Hi, It would also be a good practice to show us the notes taken by the interviewee to explain his or her approach while solving the case study. Could you please do that?
I honestly feel that Mitchell just jumped to the solution without delving into the problem at all. As a PM, you are expected to think user/consumer backwards. Who is the user you are solving this for? How does the user interact with the product currently? What are his pain points and prioritising those pain points. Then brainstorming on the solutions and prioritising among them. And finally coming down to the features you would want to build to execute those features in an MVP.
@@vanshpandita3968 That could certainly be the case, but i think for the purpose of this exercise, you're expected to explain your product thinking framework, in order to best show off your product skillset.
Yeah! The only thing he did about users is assuming they are millenials, tech savvy, music enthusiast who care about design graphic and they want the world to know that. Anyway...It was top to see. I learnt few things.
@@kevinngaleu1545 Facts, you'll literally get rejected if you pick the same segment as the one you belong to attributed to "bias" EVEN THOUGH You're the majority user lol
Here is a framework I think seems to work best for these interviews (built myself over watching a bunch of these videos): 1. Restate the problem 2. State assumptions 3. Describe your understanding of the ecosystem - products, platforms, users, personas, market segment 4. Hone in on the user base or "who" you are building for - describe them 5. Define the metrics you think we could optimise for - how do we measure success? 6. Pick metric. 7. List solutions 8. Prioritise each solution based on ROI, linked to the metric you want to optimise for 9. Show how you would test this. PAEMSPT Problem Assumptions Ecosystem Metrics Solutions Prioritise Test
Overall liked it. few notes and questions: 1. Mitchell got not feedback on his body language, covering his mouth most of the time . 2. Mitchell said "Hey, let's not make Spotify into a social network" but then he offered to follow a person feed which feels Instagram/Facebookish . 3. Mitchell said that he personally doesn't like the feature of seeing what friends are listening to on the right screen . should a PM give his personal opinion without given data analysis first ? I personally don't use Spotify much , but I cought my sister listening to a very stupid song and harassed her about it , so maybe it is a good feature in general but needs to be expanded ? 4. When asked what KPIs , he did not answer , but described , so Stephan basically answered and summed his explanation for him - User session length Hope someone can refer to those points and give some useful tips of do and don'ts from their vast experience , as I am a junior product manager who's in the learning progress , trying to learn practices .
covering the mouth is more in the Asian culture. It is inappropriate to speak or eat in front of each other without covering its mouth partially. That's why in Japanese restaurants, people sit next to each other.
It'd be great to see a similar interview using a whiteboard! Would love to see the thought process expressed visually, and see best practices on a whiteboard interview
Hey Mahmoud! We actually did an entire lesson on this in our online course! You can view it here: www.tryexponent.com/course/lesson/tips-whiteboard, along with several other example videos with whiteboards!
Stephen is really passionate about helping us prepare for our interview. Appreciate tryexponent. I have grown a lot in just one week of mock interviews.
great interview. I would approach it by 1) define our target user group 2) use cases by that user group 3) why current website does not satisfy the need without social features 4) what social features can be the next improvements 5) wrap up.
1. Should a PM be asked to implement Social features in Spotify out of the blue? Or should he instead be asked to deliver business KPIs: like enhance user retention & LTV, and on basis of his knowledge of user, business needs and the product, should he come up with what to do: Social Features, Loyalty/Subscription Programs, or a new feature altogether? This felt like starting with a solution rather than actually knowing the genuine problem. 2. Assuming Mitchell is indeed given the direction to implement social features as a product requirement, shouldn't he spend more time trying to figure out what problem he's solving here for his current user base? I think the fact that he chose to double down upon the cool & sexy factor of Spotify without looking at other user psychology angles and needs left some loose ends.
Apt! From my experience collaborating with designers and developers most of the time, as a PM you are not the one coming up with the solution. It's rather a kind of combination of all the different inputs, ideas and constraints (during developments or collaboration). I start to believe that Product Manager interviews are somehow broken.
@@kevinngaleu1545 you are spot on mate. the PM's job is NOT to find and deliver the SOLUTION> the PM's job is to figure out what does the customer care about, what does the customer want (what problem do they want solved) - and finding the things to focus o that will create value for users whilst enabling the business to capture value from the market.
it's truly bewildering that this is the bar for PM'ing at the mainstream corporate level. these answers would not fly with Startups or VCs. at the end the guy on the left said Mitchell did an "excellent" job, a "professional" job. wow. i'd say this is a "D" grade in terms of clarity, understanding, value, originality, strategy, testability, viability, etc. i.e., it would put the company at risk to build that out. he could have kept it short by saying, "remember MySpace? let's just do that with Spotify."
I agree. Mitchell seems to be coming up with new ideas by drawing inspiration from other companies instead of understanding the various pain points Spotify users have at various user segments.
I also agree , I thought it . was eerie to simply jump into solutioning way too fast without revealing or asking more about the user's pain points/user needs. it seemed as if Mitchell jump into that way too fast.
Was surprised to see that definition of problems/goals and metrics were brought up as late as they were. Imo feature ideas should come afterwards as a function of goal outcomes
I've seen some different approach to this. (1) Goal is defined and confirmed with the interviewer in the beginning or (2) no goal was given by the interviewer even asked and then the interviewee looked at user pain points first and explicitly call-out "let me understand our users first then i can have a better product vision or direction after we fully understand our target users" or (3) you can make an assumption based on the mission of the company and say "hey Facebook is about fostering community so I want to see some user engagement picked up with my product" ... In the end based on watching all mock ups - it's all about persuasion and structure is just one strategy to land well so you can customise it to what comes naturally to you as long as you are ensuring you take the interviewer with you on your approach and ensure the interviewer is not lost...
It shouldn't because that is his personality. Maybe he is just avoiding spurling out saliva because the interviewer is sitting close to him. As long Mitchell and the interviewer are both comfortable - gets the job done.
Really loving the content of this channel, would love to see a interview with Stephen and Mitchell having their roles swapped , as stephen suggested in the end ;)
Isn't the first step is to see whether Improving social feature aligns with Spotify's goal? I wasn't clear on what's the goal that was set before jumping to features and for whom?
It would have been nice to look at some notes or a summary of the thought process divided into sections - User Base, Features, Prioritization, etc. Do you have some documentation or summarized version of this case somewhere?
When left-side guy asks, "Why is this an important user need to talk about?" the right-side guy totally misses that question. He says, "Doubling down on discovery."
@Exponent - I just watched the video and it is cool. How about Spotify reads the user activity and gifts him a musicmashup as birthday gift and asks if he/she would like to share it to their instagram story or snap story etc., Twin benefits: User engagement, shows that product empathises with user
Hey Kewal! I'd recommend communicating to the interviewer you've never used the app before (although, as a good PM, it'd be helpful to have exposure to some of the main products out there). You can ask your interviewer for advice on how they'd like to proceed.
1) how do you manage conflicts with engineers 2) how do you best communicate business goals or designs etc into technical requirements 3) how do you measure estimates? Time or complexity etc
A "moat" here is describing a dynamic of locking in users to the ecosystem. Moat around the castle/product. Basically, Spotify has a bunch of users and wants to make sure they don't jump ship to a competitor. In this case, through social features to create more of a network effect.
I just subscribed. I’m trying to make the transition from QA engineer to PM. Any tips on what benefits I can highlight since I’m coming in at a disadvantage in interviews compared to experienced PMs?
I think, improving the social features should be broken to qualitative and quantitative aspects. You can’t just add features. How about the metrics? Are we tracking how we are currently doing in that front and stuff like that.
Covering your mouth with your hand is a very unfortunate "tick". It tends to communicate that you're being untruthful. We should all record ourselves answering questions to determine if we have ticks or habits we're not aware of.
IMO, Mitchell completely missed the user persona and needs aspect of the problem. Goal was well established but without establishing user persona and needs of that particular group, and prioritising, it honestly felt like hopping onto the feature. I think Steven also felt that and tried to check it with Mitchell to nudge him towards the thought process. But once the solution step began, rest of the discussion went on in a structured manner.
It's weird; this is a good video *because* the guy answers so poorly. It's good to see what mistakes are possible. He says he wants to revamp the "old" "out of place" ~what friends are listening to~ section to be links to profiles which show... what friends are listening to. 🤦♂️ So the solution is: build more useless profile stuff into a music player 😬😬😬.
