The take-home challenge that got me a PM job at Uber

How I think about product

Over the past few years, I've built a handful of companies, landed half a dozen internships, got a full-time offer as a product manager at Uber, and I'm currently making 5-figures a month running a design studio from home.

My goal is to share with you everything I've learned to get me to where I am today.

That being said, I don't want to be spam in your inbox. If you don't find value in what I'm sharing, there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email. No hard feelings — thanks for sticking with me this far.

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Recruiting is hard.

Many of you are applying to jobs right now, and I know that it can be an incredibly stressful and scary process. It often feels like you're just taking shots into the dark, only to get ghosted by recruiters and still not knowing how to improve.

Today, I'd like to tackle one especially daunting topic you may have to deal with: the take-home challenge.

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What’s the point of a take-home challenge?

Before we get into the details of how to tackle the actual work, it's important to first understand what these assignments are meant to assess.

As an employer, hiring someone carries with it a certain degree of risk. After you’re hired, it's going to take a few months for you to get up to speed with the rest of your team, and another few months to assess whether or not your performance is up to par with expectations.

During this time, tens of thousands of dollars are spent on your salary, benefits, office space, along with productivity losses from training you up from scratch. If you turn out to be a bad hire, the company then has to spend even more time and money putting together a severance package to let you go.

Knowing all this, the company has to assess whether or not you're likely to be a good investment from just a handful of interactions with you — imagine tying the knot with someone you met on Tinder after just 3 dates.

Your goal as a candidate is to convey beyond a reasonable doubt that you will be a net positive investment for the company.

A take-home challenge is the best way for a company to get a taste of what your actual work looks like. Resumes can be fluffed up, and interviews can be gamed with a bit of charisma. There's no hiding from a take-home—you either do the work well or you don't make the cut.

So what differentiates a good assignment from a bad one?

Many people I've coached through this seem to think the answer is creativity. They try to come up with some perfect, revolutionary idea that will completely change the course of the company and solve all its problems.

You and I both know that's not going to happen.

You're spending a few days thinking of an idea for a company you have zero experience working for. The company has thousands of the world's brightest minds working for years to come up with good ideas. There's a good chance anything you can think of has been tried before.

Creativity is not the answer.

Your goal should be to systematically break down the problem given to you, arrive at a reasonable idea to execute on, defend that idea with evidence from your research, and effectively convey your thoughts to the hiring team.

While a unique, creative idea would be a nice cherry on top that might give you a slight edge, it's almost completely out of your control. Sometimes you really just can't think of something good in a short amount of time, and that's completely fine.

As long as you have a reliable process you can lean on, at the very least you'll have something that's presentable enough to get you to the next round.

Below is the 5-step process I use to tackle problems, along with real examples from my own take-home challenge. The prompt was to pitch an idea for a new product or improve upon an existing feature at Uber. I completed the challenge in 3 days.

My process

1. Research

This is usually a mixture of reading blogs, financial statements, and doing user interviews. My goal here is to gather as much information as I can about 3 areas, using targeted questions to guide my thinking.

• Market

  • What's going on in the world right now?

  • What macroeconomic trends are on the rise and how will this change the world in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

  • What is the competition doing? Who's a threat? Who isn't worth worrying about?

• Company

  • What challenges must the company overcome in the short/long term?

  • What are some untapped areas of growth that are ripe for innovation?

  • Are there any existential threats that could possibly wipe out the company if left unaddressed?

• Users

  • What are the most important user segments? Who is bringing the most value to the company?

  • What problems do the most important users care about?

  • What features have been rolled out recently? How did users respond to them?

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it should give you a good idea of how to approach your research. I try to zoom in and out, getting both a birds-eye view of the situation as well as a close-up perspective of specific users and features.

I then take this research and identify a specific goal that, if achieved, would create a measurable difference to the company's bottom line. This might mean an increase in revenue, better user retention, or even building the foundation for something much bigger in the future.

Each of the 3 points here ties back to the original 3 challenges I surfaced in the beginning.

Be sure to tie this back to the specific business and user cases you found in your research.

It's worth emphasizing that not all problems are worth solving.

Just because your research shows that a lot of users dislike the color palette of a UI, if those users aren't the ones important to the company, or if the colors aren't actually causing anyone to stop using the product, addressing it is likely a waste of company resources.

2. Brainstorm

From here, I'll brainstorm as many solutions to the problem as I can. Again, while creativity isn’t a dealbreaker, good ideas definitely wouldn't hurt your chances.

Some buckets I might put solutions into include

• Improving upon existing features

• Creating new features from scratch

• Targeting new markets

• Partnering with other companies/organizations

• Marketing/PR campaigns

Get as many ideas on paper as you can, even if they sound bad or unfeasible. You never know what that idea might lead to.

3. Prioritize

After you've built up your list of solutions, it's time to prioritize one to focus on. A simple way to think about this is:

• Pros

  • What benefits would this provide to the company?

  • What’s the magnitude of this impact?

  • What opportunities might this open up in the future?

• Cons

  • Would this cannibalize any other areas of the business?

  • Are those areas worth giving up for the sake of this solution?

• Execution

  • How difficult will this be to implement?

  • Do the risks lie in technical execution, market dynamics, or user behavior?

  • Is it something that can be completed in a few weeks with a small team or will it require a sustained effort from multiple teams across the company?

You'll never have complete certainty as to what will work, and much of this will be based on your gut feeling. Regardless, do your best to justify your decisions with research and data.

4. Plan + Execute

I live on Figma so mockups don’t take me too long — this definitely isn’t necessary, but it’s nice to help the reader visualize what you have in mind.

Once you've landed on a solution to move forward with, it's time to think about how to bring the idea to life.

Questions to consider:

• What will the final solution look like?

• What are the big milestones necessary to make this happen?

• How will the success of this effort be measured?

• What are some potential ways things might go wrong? How will you address these obstacles as they arise?

Always have a “north star” metric to guide your decisions.

By no means is this fleshed out. My goal here was just to show that I’m not completely naive and can anticipate things going wrong.

5. Present

This is the final stretch. You've done all the hard work, and you're ready to send it over to your recruiter and move on with your life.

To make sure you stick the landing without wasting all the effort you've put in, spend a bit of time thinking about how to present all this information in a clear, concise way.

Being clear means

• Your presentation has a straightforward narrative

• It's easy to follow and understand how you arrived at each conclusion

Being concise means

• You're ruthlessly eliminating everything that doesn't contribute to the story.

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to present every piece of research and every idea you came up with. As tempting as it may be to show off how much time and effort you put into your work, your recruiter doesn't care that you came up with 23 different ideas.

They're likely reading through hundreds of these assignments and you don't want to make their lives any harder than it needs to be.

Focus on the end result and the justifications needed to get there. Everything else needs to go.

Regardless of how well you might’ve put together your presentation, it’s always hard to keep track of the whole story. I closed with a short recap of everything presented so the reader can see the entire picture at once.

Wrapping Up

This process is something I've refined for years by working with over a dozen companies to tackle real business problems.

By no means should this be prescriptive — I encourage you to take it and adapt it to your own needs as you see fit.

If you found this helpful or if you have any questions, I'd love to hear from you.

You can respond directly to this email, or send me a message at tanthaipongstien@gmail.com

You can also find me on Twitter and Youtube.

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