Interview Questions

S G. - "Clarification questions: How are these metrics calculated? Get context on why these metrics are important? Are we looking at any specific role? Benchmarking: What is the current time to hire? How does this compare to competitors? Do we have a desired goal/target for these metrics? Problem Solving: I began by analyzing the various steps in the hiring process and the number of days taken at each stage. Soon realised that the bulk of the time is taken in a few steps (80/20). Drilled down further"See full answer

Umang S. - "In my role as a Product Owner, I was developing a platform for a logistics company. As a PO and that too of a digital agency, my work was mostly before-end-to-after-end, it would start from pitching, strategy, product management, launch, funding deck prep. In mid of the product management cycle, the client starts adding pressure to deliver way before the deadline, as they had found the PE firm that conceptually was ready to start funding discussion, since this was not scoped before the start,"See full answer

Kari J. - "I got this question in my Mini-Case today. I was a little confused because even though I asked a few clarifying questions -- it didn't clarify much! :-) My response was to what was shown on screen -- a mock of the current process (five modal windows) and a mock of a new single modal. THe ask for this was what do you like and dislike in the mock for the new. I will admit that it would have been easy to say what was wrong with the current process - but since the ask was for the new mock, and"See full answer

Ketshi B. - "Clarifying questions When we say signals do you mean just features that are fed into the ML model that decide how the content should be ranked? Is newsfeed the front page of fb app. Can you expand what you mean by relevance? User journey User enters blue app.. Newsfeed is the first thing they see. User either continues on newsfeed ie scrolls through it or moves to a separate part of fb As they are scrolling they may see contents from friends, creators and ads, or other pages that they have been"See full answer

Ayush R. - "Clarifying Qs: Uber PM Business goals - revenue, user engagement Known customer needs Any trigger or prompt - post covid, things are getting back to normal. Observing demand for kids to travel alone within the city from point A to B Geo - US Uber mission -- Create opportunity through movement Uber strengths - Brand value Mobile tech GPC tracking Real-time traffic and routing algos Fleet of drivers Why we need this app for kids: Why would kids want to trav"See full answer

Anonymous Raven - "How often do we get 15 min to answer a question? Wondering isn't the expectation to answer this in 3-5 min?"See full answer

Mehul K. - "Clarifying Questions Are we building feature for YouTube Music/YouTube Video? -> YT Video has higher scope of user engagement so YT Video. YT Video has 2 forms of video content, are we focusing on long form, short form or am I free to chose ? -> YT Shorts and short videos have taken off lately so focus on it. Do we have a specific business goal with regards to building this feature ? -> We want to improve engagement. Do we want to build this feature for a specific kind of audience or"See full answer

Chitapuram N. - "Since there is a need for the data to be accurate and consistent without any latency to allocate a spot, can't the data be synchronously synced to replicas after every write as the number of writes are not many per min, instead of read lock phenomena Let me know if i am on a wrong thought here."See full answer

Jazmia H. - "Weak point: suggested something that YouTube Music already does- offering the service free to Premium members. Rebounded by saying the lack of user awareness is a pain point and how it can be mitigated- by frequent check-ins by way of notifications and emails Strong point: discussed overall strategies of global expansion, marketing and innovation with pros and cons for each approach. Settled on discussing an innovation piece combining ranked recommendation of YouTube music as well as personaliz"See full answer

dreamingincode - "In the API design, the interviewer is switching between RPC style (operation based endpoints) and REST style (resource oriented). Sticking to one convention and explaining why it is preferred over the other e.g. REST if the twitter domain maps nicely to resources e.g. /tweet or /follower or /user would help to create a more consistent and unified API. It would make it easier for clients to integrate with the API as well."See full answer

Vihari K. - "Situation: While working at CVS Health, our inventory management system for OTCHS products was facing challenges. We had increasing stock outs, and our existing data was insufficient to fully understand and address the issue since it has been only a year this product line was initiated. Action: Although we do have a forecasting model to predict demand and other algorithms to trigger out of stock flags to warehouses to fill them, lack of data points on seasonality, supplier delays, compliance"See full answer

Michelle D. - "I'd tell the interviewer that I'd start off with clarifying the question to make sure I understand it correctly (see 1 below). Then, I'd tell the interviewer my approach to make sure they know what to expect as I talk through. Approach would start with discussing the mission and connecting a north star metric (NSM) to the mission, then discuss key product metrics that are inputs towards NSM. If there's time at the end and if the interviewer wants to go down this path, we should also talk about t"See full answer

Nagendra S. - "Assumptions: Platform: iOS/Android and Web Application Service Type: Renting Bicycles (hourly, daily, weekly), possibility of buying or selling Geography: Focusing on Asian markets, e.g., India, where bicycles are a popular mode of transportation Role: Product Manager at Microsoft Objective: Design an app focusing on customer engagement and new customer acquisition Setting the Stage: Why a Renting Business? Market Potential: In Asian markets, a si"See full answer

Sam E. - "average price per transaction would drop because we might not be considering currency exchange rates, which is much lower in India and Southeast Asia, when aggregating data globally. to define success, i'll first segment the data, separating existing markets to newer ones to check if that is the cause of the dropping average price. then i'll select a north star metric, which would be the number of completed transactions vs. attempted. i'll also track supporting metrics like usage frequency and"See full answer

Manu G. - "Design an alarm clock for blind people Clarifying question: Does it have to be a physical product or software? Your call Do I need to think about the long-term implications of the product from a strategy perspective or a single product? single product What are the metrics this company will focus on? Engagement What industry are we in? (start-up, google/Amazon, etc) - Startup What do we mean by blind? - ppl who cannot see anything, or people who still have sense of"See full answer

Jatin S. - "public int minInsertions(String s) { int n = s.length(); int dp = new intn; for (int len = 2; len <= n; n++) { for (int i = 0; i + len - 1 < n: i++) { int j = i + len - 1; if (s.charAt(i) == s.charAt(j)) { dpi = dpi + 1; } else { dpi = 1 + Math.min(dpi + 1, dpi); } } } return dp0; } `"See full answer

Elly P. - "Answer generated using AI plugin: https://github.com/buildforward/product-sense-interview-answer Section 1 — Clarify (~2 min) Before I dive in, I'd like to ask a couple of clarifying questions to make sure I'm solving the right problem. What do we mean by "engaging"? Hashtags can drive discovery, community, creation, or interaction. I'll assume we're focused on making hashtags more engaging for content consumers — increasing the time people spend exploring and interacting with"See full answer