Welcome to "Tackling Product Strategy and Product Design Questions." This unit is designed to equip you with the skills needed to excel in product management interviews, particularly in the areas of product strategy and design. You will learn to assess market opportunities, identify customer needs, and develop innovative solutions. Mastering frameworks like CIRCLES will help you structure your responses effectively. By the end of this unit, you'll be prepared to tackle complex interview questions with confidence and creativity, aligning your strategies with company goals.

Recognizing product sense or product design questions in PM interviews is essential for structuring an effective response. These questions test your ability to understand user needs, brainstorm solutions, and prioritize features. They often start with prompts like “How would you improve X?” or “Design a product for Y users.” By identifying key phrases such as design, improve, solve, prioritize, or measure success, you can quickly determine that you're being tested on product sense. A strong response should focus on user problems, potential solutions, and trade-offs rather than just listing features.

• Jake: I'm preparing for my interview, and I'm not sure how to approach this question: "How would you improve our mobile app for students?"
• Natalie: That’s a product sense question. You’ll need to identify student pain points before suggesting improvements.
• Jake: So, instead of jumping to features, I should first think about what problems students face?
• Natalie: Exactly. Start with user needs, explore solutions, and prioritize the most impactful ones.

In this dialogue, Jake learns to recognize a product sense question and how to structure his response by focusing on user needs, ideation, and prioritization.

Once you've identified a question as a product sense question, it can be difficult to know where to start. During product sense interviews, the interviewer expects the candidate to drive the discussion and will typically refrain from asking guided questions to ensure the answer is addressed robustly. Candidates often turn to the CIRCLES framework to remember the critical aspects of the question to address in the interview. The CIRCLES framework provides a structured way to approach product sense questions. It ensures your response is comprehensive and logical.

CIRCLES stands for:

1. Comprehend the situation → Understand the problem and its context.
2. Identify the customer → Define the key user groups.
3. Report customer needs → Pinpoint pain points and goals.
4. Cut through prioritization → Decide which needs to address first.
5. List solutions → Brainstorm potential solutions.
6. Evaluate trade-offs → Assess pros and cons of each solution.
7. Summarize recommendation → Provide a final recommendation with reasoning.

This structured approach ensures your response is logical, user-focused, and complete.

While frameworks like CIRCLES provide a solid foundation, real-world product challenges often require creative problem-solving. You can use frameworks to structure your thinking, but don’t follow them rigidly. If an interviewer is giving you a case that already has clearly defined a specific user segment and their already-researched pain points, then you don't need to spend as much time on identifying the customer or reporting on customer needs. Be flexible with how you apply the framework.

While CIRCLES or any other framework can help guide your response, you also shouldn't announce that you're using one. Let the framework naturally guide your approach rather than stating each anagram letter that you're walking through.

A great PM candidate balances structured frameworks with adaptability, critical thinking, and creativity.

Now that you've learned all the components of a product sense response, it's important to know how to piece all of this together from understanding the customer to the exploring solutions to clearly defining success. Now, it's time to review how to recognize when these questions are being asked and how to package this information into a cohesive and structured response. In the following practices, you'll have one final product sense mock interview taking on a new aspect of "How to build a rideshare app for kids."