Craft Your Creative Invoice Design for Product Management Effortlessly

Creative invoice design for Product Management

hi everyone my name is liam bolling i'm a product manager at google and before i was a program manager at microsoft today i'm going to walk through the pm interview and we're going to start with kind of product design questions which are the most well-known product questions we're going to go over four kind of sections today the first one is going to be just an overview then we're going to dive into what an average response is we're then going to go into a bunch of tips on how to make that response even better and then conclude with seeing the results of what we just did so let's get started so what are interviewers trying to evaluate well you know they're looking if you can break down a problem where you aren't familiar with the space for example maybe your background is manufacturing but they might ask you a healthcare question or something it kind of puts you in a weird spot they want to see you know how you find and how you figure out core user problems how do you come up with good solutions what's your process uh can you add a clear structure and thought process to your response can you articulate how you know you think to someone else can they clearly visualize it do you add a bit of flair or creativity to your solutions and the most important thing that i want to harp on this section of the interview is empathy empathy empathy empathy is so important in this interview to show that you can really empathize and understand where users are coming from where you can see problems exist and trying to really quickly put yourself in the shoes of someone that's just not like you so what type of question should you expect well there's a bunch right and you'll kind of quickly see a pattern to all these questions help me build a calculator for blind people build a new healthcare product redesign a garage door it's really trying to keep you in this vague area to then see if you can break down this problem that's kind of the overview we went over the goals and then some example questions let's dive into an average response and then see if we can improve it all right so an average response let's say the question is build me a new healthcare product first i'm thinking in my head oh no i i don't even come anywhere near the background of a healthcare professional i have no clue what i'm doing let's just jump in and see what i can do so sweet okay so i don't know much about healthcare products i'm thinking of a few problems maybe we could build a product for uh you know there's people with terminal illnesses or somebody suffering from like the common cold right there's kind of that range there so a lot of people suffer from the common cold uh i just had a cold a few weeks ago uh i think i'm going to start with that let's start with the common cold and try to make it better since i i don't think we can build a vaccine for that so a few ideas that come to the top of my head we're gonna build a health care product for the common cold thinking maybe a website where you could you know find cold remedies a better cold pill combo basically you know like mucinex advil on like tea and one uh i i'm leaning towards the website a bit more just because i don't know the drug field too much so i'd probably go with that maybe we can crowd source things you know i have a bunch of friends that have a bunch of remedies for colds like my mom said uh you know balancing on one foot while rubbing your stomach and eating a ton of ketchup helps i'm just making this stuff up but you know these are great ideas right and we could put them on a website and people could consume them i think people would really love it so you know i don't know much about how to make a website probably i don't know i've heard of squarespace or something like that i you know i think it should be pretty cheap i'd probably uh to make a healthcare product that probably make a website that you can crowdsource cold ideas and and maybe people would feel better and recover quicker and we'd save some lives i don't know that's my attempt at you know as quickly as possible trying to answer that question without much structure or anything that's our average response let's go into how to make it even better so the first step to making a response even better is you'll notice in that kind of example that i gave i i kind of you know couldn't clearly understand the structure you want like a high level kind of guide that you can always fall back on it helps you paint a structure in your interviewer's mind so imagine you have a whiteboard right like try to put that whiteboard that you're imagining in their head and that's kind of the goal here you've probably heard of the circles method or the bcg framework or all these other kind of frameworks online what my advice for that is don't copy them but definitely use something like that right make your own framework using your own words and that's going to look 10 times better in their interview instead of regurgitating the circles method to your interviewer you can say hey this is actually how i as an individual break down a problem so an example of that that i use is it's a four-step kind of process so you have first is clarified a high-level objective two is understand the user three is understand the problem and then four is to think of some quick fixes put something on the board and do a quick just pro con analysis on each of them that's how i do it you should make your own version so while you're using that framework a really you know critical part of it is being able to use it as like a book right think of it as like a table of contents and when you're thinking of a book right when you open the book you see the table of contents there and quickly go over it so do the exact same thing to your interviewer say hey this is how we're going to go this is our roadmap for this question we're going to start with this i'm going to go to this then we're going to end with this do the same thing declare it right up front and then when you switch between chapters in your book say okay so we've we've identified all the problems let's dive into some solutions right and just kind of practice those transitions while going through the framework another really important thing is to keep everything i would say under 10 or 15 minutes in total you don't want this thing to go on too long you're not actually trying to solve the problem here remember high level objectives none of them are to solve the actual problem it's really about how do you think so next i want to make sure that you know we we ask for clarifying questions you'll notice in the not so great example that i just gave that immediately i just dove into it right without asking anything and a healthcare product that could be anything i could be going in the wrong direction you want to keep your questions pretty high level you want to give yourself some constraints that you can work with so is there a particular market of healthcare products that we're going after uh do you have a couple examples of healthcare products that you're thinking so i can kind of you know build my mindset here are we building this for your company or is this creating a startup you know you and me are founded something try to draw the interviewer in with that and then also it helps understand the first part of your framework the next tip on how to make that average response even better is understand the user right it all comes back to the user so your goal here is to quickly as possible become another person that sounds kind of weird this section is critical it starts to build a foundation of how you're going to respond to questions in the future in this entire answer so you'll really need to nail it what you want to do is get to a profile like this uh you know i want people that are older than 65 that live in a nursing home that don't have family nearby uh don't have other help critical health needs they're just getting older and you built this profile but you want your objectives to get a user like that where you totally can understand a lot of core attributes about that person how do you get there this is something i call the magical rule of three and what is that so the magical rule of three when you're trying to identify your user your problem this might help in the future as well but i kind of made it up of you know you suggest three things no more and no less you pick one of them and then move on and that starts to build a tree of decisions and that's really critical because it starts to get you towards that profile that you're trying to achieve and then also will help with determining you know what solutions you should go after the magical rule of three let me give you an example of how it works instead of just showing you a tree figure over here somewhere uh let's say hey we need to break down the population if we're building a healthcare product there's young middle-aged and older people okay let's choose old people okay so with an old person they're either living at home they're living a family or they're in a nursing home okay uh let's go with living in a nursing home so we've got old living nursing home uh okay well you know where is their family uh it's less than an hour away a few hours away i need to fly there away right so okay you know let's say a few hours away like most families uh okay uh how's their general health you know just kind of old getting very sick very very sick hospitalization level i i'm not too familiar with the healthcare space so let's go with just just kind of getting old great you know now you've built this profile just by quickly going through three at a time choosing one three at a time choosing one and you have this whole profile about a person that you can now put yourself in their shoes so it's a really great way to just make sure you don't get stuck now let's step into their shoes and understand kind of how they go about their day this is kind of the user problems part we want to understand what problems they have in their life and how can you make their lives better so the goal here is to super quickly empathize with that user uh take that profile step in their shoes and try to understand their day understand their motivations you know what does that person not like what are their struggles what is kind of maybe what's their daily routine uh you know it won't be perfect it definitely will not be perfect but we want to try and empathize as much as possible and understand their day to then figure out how we can make their lives better what is their average day like well maybe they're eating meals they're playing some games with others they're calling people or family you know okay let's let's choose one of those what about you know what do they care about uh family they're taking part in social activities hobbies uh okay we've got some more ideas there so what's like tough in their life uh you know maybe you get lonely uh you know maybe you want to see family more you're getting all this tough in general through kind of listing those things out and kind of trying to build a bit of a tree through them you can kind of see the problem right like calling family the importance of family maybe a bit of loneliness and you can kind of build a general kind of cohort of problems that the user might have it seems like there's a pattern in kind of loneliness in a way let's dive into that identify a great user profile we've identified a problem that they might have now let's think of some solutions now the goal of solutions here is you want to think of three solutions no more no less uh that kind of fit our persona and fit the problem we want a particular type of three solutions though there's kind of a secret sauce that i found uh you want one is going to be a very safe bet two is going to be aggressive uh and then third is just going to be absolutely ridiculous right we kind of call that the moonshot idea right something that is probably never going to happen it should almost make no sense but be very creative and kind of show your creative side at the same time keep in mind the safe bet aggressive and then the third being absolutely no sense uh we're going to go with the safe one i'm going to say maybe a phone service that arranges activities between you and the other people in your building the kind of aggressive maybe a video chat service that young people can volunteer their time to talk to the elderly you know maybe on our outlandish ideas as the third bet um let's think of a new type of elderly home that people can socialize and live with each other and that's you know super connected like a college and there's like a built-in bar a wine bar and a bunch of other stuff that's always happening so that's kind of the outlandish one so now that we have all of our solutions three right we've got the safe bet the aggressive and a little bit crazy one we're going to kind of evaluate which is one we want to go after you can make a quick chart for example too you can do a list you can do a chart whichever way you want the two axes that you kind of want this chart to have or pro con list to have is really take into consideration impact and effort right so if you're actually building a chart if you have a white board in front of you you've got your x axis is maybe the impact the the y axis is you know the amount of mountains we need to move to build it and walk through each of these ideas and plot your three ideas in this chart it's really easy way to visualize and kind of show your interviewer thought process we have a favorite you chose it the interviewer chosen you've got a beautiful chart you've outlined all these things so now conclude so now that you've gone through you know you or the interviewer have kind of chosen the solution now what i would just make sure you do is to conclude and make this just a one sentence one liner that the interviewer can have from the back of their mind when they're writing feedback later so you're going to sum everything up you're going to say all right based on the x persona that we found we identified why problems that they have we narrowed it down that z is probably the best solution that we should go for and given you know our uh x business strategy that we outlined in the beginning uh let's go for it so what's going to happen once you've done your conclusion you've kind of you know wrapped everything in a nice bow you know you've just come up with the next facebook not really it's an interview what i would expect after that is assuming this took around 15 minutes or so you're probably going to have a couple more you know maybe 10 more minutes after the interviewer is probably going to build off of your solution they're going to ask you questions around can be analytics how would you track analytics in this product that you're building how would you execute on it um give me some estimations on how much it would cost so just be prepared for those kind of questions afterwards that's kind of the the fourth chapter of this lesson um i just wanted to conclude with some just basic interviewing tips that i think are you know useful for whatever type of question or interview you're going into remembering the basics is super important and reiterating on those things i think is critical i i have forgotten them many times quick tips uh you know be on time uh always be ahead of time um you know you want to be on your toes for this ask good questions at the end of your interview there's always that spot where it's like hey you have any questions for me think of those ahead of time don't think of them on the spot uh you know show interest in the company do a little bit of homework and say oh yeah i'm applying to x like um i had a question about z product or like oh yeah your culture talked about this like i'm curious but just do your homework it takes 10 minutes before but it shows so much more during the interview another would be uh you know let's assume that this interview post pandemic is in person um make sure you wear deodorant uh you know go to the bathroom before this interview um don't get drunk the night before also just get a lot of sleep um don't start or stop drinking coffee the the day before or vice versa just like continue your routine you want to be the best date possible um the night before or the day of pray you know rub some rocks you know whatever gives you luck uh go with that and my one last tip is right before um make sure to just call a friend have a quick conversation with a friend the morning of just for 15 minutes just to kind of get those jitters out of the way of talking i feel like you know i do a much better job when talking including this when i talk to someone before and kind of get the get the engine started sweet all right so we're at the end just wanted to say um thanks for for listening to these these tips and tricks uh hopefully they help you if you have any feedback or questions or anything make sure to leave a comment down below hit subscribe if you you know are interested in more of these types of videos join the slack channel below there's many opportunities to kind of get involved here i'm looking for more instructors this is just my perspective these are from my learnings and experiences but i want more experiences and more different backgrounds than just me so definitely show some interest below as well thank you so much and just yeah have a great day you're gonna do awesome in this interview