How to Approach the APM Exercise
If you’re applying to an Associate Product Management (APM) role, you may be asked to do a “homework assignment,” also known as the APM Exercise.
There’s no right way to approach the APM exercise, it’s simply my take! First, I’ll share the specific homework assignment. Second, I’ll walk you through my submission and approach.
The Homework Assignment
This section is taken directly from my specific homework assignment.
“Lyft’s mission is to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. Although Lyft has improved geographic and economic mobility for our millions of passengers and drivers, the truth is that we’ve barely scratched the surface. Ridesharing as a whole accounts for less than 1% of vehicle miles in North America and even fewer passenger miles, and congestion has worsened in major US cities.
What improvements or new products should Lyft invest in to have scaled positive impact on the cities we serve? Analyze the space and put together an entire product cycle for the solution you choose to pursue. There’s no silver bullet or definitive right answers that will capture all of the potential here, so feel free to dive deep into your chosen solution for pushing the ball forward.
Specifically, your submission should include:
● Documentation of your brainstorm process to show us how you think of the space
● Defensible opportunity sizing to show how you selected where to go deeper
● A list of product requirements or features that detail your selected space
● A clear plan for what the MVP will be ideally including wireframes of the UX
● An experimentation plan with clear goals on how to evaluate and make launch decisions
● Some thoughts on the long term evolution of the product beyond the MVP
What we are looking for:
● Your ability to understand, decompose, and find opportunity in the problem space
● Your empathy and internalization of your users and their motivations
● Your thought process, intuition, and execution on defining impactful product solutions
● Your ability to identify key hypothesis and design actionable experiments to test them
● Your prioritization for defining shippable products from broad roadmaps
What will not be evaluated in the submission:
● Length or polish of your submission this should take less than 4 hours.
● A complete understanding of ridesharing nuances you will learn those on the job!
● Feel free to submit as bullet points, doc, slides, whatever lets you get your idea across
Lost for ideas? There’s lots of ways to attack the problem:
● Does Lyft need to change the way passengers request or pay for rides?
● Are there ways to introduce step function changes in product market fit of shared rides?
● What roles do vehicles other than personal cars play in moving people around?
● Should Lyft change the way we recruit or incentivize our drivers?
● How can Lyft unlock a larger / cheaper / better supply of vehicles in ridesharing?
● Can Lyft work with cities to change the regulatory landscape around transportation?
● And much much….
Most importantly, be yourself!”
My Approach
In your Title Slide, consider including:
- The name of the product/solution you are proposing
- The “what” your building
Depending on the homework specifications, you may want to include:
- The name of the exercise (in this case, “Lyft APM Exercise”)
- Your name, school, year, email
Appendix: Not a requirement at all. Just my style of presentation! I personally like to give people a heads up :)
Section headings: Not necessary, but I like how it breaks up the presentation
Mission: By stating the mission, I show that I take Lyft’s mission is my north star.
Executive Summary: It’s nice to lay out your idea in an executive summary. Consider including:
- Overview of the problems that you’ll discuss
- What’s the goal?
- In one line, lay out the solution
- Key features. Icons are great to use here!
- The bet. At the end of the day, this is just a hypothesis for a product that you think should be built. Since this deck serves as a proposal, I think explicitly laying out the bet shows that you are understanding of this fact.
Operating Assumptions: I laid out the operating assumptions to show my motivations for selecting this proposed solution.
Problem: Lay out the core parts of the problem. I like using icons to break up the text. Also, I included a sentence about how my solution will address the problem. Cite your sources!
Hypothesis + Approach: Tie this back to the operating assumptions. Include an abridged problem statement and clear goal, if you’d like.
Personas + Scenarios: By discussing three different personas, you can show that you take a user-centric approach. Be as specific as possible and paint a narrative. Important data points include age range, occupation, background, motivations, and frustrations. The reader should be able to step inside the shoes of each persona. Names are hard to come up with but chose something that is descriptive and easy to remember.
Opportunity Analysis: I find a table to be super helpful tool to visually analyze the opportunity and thus pick a target user. I compared my personas by opportunities, impact, scalability, and risks + concerns. Depending on the problem, you can change these columns.
Product Review: Now that we’ve discussed the potential users, it’s time to dive into the solution itself!
MVP Selection: Very similar to the executive summary. Be sure to include the core features.
Mock-ups: It’s nice to show mockups of your product. While I used Powerpoint, many friends love Figma.
User Journey Flow: Keep this diagram simple. I recommend color coding the steps.
Metrics of Success: How will measure the success of your product? Depending on the product, there are some good lists of metrics online. Partition this by type of product (e.g. a consumer product will have different metrics to look for than a SaaS company).
Roadmap: I divide the roadmap into three sections. While my slides have a lot of text, some things to include on each slide (and note how they change between phases) are timeline, objective, target audience, product/engineering scope, regions, marketing, success metrics/key results.
Long-Term Evaluation: What’s the big picture vision here? What’s the scope of this product?
The Economic Case: Take this slide to answer, will this make money?
Competitive Landscape: If you’re running low on slides, cut this one. If you have space, include some key players on this slide.
Current Alternatives: Use this slide to break down competitors and compare features. Show that your product wins in every case.
Risk + Concerns: As we noted in the beginning of the deck, this product is a bet. To show that you have fully considered this product’s pros and cons. For each risk that you discuss, include ways to mitigate the risk as well.
If you have additional slides, include a bit about yourself and the sources you used.