Think Big Flashcards
QUESTION: Tell me about a time when you initiated work on a project that both impacted a majority of your team and had a lot of opposition.
Title: How do you eat an elephant (piece by piece)?
Situation:
Galvanize a team by conveying a strong vision and picture of success
Organically drive passion and velocity through effective communication
Positioning individuals and teams for success; delivering for the customer
Contractual client roadmap containing 36 small to large features and capabilities
Business expectation to complete work within 1 quarter (w/o product input)
Unable to bill customer until list is complete and deemed “product ready”
Customer planning to terminate competitor’s service and transition asap
Obstacle:
Other teams, like customer success, mobilizing around completion date
Team was discouraged by an unrealistic timeline
No change in resourcing or headcount
Business pressure to generate revenue
Action:
Developed a workstream matrix with each functional team
Design, Front-end, API, Engine, Database, QA
Hosted several full day working sessions with QA, Dev and Designers
Each respective workstream provided estimates
Arrived at a 9 month estimate
Achieved buy-in from respective owners/workstreams tied back to accountability
Communicated revised timeline to respective stakeholders
Results:
Finished on-schedule
Incrementally introduced features when they were ready building team confidence
Shipped a slew of rich capabilities that benefited not just the client but the broader customer base
Co-founder acknowledge team’s contribution during all hands
Strengthened team confidence with each deliverable
Emptimizes teamwork and instills a great sense of accomplishment and pride
Activated largest contract in company history
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Earn Trust. Allowed everyone on the team to contribute to the timeline
Think big
QUESTION: Tell me about a time when you had to make a bold and difficult decision.
Title: Rebirth of our flagship application, Discovery
Situation:
Over the last three months I undertook an initiative to determine the product strategy and reshape the vision for the company’s flagship application, Discovery
Primary revenue generator and highest user usage, but aged code base, bloated feature set, overly complex, restrictive logic, broken workflows, UI/UX challenges and crippled user experience required me to reevaluate the vision and direction
Considerations included integrating features into an adjacent app or rebuilding app
Goal to craft a formal proposal to present to executive leadership
Obstacle/Task:
Resource “sensitive” (time and material) and competing agenda to keep resources on green-field opportunities
Generalized use cases; attempting to serve all. My goal to better define target audience
Action:
Leverage Salesforce for metrics on client makeup:
Number of accounts, stations
Defined account profiles to determine the product target. Broadcast audio, tv, youtube, podcast
Identified one dominate medium and two that were non-existent
Leverage Pendo for user insights. Engagement by medium
Product capability tear down and slotting exercise to adjacent application
Lead customer interviews (pain points, before and after product use workflows, user profile, primary and secondary uses cases)
Evaluated trade-offs for various outcomes (integrate, build new, redefine app ecosystem)
Presented a proposal that although revenue-neutral a new combined application with an adjacent app with UI/UX and workflows specific to radio/TV
Results:
Methodical, research and data-driven presentation
Data reinforced the target audience which influence the design/requirements
Parties agreed with recommendation and next steps to advance
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Dive deep
Think big
QUESTION (2nd): Tell me about a time when you had to make a bold and difficult decision.
Title: Make my stuff private please!!!
Situation:
Open, shared object mode within an org since company inception in 2014
Users within same org see other users content/objects
Numerous product/eng discussions over the years about OLP but “kicked the can”
Never been done before
General security and privacy concerns mentioned by customers and prospects
Business needs to safeguard information for users from other users
Obstacle:
No existing permissions model in place
Should be handled low level by platform team; couldn’t wait on dependency given timeline
Action:
Gathered requirements from customers
Locked objects (campaigns/advertisers) to the creator/owner
Identified need to share with peers and grant managers access without explicit sharing
Presented high fidelity mocks to customers to ensure it met their need
Worked with design to refine concepts, doc requirements and dev to build
Results:
Delivered on long-standing customer ask
First of its kind within the organization
Upended legacy model and inspired other PMs to follow suit
Showcased at company All Hands meeting
What this story demonstrates (skills, principles):
Insist on high standards
Thinking big
