Onsite Behavioral & Leadership: Product Sense, Team Fit, and Project Deep Dive

Context: Assume you are interviewing for a Software Engineer role on a consumer product that helps users practice speaking. Answer the following three sections.

1) Product Sense (PM-Style)

Pick a concrete user problem related to speaking practice and cover:

1. Problem framing
   • Target users (who), Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD), and 2–3 key use cases.
2. MVP proposal
   • MVP scope, prioritized features with rationale, and what you’d defer.
3. Metrics
   • Success metric(s), secondary metrics, and guardrails (quality, cost, reliability, privacy).
4. Validation and experimentation
   • How you’d validate the problem, design an experiment (A/B or otherwise), define sample size/MDE, and interpret results.
5. Constraints and trade-offs
   • What you’d cut or change under time or tech constraints, and why.

2) Team Fit

Describe how you collaborate and lead without authority:

• How you work with PM/Design/Eng; handling ambiguity and conflict.
• Your approach to giving/receiving feedback and aligning on goals.
• One concrete example of influencing without authority.
• How you communicate progress, risks, and decisions.

3) Project Deep Dive (EM-Style)

Select one significant project and walk through:

1. Goals, constraints, your role/scope, and stakeholders.
2. Architecture and major design decisions; alternatives considered and trade-offs.
3. Key challenges (performance, reliability, cost, privacy/security) and how you solved them.
4. Any incidents and their resolution.
5. Measured impact and what you’d do differently.
6. How you’d generalize the solution to other contexts.