Client Success Story
One of my clients had their Execution interview, and the interviewer said their thinking was perfect! They felt comfortable, natural, and confident. 🌈
Common Pitfall: Metrics Without Strategy
Most candidates would come up with a list of metrics, and then try to pick a couple of metrics as goals in hindsight.
That's why we spent a lot of time on practicing how to frame the problem.
The Right Approach: Framing the Problem
Similar to the Product Sense interview where you don't jump to the solution space without analyzing the problem space, you'd follow a similar approach in Execution...
Take the time to frame the problem and the "essence" of the product.
Understanding the "Essence" of a Product
The "essence" of a product refers to the core purpose and underlying user motivations.
It's the fundamental reason the product exists, beyond just the specific functionality or mechanics.
For example: the essence of Facebook Groups is to enable thriving online communities and connections.
So in the Execution/Analytical Thinking interviews, you'd want to think about:
▶ What does it mean to enable communities that thrive?
▶ What does a thriving community mean?
Demonstrating Strategic Thinking
This line of thinking helps you demonstrate that you are a deep and strategic thinker.
And the way you can demonstrate this is to bring your interviewer along a convincing narrative, through your storytelling,
▶ so that you can clearly communicate what metrics should be used for goaling such that the goaling metric is the closest proxy to measure the "essence" of the product,
▶▶ and not just identify a list of metrics without thinking through whether these metrics should be used for tracking or goaling.
