Welcome Jenny to the AWIP and AWS Coursera course! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? >> Yeah, absolutely so obviously, as you mentioned, my name is Jenny Tai, I'm currently a director of product at Jam City, so I've been in product for a few years now, I'm mostly in the mobile gaming space, and prior to that I was in consulting for a few years. >> Cool, and then just for curiosity, what did you study in undergrad? >> Yes in undergrad I actually studied in international relations, so a little different than most tech people. >> Cool and well, we'd love to learn from this interview how you found your way into product management, that's a topic of interest to probably many of our students. >> Yeah, so obviously as I mentioned, I studied International Relations then my first job out of college essentially was in consulting, so I was a consultant for a few years. And then, when I was looking to transition out of consulting, I was really evaluating, what are the skills that I ultimately can bring to a job, and I was always very analytical, so I looked at various different opportunities, and essentially mobile games is also very analytical. So I was able to say, hey, let me leverage my strong analytical skills while learning some of the more creative aspects of like game development. >> That's awesome, well, thanks so much for being on the course, as we go through a sample Amazon product management interview. So just before we start, as we covered in the course, Amazon has many types of PM, whereas Google tends to be a little bit more generic in their PM description. So Amazon there is a PM product management non-technical, which is typically a little bit more business focused. There's also an Amazon PMT which stands for product management technical, or PMS who may come from engineering backgrounds, or are working on products of a technical nature such as AWS. And then the most recent category that just got introduced last fall, as if it's not already confusing enough, I'm sure, right, is PMTES, which stands for product management technical external services. And so, the question is what is the difference between a PMT and a PMTES is that the PMTES, given the external service designation, actually deals with external customers. So for example, I work on a external service that services Fortune 500s and other large enterprise customers, whereas PMTs may work on internal financial platforms, for example. So, with that said, let's conduct this interview actually as if we are going for a PM non-technical position. So typically, we'll present some links, on the 14 Amazon leadership principles which are very core to how we conduct business at Amazon, how we even evaluate one another through the promotion cycle, and definitely as we interview candidates for product management positions at Amazon. Ready to get started? >> Sure. [LAUGH] >> Cool, all right, so let's start off about telling me about a project that you're most proud of. >> Yeah, so I think I would have to go back to during this time when I worked at Zynga, I was on a game called FarmVille Harvest Swap. One of my main projects was called this level tuning exercise, so, I mentioned earlier that games are very analytical, so I actually had to work with our designers directly to say hey, what is the optimal win rate for this particular level? Like how many attempts as a user need to achieve before they turn where do they need to pay? So, my goal was basically create the entire methodology as well as develop some guidelines for our design team to say what are good versus what is bad. So I created this whole process basically generated an output, of basically X number of levels on a monthly basis that we were able to kind of give to our designers, and ultimately what happened was it increased basically our LTV by roughly 10%. >> That's great to hear Jenny, so taking a step back, the question I asked Jenny was to describe her project. And so typically in Amazon interviews, your interviewer will want to dive deep, which is one of the leadership principles, into a candidate's answer. Right, so in addition to dive deep sometimes they may also direct the questions into another direction of an LP. So for example, this time I'm going to ask Jenny a follow up question around deliver results. Okay, so you told me that you designed a methodology to help you gain more win rates right, for your customers, how were you able to measure that you were successful? >> Yes so, essentially the success criteria here was LTV. So we measure LTV by a cumulative of revenue over your retention, your turn rate essentially. So what we look at is saying looking at your cumulative spend over multiple levels, and the times that session that you stay within a game over a month period of time. >> Understood, and so were there any areas that you think, looking back, you would have done differently to achieve an even better outcome? >> Yeah definitely, there was a lot of learnings through this entire process. One of the areas was, we found a lot of learnings by different types and groupings of types of levels. So there was further segmentation that we could have done further targeting we could have done even on the user base as well to do better matchmaking and further analysis to maybe potentially even find higher LTV numbers. >> I quote the question I asked Jenny as a follow up is also around deliver or insist on the highest standards, which is another leadership principle around how could she have further improved the outcome that she was looking for. So in that case, I'm actually going to dig a little bit deeper, so I understood that you could have come up with even a different algorithm to, for example, achieve a better LTV. Why was it that you didn't go that direction? >> Yeah, so one of the reasons we chose not to kind of pursue further segmentation, it was a technical limitation, right? One and also a bandwidth limitation, so every one of these levels that were basically we were deploying out to the users, were created by a designer and they would had to be conducted over a series of tests, QA process, etc so it took a long time. And in order to kind of do these deep dives, we needed more time, quite frankly, to do this iterative process. >> Understood, okay so that was a great question and an example of how an interviewer might ask you follow on questions that might hit on several of the leadership principles.
