How to Answer Product Manager Take Home Assignments

Product management is multi-faceted, and so is the interview process. While interviews are a great assessment tool, companies are also interested in seeing sample work outputs from PM candidates. This is why many leading tech companies, like Google and Uber, use PM take-home assignments to evaluate candidates.

In general, these assignments test your knowledge on the following:

1. Writing/Presentation Skills
2. Creativity
3. Prioritization
4. Design Sense
5. Technical Knowledge
6. Market Research

Overview of Take-Home Assignments:

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the types of take-home assignments you might encounter:

1. Design a new product
2. Improve an existing product or service

Question type 1: Design a new product

These questions are centered around developing a new product from the ground up. Your goal here is to narrow in on the pain points of your target users and establish a clear product vision. Then, you should come up with relevant features in line with your objective. Overall, these questions test how you come up with solutions to a broad problem. Furthermore, they also help evaluate how you prioritize ideas and define success metrics.

Here are some sample questions:

1. You work for a well-resourced startup and are responsible for building a new restaurant reservation app for urban areas. Propose a product to the startup’s leadership to increase the number of bookings.

Pay attention to the below criteria as you structure your presentation:

• Clearly define your goals and your target users. What’s unique about urban areas when considering user demographics?

• Discuss tradeoffs, risks, and metrics for success. Are there cases when metrics might be misleading? For instance, when might number of bookings be a misleading metric?

• Demonstrate how your proposed product looks and feels (simple wireframes can be helpful).

2. You are the lead PM of a new fitness startup focused on helping people lead healthier lifestyles. The company wants to release a new product to the market but isn’t sure where to start and what product to launch for. How would you go about launching this startup’s new product? You can submit your proposal as a pdf or a power point presentation.

Pay attention to the below criteria:

1. Users: Who is your target audience? What user problem are you trying to solve?
2. Features: What will be in your MVP? What is in your v2.0?
3. Engineering: How hard is this to build? How long might it take? Are there ways to build a solution quicker?
4. Design: How does the product look? What is the user flow?
5. Success Metrics: How will you measure success? Why are these metrics the most relevant?
6. Go-to-market: Where will you launch your product initially? How will you expand?

Question type 2: Improve an existing product

These questions evaluate your ability to improve an existing product in the market. These problems could involve improving the existing user experience, expanding the product’s functionality, or moving into new markets. Always tie your answer to the overall company’s product vision or mission. You should also take some time to identify the target users, the key competitors, and the product’s strengths/weaknesses.

These questions are distinct from the previous section in that you often already have a product vision to work with. It’s effective to state this product vision, as well as any other assumptions, at the beginning of the session.

Here are some sample questions:

1. You are the PM for Google Hangouts and are assigned with the task of expanding the product into a new market (geographic, occupational, or other interpretations of the market all viable).

Here are some questions you should consider:

• What new market do you think is worth considering? Why is this better than the alternatives?

• What new features would you build? How do these new feature look (hint: wireframes can be helpful).

• Discuss the potential tradeoffs and risks with the decisions you make.

• What does success look like? How do we measure it?

2. Let’s say you are the PM for Uber Eats and assume that helping users eat healthier will improve engagement.

• What new feature will you build to test this assumption?

• How does your new feature look? (Hint: consider using wireframes)

• How might you market this feature?

• What cities/countries would you first you launch this feature in?

Approach:

Each type generally requires a similar approach. In general, these questions often boil down to the product design question. Here’s an outline of general steps that you can walk through for your next take-home assignment. This list is not exhaustive and should be tailored to the assignment’s requirements.

1. Identify the users and define pain points: The most important thing is to clearly define the problem we are solving. We must identify who our target users are and what their main pain points are. This step is critical in helping us define our vision for our product.
2. Define clear goals and product vision: Now that we’ve clearly identified our target users and their pain points, we need to establish clear goals for our product. Specifically, we want to frame a compelling product vision to help inform our roadmap going ahead.
3. Brainstorm and prioritize features: What features should we build? What is in our MVP? We need to brainstorm and prioritize feature ideas in line with our objectives. Furthermore, we need to establish what features are absolutely necessary for our initial launch and what features can be held off for later iterations.
4. Establish a go-to-market (GTM) strategy: Now, we need to spend time thinking about how we plan to launch our product and grow it. What markets will we first enter? Will everyone get access to our product from day one or will access be limited? How do we plan to expand to additional regions?
5. Define success metrics: At this point, we’ve defined the key features for our product and have established our objectives. We should now spend time thinking about how we plan to define the success of our product. We can follow the (GAME) approach from the analytics lesson here to define key user metrics. In general, we need to identify the user actions that support our goals and then find the associated metrics.
6. Get Feedback: As we’ve completed our report, it’s time to get feedback from others. This step is critical as there might be important user pain points we might have overlooked or alternative features we did not think about. Feedback helps us better understand how we can improve our proposal as we learn what others like and don’t like. It is also important to not spend too much time getting feedback from too many people as this can lead to confusion. Only ask others for feedback if your assignment permits it.

Formatting:

Oftentimes, you might have the choice to decide between either making a powerpoint or a written report. Here are a few tips on how you can decide between both choices:

Written Report:

1. You can articulate your ideas better verbally
2. You like elaborating your ideas in detail
3. You find that writing helps improve your thought process

Presentation:

1. You are comfortable with expressing your ideas visually
2. You have a strong design sense
3. You can express your ideas succinctly

Ultimately, there’s no right or wrong answer. Pick the format that better plays to your strengths.

Common Errors

Here are some common errors that PM candidates face during take-home assignments:

1. Misunderstanding the goals of the assignment
2. Spending too much on wireframing as opposed to establishing a clear vision
3. Putting too much emphasis on the formatting of the presentation as opposed to the content
4. Not being succinct
5. Not getting feedback on ideas
6. Not considering trade-offs about product decisions
7. Not thinking critically about user pain points
8. Not having a clear objective
9. Not defining clear success metrics
10. Not providing a clear structure for the report/presentation