How to Ace the PM Take Home Assignment

Take-Home assignments are increasingly an integral part of the PM interview process. These are designed to simulate a real-life problem that the company or product team is working on. It aims assess how a candidate thinks through the problem, comes up with solutions and presents their recommendations. While these involve significant time commitment, I truly believe they are a great opportunity for candidates to showcase their talent and set themselves apart from the crowd.

Broadly, there are 3 types of Take-Home assignments that you can expect to encounter.

1. Building products or features from scratch

2. Go deep & solve a very specific problem

3. The Super Ambiguous Futuristic problem

These call for somewhat different approaches, although many elements will still be common across all of them.

1. Building 0 to 1 products

This is the most common type of take-home assignment. Companies provide an ambiguous high level problem statement typically involving building a new product or app from scratch.

Examples

• Build an app for doctors.
• Identify a new customer segment, vertical or product idea for our company.

Tips to solve this type of assignment

(1) Identify the Target Customers

• Typically, we’d start with identifying who the target customers are and also the ecosystem in which the target audience operates. For example, doctors operate in a system in which patients, hospitals and insurance companies are key stakeholders. Your solution has to factor in the interactions with these stakeholders.
• Additionally, you might even do a quick TAM (Total Addressable Market) analysis to support your choice of customer segments. This could be a simple back of the envelope calculation but needs to be rooted in logic.

(2) Identify the customer problems

• Articulate a set of key customer problems in this space and zoom in on the highest impact ones that you will specifically focus on. Why do you think this problem is not being addressed by the existing products out there?
• Another framework to use here is ‘Jobs to be Done’. What jobs does the customer want to be done that are not already being addressed?

(3) Vision

• Based on your analysis of the customer’s major problems, outline a vision that will be the North Star for the product that you come up with.

(4) Solutions

• Brainstorm a set of solutions that are MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive).
• Articulate the pros and cons of these solutions and narrow down to the solutions you will choose, while providing sound reasoning.

(5) Hypotheses & Learning Plans

• Remember, for 0 to 1 products, all your great ideas are still hypotheses.
• How will you test them efficiently? How will you build conviction in a specific direction? Come up with a hypothesis testing plan.
• What things do you want to learn in order to move forward?

(6) Product Features & Prioritization

• What features will you need to build in order to actualize the solution you envisioned?
• What are prioritization criteria?
• Provide a rough prioritization for 1–2 years or even longer depending on the scope of the assignment.

(7) UI & Wireframes

• Sketch out the UI and wireframes for your main features and flows. It does not have to be super fancy — PowerPoint will do nicely. Companies are not evaluating your artistic or design skills. Rather, they are looking for a clear thought process around how the product will flow and how the functionally will be executed.

(8) Metrics

• What metrics will you pick to learn whether your hypotheses have been successful, and why?

(9) Tradeoffs

• What tradeoffs do you expect to resolve? How might you mitigate these?

2. Solve a specific problem

This type of assignment often involve a very specific and tricky problem that is not broad but requires deep thinking to solve. The company is trying to evaluate how the candidate will perform for these kinds of real-world situations that the company invariable faces.

Examples

• Design a flow that will increase conversions for the app’s existing customer segment(s).

In this instance, the target customer segments and customer problem may be already defined for you. But it still makes sense to think about the deeper problems that may remain unaddressed.

How will you address these problems to achieve the specific outcomes targeted in this assignment?

• Brainstorm MECE solutions that are specific to the problem. Identify the pros and cons of each solution and decide which ones you will zoom in on.
• Come up with a feature set and roadmap that encapsulates the solutions you have identified.
• Design UI screens or flows.
• The metrics may already be stated ahead of time (eg: conversions). But you might want to rethink whether there are any other intermediate metrics that might be needed in addition to the output metrics.

3. The Super Ambiguous Futuristic assignment

Some companies like to ask candidates to predict the future or think broadly about the applications of a new technology.

Examples

• What will the Payments industry look like 15 years from now? What products will you build for those needs?
• You have invented a time machine. What use cases will you apply it to? What product will you build and how will you monetize it?

(1) What might the future look like?

You start with trying to identify what the future might look like. It is perfectly okay to go a bit crazy, in fact, that is expected. But you still have to provide some reasoning for why you think the future might look a certain way.

(2) Generate applications of the new technology

Here you are working backwards. Instead of starting with a user problem, you start with the technology and then find problems that might be solved by this technology. Brainstorm a set of ideas and provide the reasons why this technology might help. Find the highest impact problem this technology can solve.

(3) Design the solution.

What would the product look like? How will it be built? How can it be monetized? Come up with a feature set for the application you have in mind.

FAQs

1. Take Home Assignments take up so much time. I’m not sure this is worth it.

While it is true that Take Home assignments may seem like a huge time sink, it is still a good idea to do these assignments for companies that you are truly interested in.

Putting together an impressive take home assignment showcases your product sense like nothing else will. In fact, for less experienced PMs, I actually believe this is a good way to distinguish yourselves and compensate for the lack of experience.

Take Home assignments also provide an opportunity to think about product problems expansively and hone one’s Product Strategy chops. Often PMs’ day-to-day jobs tend to be very execution oriented, and people can often tend to get lost in the weeds. These assignments are a good way to refine our skills in product strategy and big picture thinking — and get live feedback from seasoned PMs and stakeholders in the target company.

2. I worry that the company might be stealing ideas or getting work done for free.

This is a common worry but is pretty misplaced because most companies are not relying for ideas on someone who does not have all the context and data. If so, they have much bigger problems!

For coaching on PM Interviews or Take Home assignments, reach out at: arundhatipmcoach@gmail.com.