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Invoice wording for Product Management

hello everyone my name is Kenton kavestu I'm an ex-googler ex-bcg consultant and the founder of rock blocks an online platform that helps candidates prepare for interviews in today's rocket blocks mini lesson we're going to talk about structuring your responses in product management interviews over the course of my career I've interviewed hundreds of product managers and the number one mistake that I see in Canada is not structuring their responses there's either no structure at all or sometimes they'll use a can structure like circles off the shelf even if it doesn't quite fit the question that has been asked so what we're going to do in this video is we're first going to take a step back and understand why does structure in your response actually map once you understand that it's going to be easier to actually productively build and use structures in your interview and then in the second part we're going to talk about just a live example and show sort of building a structure on a fly to a prototypical product management interview question so let's go ahead and jump in okay so let's first talk about why structured matters and there's really three key reasons to remember here the first is that it shows that you can simplify a big messy problem and simplifying a big messy problem is quite frankly probably one of the key skills that is needed for product managers on the job it shows that you can take a big problem and say okay if we need to solve this big problem we're really going to need to look at components a b and c and then we can break those down further it gives an organized way of looking at the world they want to see that you can do that because that's critical on the drum the second is it demonstrates that you have a repeatable repeatable is the keyword a repeatable problem-solving process when you get a question in a product management interview that's like design and refrigerator for the blind Etc whatever the question is you're not actually going to have that question or that problem face you on the job so what the interviewer is trying to understand is given a particular type of problem can this person craft a structure and a process for solving that problem that we think they can credibly repeat on the job no matter what problem gets thrown at them so they're trying to understand do you have a process that you can use over and over and over again and then the third part is structure helps interviewers follow along with your thought process and if you think about it if an interviewer can't follow along what you're saying if they literally are confused or how did he jump from this idea to that idea and they're getting lost in that there's no way they're going to be able to understand the Nuance the depth or the Insight that you're providing even if it's incredible because they've lost you in in your thought process they don't know where you are and therefore it makes it very hard to understand and I know that sounds a little bit silly like hey like the interviewer is going to be paying close attention like how could that happen but the reality is that interviewers are people too they've got a ton of stuff going on on any given day and it's highly possible that your interview is the least important thing on their doc they may have a presentation with their boss in an hour that they're stressing about or maybe there's a bug in production that they've been troubleshooting all day and they don't know the answer to and that's stressing them out they're thinking about that so you may have 50 of their attention making sure the interviewer can follow below what you are saying in your thought process is really really important and having a structure laying that out and then walking through that methodically really helps make sure that all your nuanced depth inside all those things come through the process so that's why it matters now let's look at a live example okay so now let's look at a live example and before we get into the details of that just a couple tips to keep in mind as we talked about in why structuring really matters the first thing you're really going to want to do is make sure that the structure you're proposing breaks apart the problem in a way that helps simplify the problem-solving process of of walking through that is the critical part that we need to make sure we achieve the second thing that we want to keep in mind is we want to make sure that our structure is really applicable and customized to the particular question and the Contours of it that have been asked every product management interview question is going to be a little bit different and so we want to show that we're really considering that particular question that's been asked rather than just pulling like an off-the-shelf product design framework something like circles for example I'll link to that below that's a very popular product design framework and just using it no matter what sort of question is throughout it out so those are the two things to keep in mind make sure that you're cleaving apart the problem breaking it into components and that it's up applicable and really customized to the question that's been asked and we've got additional videos going really really deep on this process of like what makes a great structure so I'm going to link to those below and we'll include those you can check those out but now let's jump into this example and let's imagine the question that we get is a very typical product execution style question Instagram revenue is down week over week how would you investigate what's going on okay so given this particular question a couple things jump out of me the first thing we're going to do is we're going to try and simplify this problem right we're trying to figure out why Instagram revenue is down and one thing that jumps out at me that we know obviously is that NADA and Instagram as an extension is highly reliant on ads for its Revenue they do have some new e-commerce initiatives they've been spinning up I don't know what the sort of complete breakdown is but at a high level one thing that jumps out at me is if revenue is following the first thing to understand is is ADS Revenue falling or is non-adds revenue following this accomplishes a couple things for us if we think about that at the beginning of the structure takes the problem and it Cleaves it apart into two components that we can independently analyze what's going on with our ads Revenue what's going on with revenue from other channels okay now if we take that structure we build upon it a little bit further let's zoom in on the ads bucket if ads revenue is falling at a high level we know that it means that either the number of ads that we're showing is going down or the price the advertisers are paying on average per ad is going down or both could also be going down at the same time so now we've got a way to think about what's actually going on in that ads bucket and we can analyze that we can ask for that information do some calculations and sort of pull back the different layers of that problem in a very logical structured one on the nonads bucket we can do something similar we can break down the problems okay if non-advertising Revenue comes from e-commerce and e-commerce is people selling Goods on Instagram and Instagram gets a cut of it well then the way we can think about that is there is how many items are being sold on Instagram what's the average price that people are paying for those items and what is the percentage cut that Instagram earns from those items being sold and if we look at each of those and gather that information we'll be under we'll be able to understand as one of them going down or drop it and is that driving the source of our Revenue decline but if we put this all together basically what we've got is we've got a really nice structured way of looking at this problem it breaks the problem apart into ads Revenue versus non-adds Revenue it's really sort of a simple nice way of looking at it and it goes into detail on each of those and it is very sort of customized and applicable to the question we have at hand which is specifically about Instagram revenue and it really hits that on the nose so it demonstrates that you can break apart a complex problem of sort of a big messy problem about falling Revenue it shows that you've got a structured and repeatable problem solving process that you could apply on the job if you face a similar problem but not the exact problem and lastly it's going to make it really easy for the interviewer to follow along and understand your thought process as you're working through it so you're going to be really set up well to deliver a great answer over the course of that interview so one final thought I want to leave you with as you're thinking about structuring your responses in PM interviews and that is good structures can be simple if you think back to that structure that we talked about in the example it started with hey like it could be ads or it could be non ads and then it builds from that and goes deeper and has nested structures within it that's totally fine and often thinking of one thing is going to be a lot easier than thinking of you know three or four sort of top level buckets right off the bat so if you have an idea of like hey it could be X well the top level structure could be could be X or could be not X and then let's start digging into each of those in more detail and peeling back the layers of the onion thank you so much for watching we have a ton of great content coming out on a weekly basis so if you haven't subscribed yet already please do so there is a big red button below get all our content as soon as it comes out and if you are preparing for interviews right now I highly recommend you check us out at dot rocketblocks.me we have a ton of concept reviews drills and prep Partners to help you get ready for your interviews and put your best foot forward on interview day and Landon offer so thanks so much for watching have a great day