Answering My Favorite Interview Question - ProductFTW #102

A while back, I wrote about my #1 PM interview question: think about a favorite tech product that you’ve never worked on, then imagine you’re the product lead, and tell me what you would change and why. Typically, I use Dropbox as an example to show that the product doesn’t need to be unique or special. I care less about the product than about how someone empathizes with users, thinks about product problems, and makes decisions.

Asking this question for years has introduced me to some great products I’d never heard of, and also led to some weird conversations, including hearing all about one candidate’s dating problems on Tinder. I thought that was a terrible choice for an interview. So don’t do that.

I ask myself a version of this question all the time, usually without noticing. It’s easy to get buried in your own product day to day, in the tools and problems you already know, and forget to look up. As a consultant, I get to work across many products, which helps, but I know that when I've worked inside a company, I've gotten very heads down on my own problems. Thinking about what I’d change about the products I use gives me a reason to look up, so I thought it would be fun to answer my own interview question.

My product pick is Spotify. It’s an app most people know, and it's simple on the surface. It plays music. They’ve had tons of people building software for many years, and yet I couldn’t tell you what half of the newer features do. Meanwhile, a few everyday interactions are still very frustrating. What all those newer features are trying to accomplish is probably a separate post.

I suspect that some of this comes from trying to drive people to do certain things rather than listening closely enough to what users want. I’ve been a paying subscriber for a long time, so maybe someone from Spotify will read this and fix some of the things that bother me.

Most of my listening happens in the car through Apple CarPlay. I use voice commands, but they’re not always great, or maybe I just can’t remember the exact name of something I’m trying to listen to. This leaves me needing to browse. When I go looking for a favorite artist in my library, the list isn’t alphabetical or organized by genre. It’s ordered by when I added the artist to my library, which I find extremely weird. Maybe some people like it, but alphabetical sorting should be an option. If it already is, I haven’t found it.

While a song plays, I’ll think, "I want to hear more from this artist." On the main screen, I can tap the album name and see the album, but I can’t tap the artist and see their music. The screen is mostly a huge album cover, which is lovely, but the touch targets are very small. Why can’t I tap the artist and see their albums, pick another one, or open an artist playlist?

It makes me wonder which parts of that experience Spotify controls and which come from CarPlay, and how Spotify even finds out about problems like this. What analytics would surface a missing artist link, and how do they collect feedback?

I understand why Spotify likely pushes discovery. It probably means more listening minutes and maybe more upgrades, but music is also about familiarity. Spotify’s own research found that listeners disproportionately stream music released when they were between 12 and 22 years old. Apparently, I’m not the only one who still wants to hear the stuff they loved in high school and college. As someone who already pays for the service, I want the easiest, simplest way to listen to the music I want. The app doesn’t always feel organized around that.

I’m not leaving fintech anytime soon, so I’m probably never going to work on a music app. But I use Spotify all the time, and answering this question gives me a reason to think about product problems outside the ones I deal with every day.

I bring these same questions into my own work building credit and debit card products. What should be obvious in those interfaces that isn’t? What would someone expect to see when they tap a transaction? Can they figure out how to make a payment? It’s easy to become so familiar with your own product that you stop noticing the things someone else would find confusing.

The hard part is making simple things intuitive. It’s easy to add lots of buttons, and some days it seems easier to just use a darn MCP server and ask it for what I want. As PMs, we have to figure out the right experience, which means understanding what people are trying to do and putting ourselves in their shoes.

That’s why I like this question beyond the interview. Spending a little time thinking about someone else’s product helps me notice what I may have stopped questioning in my own.

About ProductFTW

ProductFTW is a weekly newsletter about product management, with a focus on real-life experiences in startups. We want to help product leaders be successful by giving realistic approaches that aren’t for giant tech companies. We know you don’t have a full-time product designer on each team. We know your software probably hasn’t been used by millions of people worldwide–yet. We bridge the content gap from building your product and team to scaling it.