Mastering the "Product You Hate" Question: A PM Leader's Framework for Interviews
You’ve made it to the final round. Your palms are sweaty, maybe you’ve chugged that third oat milk latte. Then it hits you—the question that sounds like a personal attack but is really a test of your product thinking:
"What’s a product you hate? How would you make it the most loved?" Or perhaps it is,
"What's your favorite product, and how would you improve it?"
Cue internal chaos.
As product leaders, we've all been on both sides of the interview table. I’ve worked across big tech, led product teams, and conducted hundreds of interviews, and let me tell you—this question stumps people. It's deceptively simple, yet surprisingly multidimensional.
At its core, this question is evaluating your ability to:
Stay current with tech and product trends
Narrow ambiguous problems
Prioritize
Empathize with users
Creatively solve problems
So how do you show all that in five minutes? The secret, in my experience, isn't the flashiest answer—it’s about showing how you got there. The answer: your FRAMEWORK and approach. It's your "X-factor" – that intangible blend of critical thinking, user empathy, and strategic vision that seperate a good Product Manager from a great Product Manager.
Let’s walk through a mock answer together that showcases both structure and strategy.
🔹 Step 1: Start with the WHAT
Unlike traditional product design questions that begin with the "why," this one calls for a shift. Begin with the "what" to establish context. This helps set the stage so you and the interviewer are aligned on what the product is, what features (good or bad) it has, and any relevant context. It also aligns the interviewer on a high-level mission – why does this product exist within the ecosystem?
Example: "WhatsApp is my least favorite product. Originally built as a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging app, it was acquired by Meta in 2014 to fulfill its mission to help bring people closer together. Over time, WhatsApp has layered on features like avatars and statuses, shifting from a focused utility to a diluted hybrid of messaging and social features."
By starting here, you and the interviewer are aligned on what the product is, what it does well (or poorly) and it’s intended mission in the ecosystem :
🔹 Step 2: Define the WHY (Problems + Prioritization)
Now, it's time to dive into why. I typically focus on 2-3 core problem areas.
"Three pain points stand out:
WhatsApp for Business: Many businesses rely on WA for customer engagement, but the UX is clunky and inconsistent making operations difficult from both the business and user perspectives.
Search: Recalling a specific message is tedious. It is often a pain to find the chat thread, people or even media you are looking for within the WA.
Media Transfer: Image quality degrades heavily between iOS and Android devices. There's a loss of resolution when transferring media from different types of device.
When I think of which of the problems is the most important – I can’t help but think about the product goal. WA first existed to give people a secure and trusted means of communication and sharing information. I can see how this is extremely important for WA business as now more than ever, users are at risk to scams, fraudulent vendors, etc. where trust with a business is critical. While all three are valid, I’ll focus on #1: WhatsApp for Business. Additionally, improving it drives time on the platform in the form of engagement and richer data—a win for both users and the business."
This section shows you understand:
Problems
Product goals
Business goals
🔹 Step 3: User Segmentation
Show your ability to segment broadly, then zoom into the most important group. This shows breadth and depth.
Broad segments:
Businesses
Individuals
Advertisers
Meta teams
Zoom in: "Now, I’m going to double click on Businesses as the user segment. We can think of them based on size: Entrepreneurs, SMBs, and Enterprise businesses. I’ll focus on SMBs (10-1000 employees) for two reasons:
Reach: Based on recent statistics, my assumption is that this is the largest segment that majority of businesses fall within.
Urgency: SMBs have limited resources and a greater need for scalable solutions.”
This approach communicates to the interviewer that you have a framework for breaking down user segments (broad) into categories and then prioritizing the most impactful segments to focus on (depth).
🔹 Step 4: User Persona + Journey Mapping
Take it a level deeper (time permitting) and assume a persona. This helps crystallize the pain points and demonstrate empathy – which is a crucial skill of a great PM.
"To help identify pain points, I’m going to use the persona of a small online boutique owner - Maya with $300k in sales/year looking to grow. I want to think about the user journey by thinking about critical elements of the sales funnel. Here’s her journey:
Discovery: The online boutique may struggle with visibility and discovery and acquiring new customers due to limited budgets and resources.
Follow-up: Without the access to the right information about their customers, the boutique struggles to convert customers or show value to customers and close deals.
Customer Support: The online boutique struggles to scale the business and keep up with customer questions, payment issues and refund requests. This may affect their retention and create negative reviews which has an extreme impact on sales.
I'm going to prioritize customer support because the pain level is extremely high for small businesses and the goal of the boutique is to grow their business which will be most impacted by repeat business from loyal returning customers through word of mouth and positive experiences."
Notice how by assuming Maya’s role you are now able to better empathize and share a strategic focus.
🔹 Step 5: Solutioning
Now, you've shown the interviewer that you are able to empathize deeply with customers, identify user needs and pain points and prioritize the most important thing to work on using a logical and repeatable framework. Next, its time to move on to solutioning. Present multiple solutions – don't fall in love with the first idea.
"To improve support for SMBs, here are three ideas for helping to solve the pain point of providing and scaling customer support:
Self-Serve AI: Offer business fine tuned models for customer support queries. These fine tuned model can be part of a tiered subscription where models can be trained on business policies (refunds, delivery times, etc) to answer and resolve customer inquiries.
Delivery Integrations: Partner with major logistics players (UPS, FedEx) to show real-time delivery updates within WhatsApp. Offer 3rd party out of box integrations with delivery services like UPS that allow for in-app visibility into tracking a package (think uber-like for seeing where a package is on it's route to you).
Agentic AI: Provide auto-generated workflows for tasks like invoicing, follow-ups, or handling disputes. Allow for automated creation of workflows to make book keeping or certain processes easier for handling scale of customers.
I’d prioritize #1. Why?
High impact: If we're able to automate processes for businesses such as refunds or questions, this is hugely impactful for small business looking to grow with limited resources. It solves Maya’s top pain.
Low effort: Meta already has AI infrastructure. This lowers the complexity to build because we can reuse existing technologies.
Fast to market: We can ship a solution using existing capabilities, allowing us to deliver a beta solution faster to market.
🧠 Final Takeaway
By walking through this structured approach—problem definition, user focus, pain prioritization, and solutioning—you’re not just answering a question. You’re demonstrating product sense, empathy, and execution mindset. You have proven your ability to take an ambiguous product, think critically to identify problems, and use a structured approach to arrive at creative solutions.
There’s no one right answer. But there is a right approach to show how you think… This is one. What would you do differently here and how would you customize this framework?
👉 And most importantly, product people, what product would you redesign?
If you found this helpful, feel free to share it with someone prepping for PM interviews—or let me know how you tackle product sense questions!