I interviewed many hundreds of PM candidates at Google, and if things were going well, I’d ask, “Tell me about a product you hate that you use regularly. Why do you hate it?”
This proved to be a great bozo detector. Does this person have curiosity, conviction, passion, unreasonableness? Were they forced into coding & now just want to escape life in the damn debugger, or do they have a semi-pathological need to build stuff they’re proud of? Would I want them in the proverbial foxhole with me? Are they willing to sweep the floor?
Unsurprisingly, most candidates offer shallow, banal answers (“Uh, wow… I mean, I guess the ESPN app is kinda slow…?”), whereas great ones explain not just what sucks, but why it sucks. Like, why—systemically—is every car infotainment system such crap? Those are the PMs I want asking the questions, then questioning the answers.
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Specifically the car front, as Tolstoy might say, “Each one is unhappy in its own way.” The most interesting thing, I think, isn’t just to talk about the crappy mismatched & competing experiences, but rather about why every system I’ve ever used sucks. The answer can’t be “Every person at every company is a moron”—so what is it?
So much comes down to the structure of the industry, with hardware & software being made by a mishmash of corporate frenemies, all contending with a soup of regulations, risk aversion (one recall can destroy the profitability of a whole product line), and surprisingly bargain-bin electronics.
Check out this short vid for some great insights from Ford CEO Jim Farley: