Imagine the following situation: You have come into the new company and settled into your role as the newly hired and appointed product leader. It’s been a whirlwind first three months. But you start seeing the forest for the trees.
You know the ins and outs of your product or portfolio, and you have secured the budget to grow your team. You get into recruiting.
What are you going to ask the candidates? The employee experience starts with a great interviewing experience. The best candidates are off the market like hotcakes. You need to move swiftly and you need to impress them as well. The supply of really great PMs is limited.
I have found one question that works time and time again for senior product people: Why is there no X? The X can be something from your portfolio if it’s well-known, or it can be like the classic VC pitch „our product is like Uber for X“.
Obviously, you can insert anything for X. Let’s do a thought experiment. Why is there no Amazon Maps? I recently discussed that with a senior product person and it gave us a chance to riff on it. The best kinds of interviews, they do not feel like interviews, but like a discussion among peers.
(There is of course Amazon Maps API, but no big customer-facing product based on it.)
Of course, I don’t have insight into Amazon’s grand plans, I’ve only talked to a couple of Amazon product managers and they have a very Amazonian kind of product management philosophy there. Yes, I have read Working Backwards, and have quoted from the PR/FAQ chapter in internal meetings. But that’s about the extent of my insight.
Like with any of these questions, there is no perfect answer. It’s more about the process. About the candidate’s product sense.
It’s a triangulation exercise. Like: How many apples fit into a jumbo jet?
So: Why did Apple start Apple Maps? Because they run a mobile operating system and they did not want to depend on a Google product for a very important mobile use case: directions. They were already heavily dependent on Google for search. (Or a different vendor of search products, say Microsoft.)
What do you need to build maps? Map data, Traffic data, satellite data, a fleet of vehicles to do your mapping, a team for blurring images taken in Germany, etc.)
It’s probably a large 8- to 9-figure investment to make a compelling product. Who are the big providers? Mobile operating system companies and the automotive sector. Even there, one car maker alone could not purchase Here. It’s a jointly-owned company.
So I would wager, that if the Fire phone had been a success, Amazon might have invested in the Maps space eventually. To fully fork from Google’s underpinnings, like Apple with Maps.
And the next time you walk into the after-hour of a PM networking event: Think about your X in that question.
Why is there no European Google (size of investment, language barrier in original market, data privacy concerns, scraping and copyright concerns)?
Why is travel search so broken?
Since I work in publishing: Why is there no Netflix for news? That would be our equivalent. (Radically lower shelf life of content, lesser willingness to pay for non-entertainment than for entertainment, much more fragmented market than movie industry, language barriers, lack of differentiation between publishers, importance of national markets much bigger / there is no European or Global public on a lot of topics, much lower content production costs which decreases barrier to market entry – think freelancers and influencers, content creators. Swagger, a little digital product gear and you’re off to the races.)
It’s really fun and very engaging. Try it.
And often, the feature or product in question, was built, Gergerly Orosz reminds us:
A lot of the answers to “why {this feature as an outsider I think would be awesome} was not built?” is that it has, and it doesn’t work.
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 29, 2022
Answer to “Why don’t food delivery apps show the 5 most common orders as 1-tap order options on the home screen?” from @Appyg99 who built it: https://t.co/Y5HxkiBEv9
For more junior product people, the equivalent would be: What is your favorite product? It’s also a favorite on one of the prep sites for PM interviews.
Cover Image based on a Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash
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