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hello everyone kenton covestio from the rocketblocks team here in this mock interview video we're sitting down with darsh thucker who is a product manager at microsoft focused on the microsoft
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teams product and in this particular mock interview video we're focusing on the canonical product management interview question what is your favorite product and why and how would you improve it so let's go ahead and jump in and see darsha's take
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okay cool so i'd like you to tell me a little bit about your you know what pick one of your favorite products tell me about what that product is why is it one of your favorite products and uh tell me about one or two improvements you think should be made to
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this product that would improve it even further sure so when i think about favorite products uh i think i personally have multiple favorite products and i'm guessing many people do too but there is one product uh that lately
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i've been using a lot and i really like it because um especially in the era we live in like the kuwait 19 20 20 social distancing it really helps me to stay connected with the people i care about and that i believe many people might have also used as uh
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instagram stories okay yeah and stories is a hot topic right now uh linkedin is having lignan stories spotify is planning to launch their own version twitter just launched fleets so snapchat is the one who originally
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started it so there are a lot of variations of stories as well so um i'd give you a point-by-point answer like why i think uh my favorite product is stories and what i like about it so to go ahead uh first and foremost i
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think it depends for me at least a lot on the usability of the product like does this product even solve a problem and i think a definition of a great product is sometimes to help the user identify a problem
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even if they don't know like exactly this problem exists so in case of instagram stories uh for example i think uh one thing i really like about it is um it allows me to stay in touch with people i care about
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and it might be friends family or it might be like some sports uh soccer player who i'm a fan of and the fact that instagram stories allows me to know like what's going on in their life if they voluntarily want to live reveal it it's a really powerful thing
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like um for example let's say if i have thousand followers on instagram and i post a story within two hours more than 200 people have seen it and that's such a powerful thing for me to even grasp that something
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like i just posted a picture of this interview and 200 people know i'm doing this interview so that is something i feel uh has been observed with stories as a product not instagram story specifically which really helps people to kind of
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know what's happening in other people's life and it has its pros and cons but in my case i like staying in touch to give you a small example um i visited my mother uh eight nine months back after a long time and she told me call me often because i
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have no idea what's going on in your life and she was not on instagram and i am basically very active on instagram so what i did was i downloaded instagram on her phone and told her uh taught her how to use stories taught her how to view stories and now
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since nine months like frequency of when we talk is almost similar but she knows a lot about what's going on me on in my life because she's able to view those stories and obviously like as you grow uh in your world and as you grow more you know more and
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more people and it's hard to keep in touch like there's no shade over there but stories allows you to keep in touch without having to talk to people so that is like passive like if i meet kenton after four months never talk to him but i still am kind of
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aware like what's going on in his life so that usability problem i think is a very powerful factor in stories now obviously the natural um thing some minor things which i think is more design focused that i really like is called to action
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so one would argue like what's the difference between stories and just posting a picture on facebook or instagram like what's the difference so the difference here i see is the concept of temporary um existence like if you post
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a story it stays on for 24 hours and if you post create a post you have to think of a caption if you might want to you know like this going this is going to stay on your feed for like permanently uh not deleted
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and one other thing is on your post people can comment and if people can comment everybody else who sees your post can see those comments until and unless of course if you want to delete them which normally you wouldn't want to so i feel there is
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a more barrier in terms of uploading a picture or a post because you have to think about these things but in case of stories you are like okay i'll just upload it and then it's done after 24 hours it's gone like unless you save it somewhere for people to see they are not going to
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see it so i think that's minimum barrier and another thing is let's say um kenton wants to reply to my story he would reply to me and only i will see it so that is um also removes the barrier from the audience side like if
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somebody is seeing a story um if they have to just respond and they know that only i am going to see it they might say something that they may not say during a post because in a post they know like if they comment something even lot more people can see it so i think it allows a touch point
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for many people to interact with each other that reply to stories start a conversation with somebody and i think it's really important especially in this world where we don't meet people we care about a lot to have those small touch points where you can initiate a
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conversation so those are a few points and i have a few more in mind but i just want to take a pause here and check if you're able to follow my trail of thought or not yeah no i i think that sounds great um i think your points are valid they make sense to me
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um i think i have uh one question for you and then i'd love to hear the sort of improvement you'd like to make to stories but my question before that is uh you know i agree with the points about that it minimizes the barrier to posting because it's not a it's not a
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permanent photo uh there's not permanent comments from other people is there something in particular about instagram's implementation of stories because you pointed out you know snapchat was the original person that did stories now twitter has stories is instagram stories still better for
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you than those other products and if so what is the key differentiator there got it so to think deeply about it i think putting my uh product manager hat i would try to think of a product strategy that i feel uh is really
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important here so as i said snapchat was the original creator of the stories product and it was going really well for them and i think the reason instagram copied that product is because um instagram had an edge
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that people had invested time in creating their feeds on instagram so when i say creating your feed is creating your profiles so let's say if i have a thousand followers on instagram going with the same example and i have 300 friends on snapchat
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i used to be very active on snapchat but i still remember february 2018 snapchat pushed out a major update and the reason behind that update was they wanted to push more sponsored content in order to increase their revenue
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and in order to do so they did a major ui design which kind of didn't work well with a lot of users and instagram did a really good job on pushing the stories products right at this point so people who are already kind of
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frustrated that okay if i post a story on uh snapchat i save it then post it again on instagram because not all my audience on instagram is same as snapchat and i think snapchat has a competitive edge over kind of quick private chats while
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instagram people have invested more in creating their base kind of like followers and creating a lot of picture feed like i have already 30 post 40 posts and it's kind of an integrated environment that it implements over snapchat twitter
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linkedin that if you want to respond to me you can also go and look to my profile if you respond to me in my stories there is a dm chat that we are having so i think that competitive edge where people have already invested time
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plus an environment that integrates your feed and stories is the competitive edge that instagram has over snapchat over twitter it's uh too soon to say because fleets is a very new product but i think each of the social media app has grasp
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that spheres so like snapchat is uh become more popular for private conversations uh twitter has become a very place of candid and networking and people who are loyal to twitter say lord but instagram has its own element which is
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of kind of out of work socializing like my lifestyle or maybe what i do out of work with my friends fun family and that is something i think is there to stay like that is an aspect of human life that is always going to stay there so
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i think they did a really good job in having that aspect of life to uh get into that product strategy and as long as you solve problems for people people are going to use your products so i think that's why they are doing better in that particular
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arena okay got it cool and then let's uh hear what is your suggestion to improve your favorite product instagram story um so instagram has this uh feature within stories uh they recently
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not quite recently but almost more than an year back released which is called close friends so basically the concept here is that you post a story let's say you have thousand followers but as i said you may not talk to these
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people even for eight months five months but you are just in touch with them but out of those thousand followers i might have very close friends that i meet daily or weekly monthly whatever like they're just my close friends and obviously nobody can have thousand close
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friends and if they do then they really need to do a check but uh we might have ten close friends fifteen twenty fifty so uh i really like that feature because it allows you to separate out content like i might post something more
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intimate on my close friends rather than my normal story which is great but i see a one kind of gap for improvement which is uh when you you only have the possibility of creating two user
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segments which is your all followers and a subset of all fours which is close friends but i might have something let's say i have gone to like a family event and i just want to post that story to my people who are in my family and my followers
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while i might go to like my school group or georgia tech group or soccer game which i might want to just share it with um like georgia tech folks so i think there is a possibility there um which is kind of a minimal improvement i would say
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but segregating and allowing people to have customized groups in there instead of just one closed group is something and again one can argue like why don't you just create a group chat with them but i think creating a group chat uh loses the sense of um anonymity which we talked about
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earlier that if somebody replies to me they only reply to me and if it's a group chat obviously if they reply there they are replying to the whole group which is kind of not the point of the product yeah so i think if they allowed um more customization that okay you can have close friends
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you can have a family story group you can have a friend story group i think that's an improvement which would allow people to post more or like engage more with the product awesome cool and if you were actually at instagram stories and you launched this feature
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one last question here how would you think about measuring whether it's successful or not like what would you use to gauge whether this idea of um an additional segment that people can do or multiple segments that they can do was was working um that's a good question i think um
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before i decide what the success means um i would ask a clarifying question to you like is the success um as i'm a product manager as you said at instagram in this scenario what does success look like from a business perspective like what is uh
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what are we trying to achieve through this product right let's say we're mainly just focused on engagement here we're not concerned about revenue at the moment okay so if you are concerned about engagement my trail of thought would be that why are we using this product to
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promote engagement and if i think about it there can be a couple of reasons like one reason might be people are not comfortable to post much because they are like they don't have things to boost but this product allows them to have a
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more customized subset of users so they might just post for three people or four people so they're still posting now because it allows them to do so so i think i would not track a single metric i would track multiple uh metrics
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but there would be one not star metric so one metric i definitely drag is the frequency of number of times people are posting in a week is that increasing because like before close friends was a feature
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i didn't used to post a lot but now it is i post more in close friends so that's something very basic metric i think that we can track that how many people are posting stories per week and how many stories they are posting
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another kind of matrix that i would use is kind of a ratio matrix which is out of people who are posting stories per week let's say it's uh 10 million for example out of this 10 million how many people
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are using our new product to post their stories that is customizable story groups so a ratio between both of them would give an idea that i i obviously wouldn't expect it to be one or hundred percent because that's not what we want yeah but
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if that is around 0.2 0.1 0.3 it allows us to track whether even this product is useful or not especially in initial user testing that whether people are even care about this product or even want to use it and we don't want
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like even 50 percent success rate because we want the normal stories product but this is a subset of stories product that wants to drive more engagement wants to make people more comfortable with posting and interacting with each other's stories so i would track the second matrix which
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is this ratio to kind of track the retention that okay if it was 0.1 in one week the next week is it increasing to 0.2 decreasing to 0.05 and that would basically allow me and like my higher ups or my team to make
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decisions that how much time or how much new features do we want to invest in this product okay sounds great awesome you