Product Manager Interview Prep 2017

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**Tell me about yourself**

Let me give you a high-level summary:

5 years experience building, launching and scaling products
Worked has spanned very early stage, high growth startups - venmo at 5 ppl and large companies - also worked at Etsy

My work has led to successful results.
1. Informed a re-design of venmo back in 2011, pre-acquisition that is still the design today
2. As team of 3 at customer.io went from $100 / m revenue in beta to 50K/mth in 1.5yrs

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More specifically, let me tell you want I bring to the table and my philosophies around how to build great products. 

*WHAT I BRING TO THE TABLE*:

1. EXPERIENCE BUILDING TOOLS (applicable to SAAS)
- Particularly, I have built tools. Tools that are trying to help make a particular process or craft more accessible to the general population.
1) did this at Hopscotch - programming accessible using block-based lanugage
2) did this at customer.io — intelligent email tool for marketers.

2. HELD ROLES W A LOT OF RESPONSIBILITY
- At early stage companies, I’ve held critical roles
- VP of Product, at Customer.io from nothing to launch to scale
- Head of Product at Hopscotch
- PM of Etsy Android and iPhone app
=> Honed my ability to navigate the unknown or new.
=> Used to doing things for the first time, that i’ve never done before

3. PREVIOUSLY A PROGRAMMER AND DESIGNER
- Make a very effective PM because I’ve done both programming + design
- Sole android developer at Venmo 
- Lead front-end developer at Customer.io
- Lead designer at Customer.io
- Lead designer at Hopscotch
=> I understand what’s involved, and can make creative + pragmatic solutions
=> I can do more on my own (db look ups, fixes on site, etc)

PHILOSOPHIES

CANT BUILD GREAT PRODUCTS WITHOUT CLEAR STRATEGIC GOALS
- Everyone at the company should know the goals and non-goals
- We are all making tons of decisions everyday in our jobs, it’s critical that everyone has important context to make decisions.
- Write the goals on the wall. 
- Have very few goals. Get every detail right, but limit the number of details.

CANT BUILD GREAT PRODUCTS WITHOUT CONTINUOUS INSIGHTS FROM USERS
- Studied human-centered design at stanford d.school
Changed me
- Strongly believe exceptional products stem from nuanced understanding of user behavior
- Have indepth experience launching entirely new products and features. rapid prototyping, product experiments, MVP

CANT BUILD GREAT PRODUCTS WITHOUT TRACKING KEY METRICS
I am data-driven developer.
Did math in my undergrad and modeling as a corporate strategy consultant
where and when possible, use data to learn more about user and drive decisions.
e.g., what part of the funnel to focus on, what behaviors lead to conversion, 

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THE ONE WHERE WE USED DATA TO IMPROVE THE PRODUCT.

Goal: User growth at Hopscotch
- First look at funnel, where are biggest leaks? Great downloads (100K per week), but week 1 retention was low, like 5 % (HS is weekly usage product, typically used by kids on the weekend; our DAU and WAU wasn’t that different)
- Need to improve retention.. what do we know about retention? what leads to it?
- Used Amplitude to look at what behaviors are strongly predictive of high retention
=> Publish a project
=> Use a template

- Redesigned product to encourage both those behaviors.
- Saw 3x increase in retention. 
- Specifically we 
1) land people on templates
2) improved template content (more engaging)
3) improved templates tooling (added embedded video player)
4) encouraged and made it easier to publish


THE ONE WHERE WE USED USER RESEARCH TO IMPROVE THE PRODUCT.

Goal: User growth
Venmo: 5 ppl
Research informed app redesign.
YADA


**Tell me about your career path and how you ended up moving around so much**

Sure! I learned a lot and left each place on great terms.
Specifically:
- Customer.io was going remote - I like working around people.
- Etsy product development was too slow
- Hopscotch I wanted a sabbatical (recently turned 30) and a pivot was a good time to do that.

- Role wise, I’ve worked a lot of small, high growth companies, which means I’ve taken on any role necessary to drive the growth of the product.
- Venmo: Research + Development at Android
- Customer.io: Front-end developer + product designer

Found my home in PMing because it requires a lot of skillsets. Design, engineering, user research, creative, analytical, communication, writing, people management (empathy) pragmatic solutions, team motivation. 
Move from high-level to details.


**Whats a prodcut you like and why**
Headspace.
Creating a new behavior (an important one as well). Behavior change is very hard to do, and they’ve done smart job of doing it.
1. Borrow from video game. See linear map, only one choice of what to do. Super important (this is a problem w a lot of onboarding, too many options, means user has to make too many decisions)
2. Content is accessible, imaginative, short.
3. Set up calendar reminders. Get you to do the same time everyday

=> Changes to make add social, improves behavior change.
=> Offer a few more options for personalities. So important that you like the eacher and that is such a peronsal thing.

**Unpopular, difficult decision**
Have to do this all the time. But key is understanding why it’s unpopular. Usually because not everyone has the same data or goals in mind. 

1. Make sure high level goals are clear/
2. discuss understand options to achieve these goals and walk through what will happen in different scenarios.
3. typically when everyone has the same data people are more understanding

another issue outside of data + context can be sunk costs, and personal attachment to something someone has worked on. explain this is part of jobs at companies that take risks. not all things work out. otherwise, woudln’t be risky and others would do it. share stories of how this has happened in the past.

do things for morale. celebrate things.

e.g., killing the web player. had worked on this for 4 months. but end was not in sight. (quality wasnt there, too many bugs), while it would have streamlined development in the long-run the opportunity cost of not working on the iPhone app in the short-term was much too high. goal was to grow users.  time much better spent on iPhone app. team was okay w it, took a bit of time. 

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General Questions for Product:
- Why this hire now?
- Company goals? Product goals?
- How big is the team?
- What are the biggest challenges right now?
- What’s something insightful / surprising about users?
Qualitative or quantitative insight.
- What’s something insightful / surprising about the company?
- What was last launched? What was the process for coming up with that feature?