White board challenge?
I had one yesterday for a product design role and it was sort of brutal. The question was incredibly open-ended and my requests for clarity and constraints were refused. I felt like a fish flopping around on dry land, but at least made them laugh and hopefully made some intelligent comments. As I have nothing to compare this to (been in graphic and visual land for my last roles), curious about others’ experiences with the WBC. What’s normal? What’s not? Thanks in advance.
Company?
Most of the WBC I've had were primarily judged on how I approached the question. Asking hole punching questions, as @MiddleWest mentioned, can usually net more points than saying " here is the answer".
It’s interesting—I was on a “split loop” and the PM was one team, the designer was another. The designer wanted nothing to do with me, the PM was happy to bring me on his team. So the hole-punching approach probably depends on numerous factors.
Yeah in the end they do care about your answer, but i was also trying to stress the importance of showing how you get there, and how your mind works. Then again I've never interviewed for a high level position, so there's definitely that experience gap with interview expectations
Ambiguous problems are the toughest because your ability to narrow them down is the question. It might be more about your ability to create a framework and then prioritize (what’s the goal, who are the users, what problem are we trying to solve, who do we solve for first? what is their journey?). One trick that I use is I just ask for permission to ignore parts of the problem without needing to do a prioritization exercise “for the sake of time I will focus on this kind of user for the purpose of this question even though I know user B and C exists, how does that sound?” Also FYI I am a PM but I think product design and product management could overlap more than you think.
Great pointers. And yes, design and PM overlap a lot but not entirely—I was asked if I wanted to be a PM and I said I thought it was not my greatest strength. A PM who understands design is a hell of an asset.
Yeah this is solid advice. I realized after it was over that this is what I should’ve done. Also I think I’d be a good PM (and have been told as much) but not sure how to get my foot in the door. Do people transition out of product design into product management often?
What company was this with? My whiteboard challenge in my loop at Amazon was pretty standard. I asked a bunch of questions about context and purpose, numerous questions about the audience, etc. Only did some drawing because I thought the problem statement was poorly formed and wanted to understand exactly what I was designing for. A head of PM and a designer conducted the challenge. Later I learned that the designer didn’t like that I didn’t come up with whiz-bang ideas for a phone app and watch app, the PM guy thought about bringing me on as a PM. It really just depends on who’s running the challenge and what they want to see. If they’re looking for how you approach a problem, that’s different than if they want to see how you draw a user flow. In my case, most of the questions I asked got an “uh...I’m not sure, good point” response.