular category we can save this assumption now or later on in this assignment number three why does it need to be solved reviews play an important role in buying decision of few users recent feedback has shown that people are frustrated with how it works this information was given to us by the hiring team so no assumptions needed here number four what is the proposed solution empower users to search faster and find the right review right that is whatever we build that is what it will do it will empower users to find reviews faster the right reviews you know now you go out do your research and how what features you could do to make that happen uh what actions could be provided to users you come back and you're like okay i know what i want to do in my case i would say this can be done by adding a search bar to reviews that lets users type in the search query the reviews would filter in real time based on what the user types out two assumptions i'm making here number one we have looked at the survey responses we have found the key reason for frustration is the amount of time it takes them to find the review with information they want and number two the work effort required for real-time search results is much higher when they type out their complete query and press enter all right so now that we know what actions we are going to do in order to solve the problem let's try and come out with the minimum viable product and what the requirements would look like very very high level let's not get into implementation details here so this is what the requirements on a high level would look like add a search bar at the top of the review section users can type out the query and then hit enter to get the results that match their query users need to type in a minimum of three characters to get a valid search results and number four we will test the feature out on native mobile apps first here are some of the wireframes uh we come up with you know where we show the current state of how the review screen looks like and then there's a future state as to what the mvp would add or subtract from the screen now you can see that we've added two things here one is the search bar where the users can type out and the second is what happens after you press enter which is uh the word the search term actually gets highlighted which makes it easier for users to look at the reviews faster now there's some assumptions we have made here which is it is easier to release on mobile versus older desktop size in fact it's actually true in the real world now for a lot of companies but hey we're not sure whether it's true for amazon as well so let's put that as option in our in our assignment even though we're discussing the mvp it's good to show that you have you've thought about what future versions might look like the v2 for this would give users search results in real time as they start typing out this search query this this version uh might change based on feedback you get from the mvp uh nothing is threat on in stone right now next thing uh we should touch upon is will this cannibalize an existing feature uh well if you look at the amazon site it might cannibalize the usage of smart tags in the search results over time we can analyze if one or both features are needed by the users what are the risks associated with the update as stated reviews have high impact on conversion right an update that doesn't work can negatively impact the gmb how will mitigate risk highlighted the release will be a b tested first to validate its effectiveness before making it available to everyone how will you measure success for this release the three metrics we've thought about adoption is the first one total number of times the search bar is used to go through reviews the second is review usage change which is the total percentage change in the total users who use the review section on the product details page after the launch of the search box and number third is customer satisfaction is the new review search bar making people happy present a pop-up survey after the user has used the feature at least maybe five times ask them if they like the feature or not and an average score of four out of five is an indicator that the feature is doing well besides these it would be useful to analyze if the user is using the search bar when the search search term is presented to them using the smart tags okay the last part of our assignment that we would want to touch upon is what factors do we consider before the release before we start the update we need to align the different stakeholders on the proposed chain since it is such a high impact change and we need to consider the following when we have conversation with all the different stakeholders the update directly impacts gmb any change can have a considerable impact on each category every category has seasonality associated with it promotions that might be running at the same time as the update might also be need to be considered so scheduling a b test at the right time across the right category is one of the most important things to keep in mind while doing this update i hope uh going through an example helped you guys you know get a better grasp on different factors you want to consider you know what you eventually consider and what you write in your assignment might differ and will be very specific to the the problem that is handed out to you there are a few disclaimers on the takum assignment uh that i do want to make sure we go through number one is the proposed solution might already exist on amazon when you are looking at this video or it might have existed earlier or then taken down so don't sweat too much about the solution focus on the structure and the thought process second is please don't copy paste the solution for your assignment it defeats the entire purpose of doing this video you might not be able to include all the information we have discussed so pick the ones that make the most sense for you in the final section of our video we're going to look at some of the mistakes which a lot of people make i have made some of them i know other people who've made similar mistakes in their take home assignments so try and learn from them so that you don't end up making them the first one is not asking questions i can't stress on it enough you know that you need to ask questions sometimes you're in a hurry to get started sometimes you're lazy sometimes you're actually just burned out giving all those interviews that you decide to skip this step or sometimes you just want to get it over with man we're just really tired but please please ask questions you're trying to get your dream job so keep working hard i'm sure everything will work out but please don't skip this step the second one is overshooting the length you know it is it is human nature you know we can get a bit too excited and try to cram in too much information in our submission it's quite understandable right you've done all the hard work and you want to make sure that the hiring team is able to see that but please stick to the length generally it's two pages with a thorn size of 12. you know presenting information in a concise manner is an important skill for product managers that they need to possess so when you turn in your assignment that's too long it sends the wrong signal to the hiring team third not using appendices this is true for any work that you present not just your take home assignment cramming in too many graphs or designs in the middle of your document makes it difficult to read use the limited space you have to highlight the important findings and conclusions you have drawn leave all the grant work out of the main submission and attach it as appendices number four finishing in one setting don't try and hash out the entire assignment in one sitting on a friday night please take breaks come back and have a look at it with a fresh pail of eyes trust me it helps number five not citing references it's okay to search on the internet you do that in the real world too if you're using certain frameworks or citing data make sure to add references as part of your submission spending way too much time trying to find out that kick-ass innovative idea we don't want to discount the fact that outstanding ideas will get you brownie points they will but your idea is only one of the factors in your submission i'd rather see a mediocre idea that's built on a structured approach rather than idea that sounds great but ends there and is not backed by any logical reasoning thinking or a good approach and finally not balancing qualitative and quantitative product management isn't binary i wish it was you can't focus only on data or only on qualitative feedback you have to use both you look at all the hard data you have but then you also look at the organizational impact you are proposed of the update you're proposing in order for the update to be successful it requires a cross-functional effort so make sure your assignment is balanced it shows your ability to think analytically but lead pragmatically this is all we had to share in terms of how you should be going through your take home assignments we hope that you enjoyed going through the video and were able to learn something from it that you'll be able to apply for your next interview question if you liked our video make sure you subscribe to our channel if you have any feedback for us please use the comment section we would love to hear how we can improve our future videos and what else we can include in our upcoming series