In almost all product role interviews, including PM, UXD, UXR, or DS, you are likely to be asked to create or improve a new product or feature in a hypothetical scenario. Here are a few example questions:
What’s your favorite product and how would you improve it?
Design a better camera roll app for your smartphone.
If you were the PM for Instagram birthdays, what would you build?
The godfather of PM interview prep Lewis C, Lin, author of Decode and Conquer, created the CIRCLES framework to deal with such questions for PMs:
Comprehend the situation
What is it?
Who is it for?
Why do they need it?
When is it available?
Where is it available?
How does it work?
Identify the customer
Report customer’s needs
Cut, through use case prioritization
List solutions
Evaluate tradeoffs
Summarize your recommendation
However, does this framework only apply to PM interviews? Of course not! Everyone who works in a product organization should possess a strong product sense, which includes your product thinking skills, your ability to think on your feet, and your communication and collaboration skills. Yes, with different roles, they want to see you applying technical skills as well, such as reusing design components in different screens (designer), developing a screener to recruit desired participants (researcher), or specifying your plan to measure the average difference in the KPI between treatment and control groups.
Below is an altered version of CIRCLE for designers. You can practice it with any whiteboard challenge or design exercise.
The first couple of steps are the same for designers to leverage the CIRCLES framework.
Comprehend the situation: You need to ask the interviewer clarifying questions to understand what is the mission of the company, who are the target customers, what is the motivation for this initiative, and what resources and how much time you can expect.
Identify the customers/users: Then you move on to emphasizing customers or users, create a few lite personas, call out their goal, use cases and relevant behaviors.
Report user stories: As a <role>, I want <goal/design>, so that <benefits>. Describe your user case clearly. A user story conveys what the end user wants to achieve. It does not describe how the solution works.
Create high-level user flows: You can sketch out a storyboard or write down a step-by-step user flow, including key screens and explain the interactions between screens.
List solutions: Come up with more than one design solution for at least some of the steps. Explain your thinking process when generating different options.
Evaluate tradeoffs: Articulate the pros and cons of different options, and eventually make a recommendation with a clear rationale. This is where you can connect back to user goal, persona, and company mission. There’s no right or wrong answer, as long as your rationale is well articulated.
Summarize approaches: Use 2-3 sentences to summarize what did you design for who, and the purpose for this design. More importantly, point out how would you improve your design if you had more time.
Remember, this exercise is also a highly interactive one, meaning the interviewer would treat you like a member of the team, occasionally throwing in some feedback or “what if this” “have you thought of that” questions. They want to see how you respond to feedback, how you articulate your rationales, and and incorporate other people’s perspectives to build a better product.
Like all other interview questions, the only key to success is to practice, practice, practice. Practice it until you internalize the framework, you will find that you also became a better product person.
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