Identifying Pain Points
Shallow problem definition produces shallow solutions. Everything downstream is only as strong as the problem you chose to solve. This is where product judgment and user empathy converge.
What interviewers are scoring right now
- Whether your problems are specific to this user, not just plausible for any user
- Whether your problems are genuinely distinct from each other
- Whether your prioritization shows product judgment, not just a gut call
The three-part approach
Part 1: Paint the user's world
Start with a one-sentence recap of who you selected and the constraint that makes them interesting. Then walk their day. The problems should surface from the journey, not from a list you had in your head before you started.
Interviewers are watching whether your problems feel discovered or pre-loaded.
Walk from morning to evening. Note the moments that are hard, uncertain, or emotionally unresolved. Those are your raw materials.
"We're designing for dog owners with full-time jobs. They leave for work each morning without knowing how their dog is actually doing during the gap. They try different departure routines but have no feedback loop on what's helping. On weekends, they're hyperattentive to every behavioral signal because it's the only data they get."
Write down every friction point. You want more raw problems than you'll use.
If your narration sounds like a schedule, you haven't found the friction. "They wake up, they go to work, they come home" is what happened. The problems live in the moments that feel uncertain, unresolved, or out of control.
Part 2: Use the buckets to find three distinct problems
Organize what surfaced into four buckets: time, money, motivation, and trust and safety.
The buckets aren't just a sorting exercise. They're a diagnostic. If all your problems land in one or two buckets, you haven't found three distinct problems yet. You've found one problem with multiple faces.
Why this matters: If you bring three motivation problems into the solutions step, you'll generate three motivation solutions. They'll blur together, and the interviewer will notice. You need problems from different buckets because different root causes produce different solutions.
The four buckets cover fundamentally different reasons users experience friction. Time is about access and capacity. Money is about cost and value. Motivation is about engagement and willingness. Trust and safety is about confidence and risk. Because the underlying causes are different, the solutions have to be different too.
Three rules for your final three problems:
- They can't overlap. If all three could be solved by the same product mechanism, you have one problem in three framings. Go back and swap one out for something from a different bucket.
- They can't be too specific. "The dog barks at the mail" collapses your solution space. You'll struggle to generate more than one response to it. Stay at the root cause level.
- They can't be too broad. "The owner doesn't understand their dog" is so open-ended it doesn't point anywhere. A good problem is specific enough that a focused solution obviously addresses it.
- Separation anxiety (time): the owner is away and has no read on how the dog is doing
- Emotional bonding (motivation): the owner wants to know the relationship is genuine, not just tolerated
- Health signals (trust and safety): the owner can't tell when something is actually wrong versus normal behavior
Three different root causes. Three different solution spaces.
Part 3: Prioritize with explicit criteria
Pick one problem and show your reasoning across four dimensions.
- Breadth: How many users in this segment experience this?
- Depth: How severe or frequent is it?
- Product strength: What is this company actually set up to solve, given their technology and moat?
- Risk: Can the product, as defined, actually deliver on this?
Naming all four signals that your prioritization is reasoned, not instinctive.
Winner: Separation anxiety. Broad, acute, and directly solvable with what this technology can actually deliver.
A complete answer picks the strongest problem and makes a clear case for why it matters most.
A senior+ answer walks all four criteria explicitly, names why the other problems were deprioritized rather than just left behind, and connects the final choice to what this company is specifically positioned to build right now.
The prioritization feels earned because it's multidimensional and because it closes the loop between the problem selection and the company context established earlier in the answer.
The dimension candidates often skip is product strength. At OpenAI, interviewers consistently push back on "it's the most painful" as a standalone justification. The candidates who advanced named the tradeoff explicitly: here's the problem, here's why this technology can solve it, here's what we'd need that we don't have for the others.
Common pitfalls
Three problems that are really one. If "separation anxiety," "not knowing if the dog is okay," and "guilt about leaving" all appear in your list, you have one problem with three emotional framings. The test: could all three be solved by the same product mechanism? If yes, consolidate and find a genuinely different third.
A journey without friction. A schedule describes what happens. The friction lives in the transitions and the uncertain moments. Slow down there.
Prioritizing without criteria. "I'm focusing on separation anxiety because it's the most important" is a conclusion, not a prioritization. Show the reasoning.