3 Mistakes you makes for Estimate Questions
In product management interviews, one of the common sections is about Estimate. While Estimate itself has a bad reputation as the questions either feel odd or just simply “crazy” as questions, they tend to provide a more comprehensive view of your thinking on problems that require analytical thinking.
Why is this question important ?
Before we delve into the mistakes, one of the things to go deep into is to figure out why this question is really important. What really makes this question useful from a product management standpoint ?
Basically, as a product manager, there are a few ways to go about open ended problems. Imagine you are a product manager for Facebook and are tasked to evaluate a new product category around learning/education on Facebook. There is no clear path or process to exactly figure out the opportunity here. So as a product manager, you have two options:
- Review the existing products and make an estimate
- Evaluate Facebook’s impact and revenues through the experience
As you can see, in both cases, you require to build some hypothesis and have a process to evaluate your product strategy. In most cases, Product Managers require to build this skill over a period of time to really capture the essence of building this justification. This is why this question is “critical”.
Top 3 mistakes
- Not asking clarifying questions
- Picking wrong hypothesis from the beginning or for major items
- Prioritizing the process
As you can see, all of the above items are straight forward and easy to learn and nail the interview down.
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