Learn Product Sense in 9 Minutes | Data Science Interviews | Interview Coach (Ex-Google)

hey everyone this is dane here interview coach at dataintv.com one question i often get is how do you develop product sense you see i'm not really surprised by this question

because a lot of clients who are preparing for data science interviews are often focused on product data science roles and product data science there's all kinds of questions there's questions

about success metric there are questions about how do you improve a product and how do you test an idea and the driving engine behind all of these

product data science questions is really understanding product sense so what is product sense and how do you cultivate it so hopefully over the course of the next

couple minutes i can clarify what that means and how do you sharpen it so that you can ace data science interviews in data science one of the area you're

tested on is product sense but how do you going about cultivating this well let's start with the definition of what it actually means product sense

essentially is composed of two essential ingredients it's empathy and execution let's take a deep dive on empathy empathy is the ability to understand and

feel what a user is experiencing how do you know what value to provide to a user if you don't know what they are experiencing think about any of the products that we're using

today whether it's uber google search or amazon all of these product ideas came from the fact that the founders understood

what a user was experiencing and they came up with an idea to improve their experience so every product ideas always start with empathy

now let's take a look at an example let's just say uber for instance before uber came around how did people transport from point a to point b

they would have to arrange rides or take public transportation or drive themselves and when you're in an urban area like new york city for instance where i live

right now it's very cumbersome to plan the logistics behind us and you end up wasting a lot of time and so what uber did was it created an

on-demand solution so that regardless of where you are as long as you drop a pin on a map a driver is going to pick you up in a few minutes and it will take you to wherever

you want to go and so uber helped save time so as you can see every product always starts with empathy for user now let's talk about

the second ingredient in product sense it's execution execution is the ability to solve a user problem with product

decisions using ideation analytics and experiments now bulk of the data science interview questions focus around the execution part whether you're asked

interviewed questions such as how do you estimate the market sizing of a product how do you test the product or how you measure the product all of these boil down to clearly

understanding the execution part of product decision making and it's not surprising why they love to ask these questions because if you are a data scientist in their product data science

team you're going to be focused a lot on building metrics running experiments and help make executives and product managers make key decisions so you can

help their platform achieve success now that you understand what product sense means let's think about how to cultivate it you can cultivate product sense with the following exercise which is product breakdown

what that basically entails is that you just pick out a project and you break it down into essential components and in this exercise we're going to use newsfeed as an example newsfeed is a

flagship product on facebook core app it's the primary way content across users are created into this one seamless scroll and it's also the way in which facebook

can monetize through advertisement posts when you think about product breakdown the first component you want to think about is the problem what is the problem that the product solves

in the case of facebook news feed what it did was it creates content prior to the introduction of news feed users have to go through a series of

cumbersome steps to see what the latest facebook profile status is they had to go to a profile and look at the status but with the introduction of newsbeat

content is provided to you conveniently the second component you want to think about is the users who are the users using the product

what type users is the facebook newsfeed targeting and in this case because news feed is such a integral part of facebook it's literally on the landing page as soon as

you go on the facebook app in this case it's not a particular segment of users that facebook will try to target using the news feed rather it's going to be any users on facebook

and of course if we try to pick out perhaps different products such as marketplace then we could be a bit more refined in terms of what are the target segment that this particular product is

trying to target but in the case of news feed we're going to say it's just going to be general for all of facebook users the third aspect is onboarding what is the onboarding

process of the product basically we're talking about signup process what are the steps that a user must take in order to be able to start using that product

and the onboarding process in this case is basically just going to be sign up and the next element that you want to think about is a journey what is a user experience from the

beginning to the end of the task so this is really the all these steps that a user must take from the beginning to the end in order to achieve basically success

and in the case of news feed there are a series of actions that users can do they can scroll to view content they can react to

a content in the form of emojis they can comment on it and they can share posts to some external websites and so when you think about any product

think about all the intermediary steps that helps you go from point a to point b and the next part is the reward function how does a product reward users once

they have achieved that journey and in the case of facebook newsfeed what it does is it wars people in the form of helping people stay connected and that's a very rewarding thing when

you are up to date with what your friends are doing then you get a sense of belonging and every products out there especially the ones that are very sticky

are always thinking about how can we reward users the next element is retention whenever you look at a graph like this basically this is a retention curve

and ideally for any product developers out there they want this retention curve to be retained at a relatively high percentage across time

and so what it deals is how does a product retain current users because if they keep losing users there's a lot of costs in trying to

constantly on board users and in the case of facebook newsfeed what it does is it sends out push notifications to mobile phones and the last element is

growth so growth deals with how does a product grow users and in the case of news feed what it does is it allows users to share posts

to external websites thereby making it visible for other users who are currently not on facebook to basically start using facebook so these are the seven elements that you

want to use when you're trying to break down product and if you keep doing this what it's going to do is it's going to help you cultivate product sense which is a driving engine to be able to

answer a myriad of product data science industry questions so if you have a product data science interview coming up i highly recommend

that you use this exercise to understand the intuition of a product now if you stay with me so far here's one thing i'd like you to try pick out any product you like

and break it down and comment it down below in the comment section and what i will do for the first 10 comments that contains this breakdown

i'll provide my own personal input about what my thoughts are now hopefully this clarifying the meaning of product sense and how to cultivate it

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