Slack used this take-home exercise to assess Senior Growth PM candidates who would focus on user onboarding. Fareed discusses how to adapt this prompt to different seniority levels and product areas.

Overall, I would describe this as an easy-to-medium difficulty take-home exercise for a senior growth IC PM. It's a pretty straightforward problem, and it gives you a bunch of the answers up front. The prompt gives away what the goal is; we're not asking you to define success. It also specifies that you should run experiments. For someone with any growth experience, this is a pretty straightforward problem.

This exercise does test for some product intuition, which is not as common for growth interviews. You have to make visuals and design experiments, so it's more than just strategy. You don't have to do a lot of external research; it tells you to do this based on your own experience. It then lays out the key questions to answer.

To make this prompt harder, you would make it more open-ended and see how deep someone goes. As written, this is an IC PM, senior-ish prompt. You probably have some meaningful experience in growth and new user onboarding. It's a dunk for someone in this senior category and would be a stretch for someone more junior or for a more senior PM who doesn't have experience in growth.

This is not a prompt for leadership or deep product sense. If you were hiring for a growth leadership role, you'd probably want a setup that's more like prioritizing apples and oranges (e.g., activation vs. retention). Or instead of posing a known problem and defining solutions, pose a vague problem and define solutions. Alternately, define a quarter roadmap or a year roadmap. There are different ways to broaden the prompt for higher seniority levels.

When creating a take-home exercise, I think it's good to ask yourself how long it should take and whether you could do it in that amount of time. I think it's reasonable to say a good PM could do a decent version of this exercise in 4-6 hours. The problem with giving an open-ended time window is some people will spend 40 hours on it and some will spend 4, and while that's a signal, it's not the only signal.

You should ask yourself if the candidate obviously spent more time on it than they should have, and if that's why you like their response and maybe you should hold it to a higher standard of thinking. But I'm not religious about this. If somebody wants to work really hard on something, that does tell me something about how badly they want it and how excited they are about the opportunity. It's like, oh, they put in a lot of effort, they must really like this job, they'll probably say yes if we offer it to them.

Alternately, another thing you can do is give guidelines or a template deck so people don't spend too much time on fit and finish and polish stuff.

I have really oscillated on whether interview prompts should be about the specific product/product problem. The problem with having the prompt be about your product is that interviewers can start judging candidates by the wrong rubric. The interviews can become a quiz about whether candidates know a lot about your product or can figure it out, and it would cloud our judgement about otherwise qualified candidates. Would someone who's really well-researched end up looking good just because they had a friend at Slack who told them all the tricky things?

But then I went back to "no, it should be about the product" because I don't know what questions to ask about Instagram or somewhere else. It puts more onus on the interviewer to evaluate the right things: how did the candidate get to this answer? Overall, I think it gives you a better signal. because you get closer to "Are they good at the specific kinds of problems this person is actually going to have to tackle?" Second, you get a feel for how interested they are in what you do. They learn something, too, which is "Am I interested in this job?", which you don't get if you're talking about a generic product like a bottle opener.

When using a prompt that's tied to your product, you have to ask "how" and "why" questions and get to prompts, questions, and evaluative criteria that don't have correct answers. You want to break out of answers and get to structured thinking. If a candidate uses good logic but gets to the wrong answer, that's better than if they used bad logic but got to the right answer because they were more familiar with the product.

My assumption is that the team wanted to see how creative people were in thinking of solutions. For instance, are they a mix of big things and small things vs just smaller optimizations?

We actually ended up with a bunch of different versions of this prompt over time for different parts of the org. For instance, we changed this prompt when we were looking to hire someone with more 0 to 1 thinking. We changed it to "You've tried many things that didn't work," to encourage candidates to pursue bigger swings instead of smaller optimizations.

We would change the prompt based on the specific spikes we were looking for in a role. Where do you feel the team is weaker and what do you want to lean into? At the time I joined, Slack wasn't doing enough experimentation and data driven product management, so this prompt is focused on those areas.

This is a very well-scoped prompt. If anything, it might be too narrow, but it's really focused on what they care about. By saying you want to see 3 experiment ideas and by having a narrow scope, the prompt actually drives solution diversity versus if the prompt were focused on broader strategic themes. To think through whether your interview prompt will surface enough answer diversity, I would ask myself whether a bunch of smart people would all give you the same answer to the prompt or if it's high variance. I've had some prompts that I've asked, and you get more or less the same answers. It's boring and doesn't help you differentiate among candidates.

Fareed Mosavat

When hiring a new Senior Product Manager for New Experiences, Slack used this hiring simulation exercise to help better understand how candidates would perform in the role.

The first part of your interview will be an assignment for product, engineering, and design team members. Our goal is to see how you approach product problems in depth with real-life situations. Please prepare a presentation that covers the topic below.

We ask that you try to complete this within 

. If your schedule does not permit, and you need more time, just let us know.

When you’re done, please send us a copy of your presentation. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Every day, human beings create new Slack teams. 

These people are often not officially tasked with finding new enterprise software in their day-to-day role, but they have a problem that they think Slack can solve.

The most successful Slack team creators are able to get several people to create accounts on their team 

have a meaningful conversation within the product in the first day or so. Inviting people to a new product is fairly straightforward - we can set that aside. What is much more difficult is getting 3 or more people to have a meaningful conversation in a new messaging service.

Go through the process of creating a new Slack team. Assume that you are someone with a reasonable level of intent in creating this team: you have a problem that you think Slack can solve. Identify issues or missed opportunities with the current new user experience that you think hold people back from having meaningful conversations in Slack. 

Generate ideas for experiments to run that you think would positively impact this metric. Prepare materials for a plan that ranks your ideas in priority order.

Flesh out at least 3 of those ideas into experiments you think the Growth team should run.

Product Manager Hiring Simulation Instructions at Slack

Newxp PM Test

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