PM Mock Interview (with Director of Product): Measure Success for Facebook Events [Execution]

Great mock! watched this right before my screening and took a couple of points into the interview. Helped me quiet a lot!

Great video to understand about how to measure success but can't follow the same style during an interview. I doubt the interviewer will give sufficient time to answer 1 question.

Good interview and thanks Vipul for logical way of going through the analysis and the flow. For NSM I would have picked the number of creators with events that have a high RSVP/attendee interest. Ultimately, FB as a platform should have a healthy number of successful creators, not just a few creators; Also, if there are only a few creators, there's a slippery slope of only niche events being created - which is not a healthy eco system for facebook over the long term. Again, as the interviewer asked the RSVP rate may depend on the type of event. Events could be segmented and ultimately FB needs to have both big and small events to align with its mission of bringing people closer together

Thanks for this video

It would be great, if you please can you share the notebook with everyone.

Your north star metrics should not be prone to misinterpretation/bias in your team, period. You can't 'experiment' on metrics to see if they should stay or go, in fact metrics themselves serve to inform if experiments work or not. I think he should have taken the cue to change the north star metric to something like 'total RSVPs in time period' so that solves the bias issue while aligning with overall objective

great follow-up question on what you would do if the the eng team is now promoting smaller events that have by definition a higher attendance rate. 2 other solutions:
1) Segment that event by different types. Open to all friends, open to big communities (based on activity), events for smaller communities.
2) Even easier solution - just instead of using RSVP % as a/b use log(a)/log(b). Sometimes the magic is in the math :))

Slow interview! Too much repetition! Repeat users or first time event booker
Hook strategy for first time users.

The candidate repeated his points many times over throughout the discussion. Most clarifying questions were unnecessary. Interviewer didn't answer them anyway and asked him to take a call. He talked about competitors but didn't use those insights for defining the success metrics. He didn't really answer the follow up question about his approach to quantify 'high rsvp rate'. Having said all that, it seems to me that mock is setup to provide clear pointers on the framework for such questions, which could be useful to some.

Great video

It's probably a Weak Hire not a Hire if someone answer this

This interview is soo bad, this would definitely be a no hire. You get rejected for much less. Exponent shouldn't post such bad interviews and give the wrong idea to candidates.

Few comments:
1. I do not think competitor analysis was required for this question though I liked how he explained the competitive moat FB has over competitors by virtue its community on which the events are getting formed.
2. I did not understand the answers to the counter questions. Why would the interviewer need to do a test to understand the efficacy of higher v/s lower invitee events?
3. When asked how would be go about figuring out the RSVP threshold, he mentioned about going by category. I think that missed the point. I think we have to understand why is high RSVP important. Because it's a proxy for the success of the event and hence will drive repeat event creation. So, I would look into the data for correlation between higher RSVP v/s repeat event creation and draw the threshold cutoff accordingly.

What is prd?? Plz

It was a bit frustrating that the interviewer did not push back or really give her perspective on rating the interview…so I’ll give my 2 cents. While TC is a structured thinker and intentional in navigating the question, I would rate them as a no hire for this interview. Communication style wasn’t great despite sharing his screen, and more importantly: defining the success metrics left a lot of room for improvement. Nuanced details like why it’s important to scale and keep the the supply side of events in this network relevant/interest or digging beyond a digital RSVP rate (which doesn’t ensure actual attendance) were completely overlooked. It’s a high-level okay answer but not at the bar I would expect from a director-level PM.

Just like consultants, "they take your watch and tell you what time it is" - come on measuring events success is simply by how many people rsvpd assuming that was the outcome management wanted! didn't need 30 minutes to say that nor a $200K salary to say that.

mrs

Most dumb and awkward session i watched

What's a CTR?

Great interview, combining questions on the metrics for success and issues with a product.

Communication wasn’t great

Great insights. Will follow this strategy for my upcoming interviews. Thank you for sharing!

Super helpful! Great for newbies like me.

This is an excellent strategy

Informative