Microsoft Product Manager Mock Interview: Improve Instagram Stories | Product Design

[@tryexponent]

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[@ja9co]

Last year before PM I was only a viewer of this channel. I would have never imagined being on the flip side. Thank you to the Exponent crew for letting me contribute. Feedback from the viewers is always appreciated 🙏🏻

[@jobman79]

Your performance is one of the strongest that I've ever seen, kudos!! You killed it.

[@rajanlliw]

Go Janine!!

[@charulbhakre3904]

Yours is one of my favourite mocks! Very detailed and thorough 👆🏻

[@tryexponent]

So great to have you on the channel!

[@karthikr5884]

The way you structured your ideas was great!

[@nicoyasfgiant]

There were more business problems than user problems. I would suggest viewers to take note of that as a downfall.

[@Talhatravel2]

I feel too.

[@rituagarwal6155]

The start was great. But it went downhill pretty quickly. The 2 things i liked most were: - How she clarified the scope of ig stories and gave a short user journey before starting to think about the question. - The fact that she wrote down the mission of the company as well as the mission of the team. The 2 things that could have been better were: - real user pain points rather than ig pain points - Better solutions (maybe one moonshot?) because this was a video shoot and am assuming they practiced or thought about it before

[@DivyangSaxena]

I would probably also like to understand why do we want to improve? and how do we define improvement?/business objective before moving on to the users and pain points

[@ujalarizwan2628]

I love you guys’ content, but can you please start adding feedback at the end of these sessions too like what went wrong in the interview and how could it have been improved.

[@Test8nnn]

My humble opinion: I would start with north metrics, engagement or revenue etc. Then have some trade offs about why we diving into engagement. Then go with the user segmentation: 1. Top content creators who post stories frequently. 2. Waist users who sometimes posted stories. 3. Users who barely or never posted stories I would guess the 3rd type of users takes around 50% of the user base. Features could be how to lure them start posting stories etc.

[@anvikaanvika9834]

correct, we didn't go into the goal for the improvement

[@lamvu-q1z]

I couldn't agree more. The flow should be business goal -> product goal. Why we want to improve ig stories? It must be aligned with some business goal/problems first

[@abhisargarg95]

As the interviewer kept reiterating, first two pain points sound more like business pain points, and not user pain points. GenZ as a segment does not care about decrease in usage or revenue, Instagram does. Interviewer did keep hinting towards that, and how to connect competition with user pain point would have been how user has more options in terms of interactive elements with TikTok, and not so much with Instagram.

[@abhisargarg95]

@Surb Singh Same pain point can work for multiple segments, but deep diving into multiple segments is beyond the scope of a 45 min interview. That is why, as a strategy, one segment is prioritized over the others.

[@byNatalee]

Also PM at Microsoft, it feels like a missed opportunity to specify business objectives first of Instagram stories first and foremost, and ask clarifying questions that are relevant to what was asked such as "What exactly are we trying to improve here: user retention, new users, increased revenue per active user, etc". I'd also say the users are not specific enough and do not illustrate an understanding of those that are engaging with this feature.

[@aditya2608]

These pain points seem more like business (IG) pain points for selected user group. I would list consumer pain points something on the lines of - 1) cannot re share stories 2) i see duplication of content in stories and in my feed 3) i cannot see stories anywhere other than top of the feed page etc.

[@tryexponent]

Hey Aditya! Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!

[@souravsarkar7193]

Really helpful content! However, there is one major flaw in this interview - the goal to improve was not discussed. I feel the clarifying questions and the entire case for that matter would have a much better direction and end result. This is just a note for the viewers of this video. Keep up the good work, Exponent team :)

[@iam13andwhatisthis]

I'm not surprised about the quality of Microsoft Teams

[@ShoaibMahmudOfficial]

Thank you for sharing the insights. My feedback is that she focused more on the business pain points, whereas I would prefer to empathize more with the users and their experiences. Additionally, I was surprised by her assumption that stories are created solely for connecting with friends!!

[@tryexponent]

Hey ShoaibMahmudOfficial, thanks for your feedback!

[@bobbysinha3549]

Very helpful content, please continue focussing on PM-related discussion. Thank you!

[@arnellstewart5246]

This channel is super helpful! Check out mine as well, would love feedback

[@katherinerempel1363]

Other than confidence, this falls short. The segmentation especially - when designing for an optimized experience, best to utilize existing users who are producing a certain kind of story, along with given level of engagement instead of just basic geo/demo data?

[@abhishekkhuntwal1257]

Irrelevant clarifying questions, no goals discussed, random user segmentation, pain points which are nowhere close to being pain points.

[@rhythmtv1753]

Arey bhai bhai😂 What according to you should have been the approach ?

[@waattzup]

Maybe she was not up to the mark but the way you are providing feedback,I feel sorry for your product squad that you will be working with. It's always easy to criticize,would have been better if you would have provided some constructive criticism. Learn some humility!!

[@abhishekkhuntwal1257]

@@waattzup Or maybe humility is in accepting criticism & improving through it? Why should criticism be always sugar-coated? :P

[@WangJim-h5v]

Does it make the most sense to segment users by age group? I was thinking more along the lines of user types 1. celebrities 2. content accounts 3. influencers 4. regular users (within this high/low/0 frequency posters). Will perhaps prioritize the low/0 frequency regular users group to increase postings/engagement

[@namokar2001]

it is SO hard to get a product manager role at Microsoft, and I am really surprised that the interviewee, with her flawed approach, could get a role. - she totally missed the bus on user paint points: this to me is the biggest gap. a product manager for consumer products cannot mix user pain points with business pain points - she missed asking what "improvement" would entail? engagement, retention, monetisation, growth its one thing to memorise a structure and its one think to do justice to the structure. Still surprised how she could get into Microsoft. Sorry for being harsh but there are enough and more people who are much more qualified and still donot make it to the likes of MS

[@gamerfreakcod4156]

This interviewee has no idea what she is talking about. Inexperienced and just following a structure. The biggest thing about product design is solving customer painpoints and all the painpoints discussed were business. Not the right mentality for product management, do not follow this method, there are several other great Exponent videos you can refer.

[@KIRAtheGOD92]

Great content guys! Extremely helpful and insightful

[@tryexponent]

So glad you liked it!

[@kosarajupriyanka635]

First two pinpoint are not use a painpoints, but they are business Painpoints

[@zhelicious]

YOU KNOW, the structure and flow is good. but there's a crazy amount of YOU KNOW used...

[@jyotiagarwal7006]

Would have liked if she could have used prioritization metrics for selecting Pain points

[@tacowilco7515]

She is really good. Very good thinking.

[@harrisonooi296]

shes good but i feel like she didnt really talk about the user pain points thouh

[@chan90s]

There's a logical fallacy which you need to be aware of. If you are building something for special events, there can't really be an improvement in the engagement. It would become an use and throw feature than a daily usage feature. So the solution doesn't really address the problem

[@deepagoyal]

Can you link the google doc in the caption?

[@delnayo9474]

I need an explanation what improving IG stories got to do with hardware?

[@girish_captures]

I think there is a clear confusion in the presenting the pain points. This is a good example of what NOT to do in interview. The pain points are supposed to be for the targeted user segment: Gen Z, not the business pain points. Maybe we can add a pain point like: Users cannot reshare the stories. @tryexponent I would suggest you to add some feedback points at the end of the video of what went well and what didnt went well, so that viewers wont do such mistake in their real time interviews.

[@tryexponent]

Hey girishkumar2626! Thanks for leaving this feedback. We'll look into it!

[@bakayariman4394]

Pain points could be better, it should be specific to users

[@i_mmm_u]

Sounds good

[@schedarsector]

I'm new with this interviews but i think maybe it would be better to ask "improve Instagram stories" not "design Instagram stories"

[@AdhipWali]

Wow! This is honestly one of the poorest mocks I’ve seen here. Apart from writing the obvious structure properly, explanation of points in that structure was just blah. Nothing against the interviewee, but she took assumptions without any justification. Idea was to improve stories and never did the interviewer mention improving stories = increasing revenue. No focus on the user just on the business which again was an assumption and her biases completely screwed this up. 1. Looking purely at 2021 for answering the question. 2. Again, 2021 and rise of Tick - Tock there off. Even if it were a basis, logical route would have been to mention why people are moving to Tick Tock and see if that can be solved by IG? 3. Assumption that stories are created by people to just connect with their friends. This just blew my mind. Really.

[@Just_Manny305]

FAANG PM chiming in here... i'm not sure if I agree with Kevin Wei's interview style. He comes off as super robotic and unapproachable. While you may encounter this style in management consulting interviews, tech interviews are different in the sense that it's a collaborative discussion. Kevin doesn't really offer much when Janine asks questions, and he only replies with "mhm's and yeah sure" when she wants to deeper dive on some topics. He doesn't seem open to brainstorming with her on topics, and at times he responds to her questions with another question. I've watched a few videos, and seen him do this a couple of times. I think some adjustments should be made as I don't believe this is an accurate representation of what a candidate would encounter in a FAANG PM interview.

[@The_real_dylan]

Why skip over Gen X? We're too busy doing all the work?

[@JoeTansey1]

gen x always left out :D

[@i_mmm_u]

Didn't she did all year's work here only

[@MimKhatun-u1k]

microprokey

[@alexfriedman2175]

Not a great performance IMO.