How to ace the product management interview: Zooming into building better video solutions for…
By: Rachit Gupta
Tags: Pm Interview, Video Conferencing, Zoom, Product Design, Product Management

Solutions and Implementation:

After you identify unmet customer needs, it is time to come up with possible solutions. Here are some ideas for the prioritized needs.

Conversation Assistant:

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This assistant could analyze gestural and nonverbal cues to help the speaker understand underlying cognitive state of the participants. The assistant would indicate overall quality of conversation based on the type of conversation (sales pitch, driving consensus, brainstorming, negotiation, giving / receiving feedback, hiring etc.) and provide visual feedback to participants in real time so that they could modify their conversation style.

How this would work: The assistant analyzes streams of audio and video in real time for parameters such as facial expressions, posture, speaking time, pitch, selection of words etc. to identify roles of participants and their conversation style. These parameters could be fed into a machine learning model to predict qualitative behavioral aspects such as degree of influence, involvement, empathy or disagreement. These metrics could be shown on the screen of the participants for them to take appropriate actions based on the feedback. For instance, imagine a salesperson pitching her / his product over video call. Based on the initial conversation, the assistant could help the salesperson identify roles of different participants in the meeting as well as show which participants need to be persuaded. Moreover, the salesperson could get real time feedback on requisite changes in their conversation style. This feature would be more useful for teams working in global and multicultural settings where interpreting the underlying cognitive state is complicated.

2. AI based Bot for enhancing meeting productivity:

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Meeting productivity could be enhanced by leveraging machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and bots to increase productivity, save time and reduce frustration.

How can we enhance productivity?

· Auto suppressing echo or distracting background noise

· Enhancing visual effects by emphasizing faces in dim or backlit rooms

· Failure Resilience: For example, using speech to text to show subtitles on screen in case speaker loses voice or has broken audio

· Predicting potential failures (broken audio, call drop offs, mute malfunctioning etc.) and recommending actions

· Automating tasks before, during and after meeting — transcribing and sending meeting notes / meeting agenda, rescheduling or rebooking meeting rooms, allocation of tasks, setting up calendar invite or pulling out recent version of documents required for the meeting.

· AI enabled Collaborative Whiteboarding: Provide AI enabled intelligent whiteboarding features that can convert handwritten text and rough shapes to typed text and exact shapes. Whiteboards should be accessed simultaneously from multiple devices (PCs, laptop, tablets, phone) and should provide ready to use templates to create new content on the whiteboard.

ACTIVITY: Choose 1–2 areas in the above listed solutions and detail out how you would implement those.

3. Talent Analytics and Performance Management:

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Video conferencing presents the opportunity to analyze discussions in the meeting rooms to supplement additional insights into employee reviews. This will help in making decisions with regards to hiring, firing and promotions more precise and backed with objective measurement. This also presents an opportunity to provide constructive feedback to employees.

How this would work: The video conferencing platform will analyze streams of video and audio data to reflect metrics such as participation score, and quality of contributions (empathy, patience, insights etc.). Moreover, it could show (conditional upon employee’s approval) video snippets of high-quality contributions or areas of improvement by using facial recognition algorithms, audio to text conversion and text analysis. These metrics could be shared via API integration with a Learning Management System (LMS).

Trade-offs: In order to build powerful machine learning models and perform actions in real time, a robust training dataset is required which could be complex to generate given the privacy concerns on using meeting recordings. How will you resolve privacy concerns on using meeting recordings?

ACTIVITY: Brainstorm some solutions here: encrypting data, data access rights and secured authentication process, public cloud versus private cloud for storage, taking employee consent on which data is to be stored etc. Moreover, taking actions in real time would mean pushing processing from the cloud to the edge and using computing power of devices to reduce latency. Do we have these capabilities? How will this impact time to market, budget or talent requirements? Would we would require integration with other workspace collaboration tools or with another technology vendor?

Last, discuss with the interviewer what metrics will you use to test if the proposed solution actually works. For instance, if you proposed a conversation assistant, you may want to track metrics such as hours spent on the platform, engagement score of participants (attention span, participation), improvement in individual performance or meeting outcomes.

In going through my PM journey, I found the following resources really helpful in thinking about the right concepts to ace my PM interviews. Consider the above case study with a shift in focus in relation to the following concepts:

Estimation (e.g. “what is the estimated market size of this solution?”) Product Design (e.g. “how would you approach this from a Product Design perspective if you were building a Zoom competitor?”) Product Metrics (e.g. “what are the top 5 product metrics you would use to track customer engagement?”).

The following books are useful in prepping for case interviews: Cracking the PM Interview & Decode and Conquer.

Some final thoughts on general preparation study:

Pay careful attention to the frameworks used in the different types of questions used, and study 5–6 products comprehensively utilising these frameworks.

Have more ideas on how can video conferencing solutions be improved? Let’s keep the conversation going, feel free to comment or drop me a line at rachitt.gupta@gmail.com. Stay tuned for more on PM interviews in my next blog!