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Product Sense Question - for Goals Section

Interview prep
#1

When we are talking about the goals in the product sense questions, I have seen material and mock interviews take 2 approaches,

  1. Tie the goal to the mission and keep it very macro level for e.g. connect as many doctors to patients , or apartment hunters to landlords, volunteers to non-profits etc. and
  2. define a metrics such as total # of transactions connecting doctors and patients, or total # of apartments found etc.

Which one is a better approach? Also, does defining a metric such early on increase the risk of pigeon holing the entire response on that metric?

Product Sense: Goal related questions
#2

Thanks for asking this question — very common issue to come up.

I recommend #1. A big, open-ended, aspirational goal rather than a metric. For Facebook in particular, I recommend the following: “Build community through X” (e.g. Build community through travel for a question about building a travel product)

It’s generally quite hard to define a metric without knowing more about the solutions and you’re right that it can easily pigeon hole you.

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#3

Thanks David that makes sense. Would you recommend that we tie this to a metric at some later point? Say in User needs or solution?

#4

It’s generally not something that’s necessary. Sometimes if there’s extra time it might come up after walking through the framework (you might be asked how you would measure success) — however, generally talking about metrics is reserved to the execution interview.

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#5

Update: added lessons to the Facebook course to clarify the goals section.

#6

Super helpful, thank you so much! You have a great service here

#7

Hi David,

I had trained myself to pick a metric to optimize along with an aspirational goal upfront that worked great for most Lyft related design questions.

This thread is helpful as I can understand that for more ambiguous questions at Facebook, picking a metric may pigeon hole you.

Would you recommend picking a metric to measure success (along with a goal) upfront for any design question in that case, even if the question prompt is e.g. -

  1. “Find X”, where X = Doctor, Tutor, Roommates, etc. - designing a product that provides some utility makes sense here thus having a transaction-based metric is fine?

  2. “Improve X”, where X = An existing Facebook product (especially utility-based product)?

Picking a metric does help later during prioritization.

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