Q: Tell us about a product you love
By: Anu Pandey
Tags: First Post, Slack, Interview Questions, Favorite Product, Product Management

A three-step guide to answering that one question that is asked in every PM interview

So, if you are someone who is trying their best to nail those PM interviews — You know there is no way you can avoid this question — What’s your favorite product and why? You may have heard a version of this in interviews or may have added a few lines that briefly touch upon it while you were writing that perfect cover letter.

Tell us about a product you love

The question entails more than just mentioning a product you like and a few features that you find cool — be prepared to talk about users, use cases, metrics etc. In my first few Interviews for a product management job, I tried to come up with a product that I like on the spot and trust me it’s not easy and it does not end well — you ALWAYS miss something.

I, therefore, came up with this 4-step guide that helps me in structuring my answer to this question.

My 4 steps guide to answering the “what product you love” question

Answer Example :

My favorite product is Slack.

P.S — I love their new logo

Slack is a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services. The name ‘Slack’ is an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”. It is essentially an instant messaging app specifically designed for effective communication in the workplace.

I think of Slack as a chat room for the whole company, designed to replace email as the primary method of communication and sharing work information. Its workspaces allow different teams to organize their communications by channels. It also allows for private messages (chat) to share information, files, and more.

Slack is my favorite for the following these three reasons -

1) All in one place

Slack brings all my communication together in one virtual place and helps eliminate the inbox clutter. I have everything related to the project in the channel plus the platform offers a hardy search functionality that enables me to find key information quickly, even if it’s inside of a document I’ve shared.

2) It’s fun and it works

It offers an intuitive and customizable interface that allows me to share files, videos, GIFs simply by dragging and dropping. It gives me the affordability of brainstorming on a project idea in my groups/Teams without the inbox clutter. The chatroom environment is great for brainstorming compared to the reply-all avalanche.

3) Integration

Slack integrates well with other platforms like Google drive, GitHub, Trello, Twitter etc. and this is what takes Slack from a normal online instant messaging and collaboration system to a solution that enables me to centralize all my notifications, from work to social media and more, into one searchable place.

What is truly great about Slack is that it also allows building your own integrations. I recently build a Slack-bot (with few of my cool friends at UC Berkeley) that can be used to obtain real-time data regarding bus and BART arrival and departure times. So, now I can learn about the next bus timings for home by giving “one” simple command to this Slack bot — and I no longer need to use a different app for it.

However, it is not like there was no internal office communication before Slack. Communication is crucial for teams to function and most businesses/offices managed (some still do) a lot of communication via internal email. And I agree an Email is a great tool for connecting with people outside a workspace because almost EVERYBODY uses email — No matter what email program they use, you understand that the person on the other end will be able to open and read your message, but email isn’t so great when it comes to internal communications within your company or organization. Since one receives 100’s of email messages every day — from work emails, news you subscribe to promotions. It is very easy to miss important communications in an overflowing email inbox.

Email does allow you to separate the internal emails relating to each project, but it definitely takes some extra time and effort to make it more organized. Instead of project and work messages being scattered through your email inbox and archives, Slack’s simple UI makes it easier to view and scroll through past communication instead. There are other alternatives to Slack but its ability to integrate with multiple platforms gives it an edge.

Thus, Slack helps businesses and employees by providing a platform that allows them to brainstorm in real-time, communicate rapidly and collaborate better with each other. Slack Integrations also empowers it with the capacity to replace meetings, for example, there are daily Slack standups software such as Jell that integrate well with Slack and offer a substitute for physical standup meetings.

And though Slack does an overall great job as a productivity tool, it does add another level of notifications on top of the existing email, calendar, mobile, and other apps. And, the fast, real-time aspect of the messages could result in 100s of additional notifications each day. I believe allowing the user better notification controls can help in conquering the interruptions to some degree.

Slack can also make teams a Little TOO Connected. Slack also measures team productivity by primarily focusing on volume metrics (just as many other companies do) such as the number of active users, number of messages sent, amount of file storage used etc. However, since Slack is a productivity tool these metrics do not provide a good proxy for measuring productivity.

Connecting with the team is great, but there are times when one needs to be uninterrupted so that they can more fully focus on work. With Slack, it can be tough to disconnect from your team. Some people spent a lot of time on Slack on chatting about non-work-related matters or simply talking about projects instead of actually getting the project work done. My assumption is shifting focus on value metrics such as helping people understand their increased collaboration via the platform would be more useful for the company to both acquire new users and to retain the existing users. Slack can thus report measures such as the decrease in % time spent on meetings or the % increase in productivity/ quality of work since using Slack or integrating “X” tool with Slack (Using data and analytics from customer engagement platforms, conducting user research). By focusing on value metrics, Slack can help its customers achieve measurable productivity gains. This will not only strengthen the bonds Slack has with its customers but also deepen customer engagement in the platform.

This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities.