What is your favourite product and why?

This is a classic product interview question and it will likely be asked at least once in the interview process. The interviewer is trying to determine whether the candidate understands the user’s problem, how the product solves it, what makes it better than the others, and can the candidate give a structured answer.

How to pick the product?

Generally, people speak about a product they personally use. However, you can pick something which you do not use but love anyway. Do not pick a product just because it would be a good example as it could backfire if you fail to expand on it.

A typical structure of an answer would look like this:

• What is your favourite product and what does it do?
• Who are the users and what problem does it solve for them?
• What makes it neat? How does it delight the user and how it is compared to the alternatives?
• How would you improve it? (optional)

Here is my take on it with an example.

One of my favourite products is a mobile app called Inshorts. It is a news aggregator app that serves short-form news content. Each news item is a single screen with a heading, an image or video, a 60-word summary and a link to view the detailed article.

Snapshot of Inshorts App (source: Photo from pixr8.com)

The users for Inshorts are Newsreaders (like myself) and Advertisers (businesses advertising on the platform). As per Inshorts, their objective is to serve form-factor based experience in media with AI/ML-driven personalisation.

Most of the newsreaders, including me, are in the age group 20–35 and do not have time to read print newspapers or long-form news on the websites. We want to skim through the news to get updates quickly and prefers a mobile device to consume it. Here are the pain points with existing solutions:

• Most news media companies dump the long-form version on websites and mobile apps. They do not consider form-factor and this impacts user experience especially on mobile devices.
• Most news apps serve ads including videos that are intrusive, non-skippable and within the articles. This is quite frustrating when you are trying to find and close a video ad that autoplay on the page.
• Most news aggregator apps have the information cluttered, mostly in form of links that open other sites, this makes it hard to skim through.
• Other news mediums like social networks are not reliable sources and also tend to get biased. Their personalisation models introduce bias (based on connections, likes, history) and thus readers could miss out on the news with a different viewpoint.

Advertisers also face challenges like:

• Intrusive and un-skippable ads with a lack of form-factor focus tend to have lower engagement.
• Updates in web browsers like ad blockers impact traditional digital ad campaigns.

This is how Inshorts addresses the above pain points compared to other available solutions.

• The news summary is rendered based on form factor thus making it snappy and easy to skim. You can move to the next news by just an upward swipe and see details by a left swipe. There is no clutter of links.
• Inshorts produces an average of 1000 shorts per day, each one of 60-words. On average a user spends 12 mins on the app reading close to 80 shorts. Thus staying updated with news in a short amount of time.
• With their AI-backed algorithm called ‘Rapid60’, 80% of all shorts are AI processed and 20% by manual editors. This helps in keeping the AI/ML model bias in check. They also use a ranking system that gives more weightage to the manually edited content.
• The Ads are served in the same form factor as the news shorts thus making it easier to read. These ads are also non-intrusive and skippable which adds to the user delight. Their ads get 4 to 5 times higher engagement compared to other players.

How would you improve it?

I believe Inshorts objective would be to grow the user base and engagement in near future. They have 1000+ advertising clients and generate revenue only from advertisers right now. There are several things they could do for this:

• The majority of users are from metro cities and to expand into tier II, III cities they could explore expanding to local languages, right now it is available only in English and Hindi. This would open up regional news content and add new readers with local language preferences.
• They have been testing a polls feature on the App. A typical poll gets 400k users interaction on day 1 which is huge. This can be used to drive more engagement and also revenue generation by collaborating with marketing research companies.
• I exhaust the unread shorts rather quickly and then return visits have nothing new. The app shows some factoids e.g. about major events like Covid-19. This is great for user engagement. I believe similar features like games can be tested specially for users who exhaust the day's shorts.