interview prep no. 10

9 Design Tips | Keeping Up with AI | API Metrics | Search Filters for Recruiters | How The World Sees Us | Mock: Helping Bars Manage Lines | 5 Prompts

midjourney

Coming Soon

Next week I will announce a way for readers of this newsletter to get calibrated and find other calibrated candidates to mock with.

This Week’s Highlights

1. Design 9 Tips for Product Design Interviews

2. Metrics API for Instagram

3. Technical Keeping up with AI

4. Get a Foot in the Door Search Filters for Recruiters

5. Communication Tip How the World Sees Us

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6. Recording Mock: Time/Line Management Solution for Bars

7. Practice Prompts 5 Recently asked Prompts

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Product Design.

9 Tips for Product Design Interviews

Last week, I prepared 9 product design-specific tips. I cover how to give good feedback in a mock interview all the way through to metrics for success.

For Example:

Design

Think “Design a teleportation device” or “Design an app to find doctors.” In these questions, you need to think with a startup mentality. You have a little more freedom.

Improve

This is more iterative. Often (but not always), thinking about use cases or jobs to be done will help you more than segmentation. You want to think about improving the core experience. Often prioritization is about improving for the largest total addressable market rather than a niche you might more easily select for the design prompt.

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Technical.

Keeping up with AI Terms

I have decided to start adding occasional tips on technical topics. To get started, this is a nice article on demystifying AI jargon.

• Embeddings are a way to map concepts to meaningful numbers.

• Training involves finding parameter values (aka - weights) that result in the highest accuracy on unseen data.

• Neural networks are named as such because they’re structured to loosely mimic how neurons in our brains work.

• Large Language Models or LLMs are just models that predict the next word and have a lot of parameters (on the scale of hundreds of millions).

In the coming weeks, I will rotate in more technical concepts in this newsletter as AI knowledge becomes more critical to interview success.

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Metrics.

API for Instagram

Try to answer the prompt: Imagine you are the PM for an API for Instagram: how would you measure success?

The answers are hidden, so you can try independently and then look at my response to compare. Here are the rules for the metrics exercises.

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Get a Foot in the Door.

Search Filters for Recruiters

I don’t remember where I found it but, this an interesting set of screengrabs and descriptions of the recruiter experience on LinkedIn. As LinkedIn is always innovating, it may not be the most up-to-date experience, but hopefully, it is helpful for you. As you read it, think about your LinkedIn profile, do you want to update it in any way after reading it?

Don’t forget, I am trying to learn your burning questions for recruiters.

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Communication Tip of the Week.

How The World Sees Us

This is a great LinkedIn post from a friend Ann Maria Sencovici. Nice reflections on how we show up in the world. To improve our communication skills, it is helpful to remember how we want to be seen vs. how we are seen.

Delusions of Self-Awareness: Inside the confines of our minds, we construct a picture of who we are. It’s influenced by our experiences, our beliefs, our hopes. And it is always, scientifically, woefully inaccurate.

Fractals of Truth: This is where others are key. They reflect back a version of us that we often don’t see – whether through ignorance or denial. Sometimes, it’s an affirmation; other times, a revelation. But, like a shadow, like it or not, the reflection is always there.

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