Morning Walk #34
Interview questions for product managers and designers, new section on health tech and more
Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. I’m a product person and an entrepreneur. I’ve been working in 🏙 govtech for eight years and currently building a new company in 👩🏼⚕️ health tech while maintaining a day job at a UK-based 🏦 fintech startup.
Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, digital healthcare, working on startups, productivity, some nerdy stuff and an occasional share of reflections on the war and how it feels being Russian at this moment in history.
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Before we start off, I want to ask you to answer five questions to help me make this newsletter better for you. It’ll take no more than two minutes.
📝 My favorite interview questions for product managers and designers and why they matter
Well put questions are among the best secret sauces I know that could help in many circumstances. To get you unstuck, make a decision, and look at the issue from some other perspective, you name it. I've already shared the list of my favourite coaching questions to ask yourself regularly, and today I want to talk about interview questions.
I've been interviewing product managers and product designers of all sorts for a few years now. During that time, I have worked out a few of my favourite questions that could reveal a lot about the candidate and, at the same time, surprise that candidate with the level of depth we are trying to operate on and score us some points as an employer.
Without further ado, here are some of my favourite questions and why they matter.
#1: Out of all the areas that the product manager is operating in (e.g. metrics, design, stakeholder management, user research), what do you dislike the most and why?
What I'm looking for here:
Wise PMs would answer, "it depends on the product I'm working on and the type of business I'm in," but I want to hear a sincere answer. I'm asking this because I'm trying to figure out if that person could be really open with me and tell me about his weaknesses instead of regular bullshity things. Let's face it, we all have things we don't like doing. And I admire people who could be open about it and say, "I don't like doing user research" instead of a typical "I could do anything really". The very best ones know what they don't like, why exactly and know precisely how they could avoid doing it and get shit done regardless.
#2: Which products or companies have influenced the type of product manager you've become the most?
What I'm looking for here:
Self-awareness, passion, and how are they thinking. Benchmarks matter. And by learning people's benchmarks, you know the type of person they are. Of course, anyone could be a fan of Apple, but very few could execute as well as Apple does. And this goes once you've made sure they can execute (if you need that trait in the candidate). The best PMs I know would go to great lengths to achieve their benchmarks, but also, the kind of products they admire most might highlight areas they'll be paying more attention to. I, for instance, was hugely influenced by iPods and the first iPhones. This taught me to pay a lot of attention to end-to-end user experience. On the contrary, Apple isn't particularly religious about customer research and might make many decisions by intuition. That also played a nasty trick on me at the beginning of my career.
#3: What is the most surprising insight you have learned about your customers?
This is quite a famous one from YCombinator, but that's the best way I know to see if PM or PD are truly customer-centric or not. You don't want to ask, "Do you do customer research?". That's easy to lie and bullshit about. Try this question instead, and it could do wonders. If they try to make something up, it's easy to spot. But if they have spent countless hours talking to users, they'll immediately have their favourite anecdote on top of their mind.
#4: If you could join any product team in the world, which would it be and why?
What I'm looking for here:
Culture fit and how broad their outlook is. Most people would say they want to join Tesla, Apple, or Facebook. But ask them why exactly, and they get stuck. One of the worst answers I once heard was, "I want to join some fintech startup because I heard they pay very good".
Besides being mission-driven or curious about any specific challenge or team traits, this question could also reveal how broadly they are aware of the market. Everyone knows about FAAG, but inquisitive people always know about some tiny little startups working on an unusual challenge or mid-sized companies with unique cultures.
The most surprising answer I once heard was "China's Social Credit System". That kept my attention. And the guy had a really thoughtful explanation why.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. And some of these questions might not even fit your search. Because with every new candidate, you always need to keep the end objective in mind. Who exactly are you looking for, which traits do you want them to have and which weakness you are willing to sacrifice.
🌏 Other interests and world affairs
Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
I usually put out precisely three links in this category. But this week, I want to leave only one to focus your attention as much as possible. I highly recommend setting aside 40 minutes to watch this thoroughly this week. This talk from 2015 at the University of Chicago by John Mearsheimer is the best explanation of a bigger picture of what is going on in Ukraine right now. And it presents not just a more high-level view on things but quite a different angle from what you would usually get from Western media (both in the US and Europe).
It doesn’t justify Putin’s actions or anything. Still, it provides a perspective that the West, especially the US, could have been much smarter with their foreign policy and avoided that conflict altogether.
Although Mearsheimer’s view misses some other aspects as well. For instance, I could argue that Ukrainians as a nation might have wanted to become more western-oriented themselves without the US patronizing them. But still, he provides another view on this whole thing that you should consider. And the whole thing started back in 2008.
And just to give you some context on John Mearsheimer, a short intro from his Wikipedia page:
Mearsheimer is best known for developing the theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve regional hegemony in an anarchic international system. In accordance with his theory, Mearsheimer believes that China’s growing power will likely bring it into conflict with the United States.
👩🏼⚕️ Health tech things
Okay, I’ve been a bit untruthful with the three links thing. Today I introduce a new regular section to a weekly Morning Walk repertoire. I’ll share links and stuff related exclusively to health tech. I’m diving deep into this field, and it fascinates me greatly. Adding an occasional health-related article to one out of three links I share weekly won’t do justice to it. It occupies my mind more and more, which should be reflected in the newsletter. Even though I’m currently working in fintech, health tech excites me greatly. Besides, there are many parallels between fintech a few years ago and today’s health tech; it’s phenomenal.
Besides, the mission is indisputable. As a friend of mine responded to me last week:
Health is the most critical thing in life, and everything, little by little, gets more and more health-related. Food, mental health, sports, gadgets, even your job, you name it.
The Parallel Journeys of Fintech and Healthtech
Some perspective on why right now might be the renaissance of health tech startups.
The healthcare and financial services industries share many similarities. Both have legacy traditional institutions; most of the oldest banks, insurance companies, and health systems have been around for more than a century. Then there’s the systems’ complexity–the pain of sending a wire transfer or understanding personal finances feels analogous to trying to decode a medical bill or get records sent from one provider to another. And as far as customer experience goes, people rarely seem to enjoy visiting a bank branch or doctor’s office. Both industries have low customer satisfaction for clear reasons.
What's The Deal With Telemedicine?
First things first, Out-of-Pocket is by far my favourite publication on health tech. You'll see many of Nikhil's pieces featured here. Second of all, the future of telemedicine is exciting. It starts sort of maturing into something wholly new and more digitally native. Imagine rent listings on Craigslist (which simply replicated offline YellowPages experience) versus renting off Airbnb. Same here. We'll see lots of innovation in telemedicine in the next 5-10 years, and it will be pretty different from most of our offline healthcare interactions.
Telemedicine 1.0 almost exclusively focused on one-off patient transactions (urgent care, ecommerce style product shopping, face-to-face visit with your doc for a follow-up) and that’s also reflected in the data. This means they built products that are optimized to bill for that transaction and are not really built for longitudinal care. Most of them are either just replicating a face-to-face visit online, or using one-time forms with an anonymous doc. This is why I think a lot of the companies that are trying to shift from one-time relationships to longitudinal ones (become your PCP, chronic care management, etc.) are struggling to make that shift because their products weren’t actually built for that and it’s not how consumers think about a lot of these brands.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻
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