interview prep no. 61

Vibe Coding | Personality Tests | AI Learnings | User Segmentation Exercise

midjourney - circa 2024

Apologies for the off-cycle newsletter, trying to catch up. For Sunday, I will be sharing how I use AI Chatbots to update my resume. (I had some fun learnings this week.)

This Week’s Highlights

1. Vibe Coding Don’t Spread Yourself Thin

2. Personality Tests Increasing

3. Fun & Learning AI Reading

Paid Subscribers ONLY

1. Product Sense User Segmentation Exercises

---

Vibe Coding

Don’t Spread Yourself Thin

A Reddit post last week has people asking: Do I need to Vibe code in my interview? Short Answer: In the US, not yet. Longer Answer: AI product development relies on solid product requirements; if you can write those, I beleive you will be fine in the long run.

The Post

My Thoughts

Most US-based PMs in a position to interview others for AI roles are not vibe coding; they are building at scale. It takes a bit to learn vibe coding, and if most people can’t do it themselves, they aren’t going to be interviewing you to do it.

Much of an AI PM’s time is spent on proper requirements or product specs followed by Evals. If you can think of a strong product idea and prepare the basic requirements, then you can handle the bulk of any “vibe coding” you might be asked to do in a 30- to 45-minute interview. Unless you are based in India, I wouldn't worry too much. If you are bragging about your Vibe Coding skills, then, yes, be ready for it, the interviewer might call you out as lots of people embellish.

I would guess that the take-home assignments will see an increase in vibe coding before live PM interviews.

I don’t always agree with Aakash on product management interview prep, but he has taken a stab at addressing the new threat to PM interviewing here.

---

Personality Test

Increasing in Frequency

The use of personality tests during the recruitment process is up 69% year on year. More companies are relying on aptitude and personality tests during the recruitment process as AI leads to candidates applying for jobs en masse.

Indeed dives into 8 Personality tests you might encounter.

In practice, I see them applied more for (1) first roles, (2) people who don’t have big tech on their resume, and (3) international positions. They are meant to be more equitable, but when you take them, they can feel anything but. The evidence is mixed, there seems to be more concerns about abuse than success. Time will tell.

---

Keeping Up with the Jones

Interesting AI Finds

I am doubling down on increasing my knowledge of AI. Catching up on my reading (and debating with friends) I found a few things I would recommend you look at.

1. Guide to AI Evals Great product requirements and evals will make or break our future PM careers. This is great discussion with How to’s on AI evals.

2. A fun LLM Visualization to grok the LLM process.

3. Amazon Kiro vs. Cursor I love the idea of Kiro, give it properly written requirement specifications and a skilled engineer can build out a more durable solution on AWS tools and tech they trust. Time will tell if it works but the requirements focus is good for PMs.

4. Dia vs. Comet AI-enabled Browsers

---

Lesson of the Week

User Segmentation Exercises

I am going to share a drill (exercise) I like to leverage when I am stuck on user segmentation. Especially, when thinking about getting to super-specific users for say, a Meta-style interview. I do NOT advise using this in an interview, but doing one or all of these for say 5 to 10 prompts in a row to practice narrowing to super-specific use cases can be helpful.