5 Examples of Take-Home Tasks for Different Roles

Post Author - Juste Semetaite

Assigning take-home tasks when hiring is much like marmite, coriander, or Hawaiian pizza. Your candidates will either love it or hate it.

The ‘love it’ camp likely welcomes the opportunity to showcase their skills and appreciate the time to think it through versus answering questions on the spot in an interview.

However, the ‘hate it’ group sees it as doing work for free, might already have portfolios of work that give a much fairer picture of their experience level, and resent the infringement on their personal time (regardless of how this might be their dream job).

What we can learn from this dichotomy is that while a take-home assignment is not right for every role, it’s still worth it for some. To figure out if it’s a fit for the role you’re hiring for, let’s look at five good examples of take-home tasks that your candidates will (hopefully) love.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

A take-home assignment is an important part of the interview process that focuses on candidates crafting and completing real-world tasks .

Incorporating a take-home assignment will give your organization better insight and skill observation over candidates. However, job seekers may see take-home tests as time-consuming, exploitative, or manipulative.

The perfect take-home assignment should be structured around providing the candidate with clarity about the role, respecting their time, and ensuring consistent testing criteria.

Toggl Hire introduced homework tasks in our skills assessment library! It’s never been easier to raise the quality of your hires with reliable proof of competence.

building a take-home task vs using a template

What are take-home tasks?

A take-home assignment is given to candidates during the interview process to complete in their own time and shows the hiring manager how the job seeker is able to complete a task.

These assignments generally consist of coding tests for developers , presentations for upper-level management, and campaigns for marketers. They’re given to candidates after the first interview round. The success will determine if the candidate makes it to the second round.

Take-home task typeDescriptionRoles
A coding challenge is a test designed to test the skills of developers. (Get more info on )Developers, Coders, Engineers
A case study is an in-depth analysis of a specific situation, problem, or scenario in order to understand and evaluate its complexities, factors, and potential solutions.Researchers, Analysts, Consultants, Academics, Business Professionals
Used to test if a candidate can construct long form, short form, news articles, or marketing copy.Copywriters, Marketers, Journalists
Showcase how an individual would communicate a concept or idea to a group of people.Managers, C-level Execs, Customer Success
A sales pitch is a persuasive approach used to promote and market a product or service. It focuses on highlighting the item’s unique features, advantages, and benefits to convince potential buyers and clients that the offering is worth their time and money.Sales Representatives, Business Development Professionals
A marketing campaign is a structured effort created by a business or entity to advertise, promote, and gain recognition for a product, service, or brand among a specific group of people.Marketing Managers, Marketing Specialists, Creative Designers

5 Types of Homework Assignments for a Skills-First Hiring Process

Pros and cons of a take-home assignment

Obviously, there are pros and cons to using a take-home assignment, right? Of course! So let’s go over the big ones.

• Skill observation : It allows the hiring company to understand the candidate’s skills in action and their thought process.

• Insight : The take-home interview assignment will allow the candidate to have a better understanding of the position, break any key assumptions, and what the company expects of them.

• Supplemental information : If done early in the interview process, an interview assignment allows the candidate’s skills to do the talking as opposed to the hiring manager only relying on the resume.

• Less pressure : Because a Q&A interview can be a pressure cooker, the take-home assignment makes the interviewing candidate feel more at ease.

• Time-consuming : A hiring team may claim the assignment will only take several hours to prepare and complete, but any interview assignment over more than an hour is cutting into the candidate’s personal time and current job.

• Ethical concerns and lost earnings : Asking a candidate to complete an unpaid work assignment can be seen as unethical and equivalent to unpaid labor. Some companies may even go so far as to steal the ideas of the candidate, use them, and not give credit or compensate the candidate.

• Limited personal evaluation : While the interview take-home assignment can assess a candidate’s skill set, it may not capture important aspects such as personality and behavior.

How to structure a take-home task

Creating a take-home assignment that strikes the perfect balance of helpful but not exploitative can be tricky. Regardless of what kind of take-home task or homework assignment you’re creating for hiring, it’s crucial for hiring managers to approach their creation with careful thought and attention.

Your hiring team will need to consider all of the following:

What to considerWhy?
Assign the task after the interview to provide candidates with sufficient context about the role and the organization.
Maintain a consistent structure for all examples to ensure fairness and enable a fair comparison between candidates. (hint, this is especially relevant if you want to establish in your organization)
Create comprehensive and unambiguous instructions, ensuring candidates understand the task requirements fully.
Provide a concise yet detailed task description, outlining the goals, objectives, and specific deliverables expected from the candidate’s work. Basically, make sure it makes sense.
Clearly communicate the anticipated time needed to complete the task, allowing candidates to manage their time effectively and not spend hours on the take-home assignment.
Specify the preferred format for the deliverable and offer any necessary guidelines.
Enhance a candidate’s chances of success by including helpful resources such as internal insights, reference materials, datasets, or relevant links.
Establish a reasonable deadline for completing the task, enabling candidates to plan and allocate their time accordingly. Keep in mind that a candidate might have other commitments that prevent them from completing the task in one sitting.
Communicate the level of prior knowledge expected from candidates, distinguishing between information they should possess beforehand and details that can be withheld until the task is assigned or until a candidate asks follow-up questions.
Pre-determine the criteria and weightage for evaluating different aspects of the task, ensuring a fair and consistent assessment.
When creating the take-home task, it’s vital to design it around authentic real-world scenarios that will take place in the potential candidate’s new job.

Easily evaluate take-home tasks in one place

What are the common mistakes?

It’s normal to make mistakes, and learning from them can help you hire better, faster, and more fair.

So, let’s explore common blunders to steer clear of when designing and implementing a take-home assignment during the interview process, ensuring fairness and an effective evaluation process that respects candidates’ time and effort.

• Appropriate Task Alignment : Avoid assigning tasks that aren’t directly relevant to the role.

• Reasonable Task Length : Create a take-home assignment that can be completed within a reasonable timeframe.

• Providing Sufficient Context : Avoid requesting candidates to answer or solve company-specific problems without providing adequate information.

• Ethical Treatment of Work Requests : Refrain from asking candidates to produce work for free that the company may later exploit, such as writing a blog post for publication.

• Timely Introduction of Tasks : Including a take-home assignment as an early screening requirement can discourage candidates. Do this after their first interview.

• Constructive Feedback : Don’t miss the opportunity to provide candidates with constructive feedback on their completed tasks.

• Balancing Mandatory and Optional Tasks : Avoid making the take-home assignment mandatory for all applicants, as circumstances may prevent some candidates from completing it.

• Conduct post-assignment interviews : Once you have received a few tasks back from candidates, we highly recommend that you schedule a take-home assignment interview to better understand any pain points the job seeker may have had.

5 thorough examples of great take-home assignments

Now that you better understand the how , the when , and the why of take-home assignments, we’ll show you five examples. The example take-home assignments will cover tasks for:

  • Developer – fixing a broken site
  • Product manager – redesigning a feature
  • Marketing lead – creating a marketing campaign
  • Designer – redesigning the onboarding flow
  • Customer success executive – running a mock QBR

Example #1: Take-home task for a developer role

This challenge is geared towards a mid-level developer who can identify and fix errors and optimize the code of an eCommerce website. The goal here is to see how well the candidates understand debugging techniques, approach problem-solving, and how they will communicate with the rest of their team.

Top tips to enlarge those brains

Task: Fixing a Broken E-commerce Site

Introduction

Your mission is to debug the broken e-commerce site, fix errors, and ensure it runs smoothly. Customers are unable to place orders due to the significant increase in errors.

Requirements

  • Identify and fix all of the errors on the site.
  • Ensure that customers can place orders without any problems.
  • Optimize the site to improve its performance.
  • Document your approach and explain your reasoning behind your changes.

Instructions

  • Clone the repository from the following Github URL: https://github.com/debugging-challenge/e-commerce-site.git .
  • Install all the dependencies by running npm install .
  • Start the development server by running npm start .
  • Debug and fix all errors.
  • Document your approach and explain your reasoning in a README file.

Your submission will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

  • Identification and fixing of all errors
  • Site optimization
  • Completeness of documentation and reasoning
  • Code cleanliness and adherence to best practices
  • Clarity and organization of documentation
  • Submit your code as a ZIP file.
  • Include the README file that explains your approach and reasoning.
  • Send the ZIP file to the hiring manager by email.

Example #2: Challenge for a product manager

Our next example focuses on testing product manager candidates on how they approach problem-solving, communicate with customers, and conduct user research while implementing open-ended questions.

In a sense, how well they’ll actually do their jobs in a product management role. This assignment is bound to produce better product management interviews for your organization.

Task: Redesigning Filma’s Collaboration Features

You are the Product Manager for collaboration features at Filma, a leading collaborative design platform. Recent feedback from customers has shown that they are not happy with how collaboration features work on the site. Your mission in this product management task is to redesign the collaboration features to better meet customer needs and preferences.

  • Review the problem statement and develop a list of open-ended questions to better understand the issue.
  • Conduct user research to validate assumptions and identify pain points and user needs.
  • Develop a new design for collaboration features.
  • Prioritize features and functionality based on customer needs and business goals.
  • Outline the implementation plan.
  • Document your approach and explain your reasoning.
  • Review the problem statement and develop a list of open-ended questions to better understand the issue and customer needs.
  • Conduct (mock) user research to validate assumptions and identify pain points and user needs. Schedule a call with a team member to role-play a customer interview. Include data points such as user feedback, user behaviour, and competitor analysis in your research.
  • Develop a new design for collaboration features. Identify the key features and functionality of the new design, and prioritize them based on customer needs and business goals.
  • Outline the implementation plan. Include a timeline, resources required, and technical feasibility.
  • Document your approach and explain your reasoning in a presentation or document.
  • Quality of open-ended questions and user research.
  • Soundness of the new design and prioritization of features and functionality.
  • Clarity and feasibility of the product management implementation plan.
  • Completeness of documentation and reasoning.
  • Clarity and organization of presentation or document.
  • Submit your open-ended questions, presentation, or document as a PDF or PowerPoint file.
  • Send the file to the hiring manager by email.

Example #3: Testing marketing managers

Let’s now explore an exciting marketing challenge that aims to find a candidate who can skillfully design an innovative user acquisition growth loop. This task involves leveraging valuable market research insights to craft a robust strategy that showcases a deep understanding of growth concepts.

Task: Designing a User Acquisition Growth Loop

You are the Marketing Lead at a Product-Led Growth (PLG) company that provides a collaboration tool for remote teams. Your team has conducted market research to identify target customer segments. Your mission is to design a new user acquisition growth loop based on the insights gained.

  • Review the market research insights provided by your team.
  • Design a new user acquisition growth loop, with a structured approach, based on the insights gained.
  • Identify metrics to measure the effectiveness of the growth loop.
  • Review the market research insights provided by your team. Use the insights to identify areas where a new user acquisition growth loop can be designed.
  • Design a new user acquisition growth loop based on the insights gained. The growth loop should identify key stages, such as awareness, interest, and activation, and prioritize them based on customer needs and business goals.
  • Identify metrics to measure the effectiveness of the growth loop. The metrics should be tied to the key stages of the growth loop and should be used to track progress and optimize the loop over time.
  • Soundness of the new user acquisition growth loop and prioritization of key stages
  • Creativity and effectiveness of the growth loop design
  • Identification and feasibility of metrics to measure the effectiveness of the growth loop
  • Clarity and organization of presentation or document
  • Submit your presentation or document as a PDF or PowerPoint file.

How to Hire a Marketing Person: 8 Top Marketing Skills to Look For

Example #4: Take-home test for designers

This challenge is centered around an intriguing product design assessment designed to narrow down a candidate who excels in analyzing user recording sessions and crafting an improved onboarding flow design.

Task: Redesigning the Onboarding Flow Introduction

You are a Product Designer at a web-based Product-Led Growth (PLG) company that provides a collaboration tool for remote teams. Your team has recorded user sessions for the past 3 months to help identify areas of improvement for the onboarding flow. Your mission is to redesign the onboarding flow to improve user engagement and activation based on the insights gathered.

  • Analyze the user recording sessions to identify user needs and preferences.
  • Develop a new design for the onboarding flow.
  • Prioritize design features based on user needs and business goals.
  • Ensure that the design aligns with the company’s minimalist, intuitive design philosophy.
  • Analyze the user recording sessions to identify user needs and preferences. Use the insights gathered to identify areas for improvement in the onboarding flow.
  • Develop a new design for the onboarding flow. Identify the key stages of the flow, and prioritize them based on user needs and business goals. Ensure that the design aligns with the company’s minimalist, intuitive design philosophy.
  • Prioritize design features based on user needs and business goals. Identify the most important design features that will enhance user engagement and activation.
  • Quality of analysis of user recording sessions and identification of user needs and preferences
  • The soundness of the new onboarding flow design and prioritization of key stages
  • Alignment with the company’s minimalist, intuitive design philosophy
  • Creativity and effectiveness of the prioritized design features

How to Hire a Product Designer for Your Startup?

Example #5: Testing customer succes

Our final challenge example focuses on a customer success assignment. The perfect candidate will showcase their expertise in defining success metrics for a simulated account, devising impactful tactics to drive feature adoption and enhance metrics, and effectively presenting their approach and results in a mock Quarterly Business Review (QBR) presentation.

Task: Driving Feature Adoption and Improving Metrics

You are a Customer Success Manager at a PLG company that provides a project management tool for remote teams. Your mission is to work with a mock account to define success metrics, develop tactics to drive feature adoption and improve metrics for Q2, culminating in a mock QBR presentation.

  • Define success metrics for the mock account.
  • Develop tactics to drive feature adoption and improve metrics.
  • Document your approach and results in a mock QBR presentation.
  • Define success metrics for the mock account. Assume that the mock account is a remote team of 20 people that uses your project management tool for all their projects. Assume that they have been using the tool for 6 months, and that they have expressed interest in increasing feature adoption and improving metrics related to on-time delivery, collaboration, and budget management. Use your own assumptions to define success metrics that measure the impact of the product on their business.
  • Develop tactics to drive feature adoption and improve metrics. Use the success metrics to identify the actions needed to increase feature adoption and improve metrics, and assign responsibilities to your team. Use customer success best practices, such as regular check-ins and training sessions, to ensure that the tactics are on track and that the mock account is engaged and satisfied.
  • Document your approach and results in a mock QBR presentation. Create a deck that’s less than 10 slides, with consistent title and object placement, fonts, font colors, and different ways of visualizing insights. Use the mock QBR presentation to realign on the mock account’s goals, review their performance, present the tactics and their impact on the success metrics, and recommend the next steps to improve product performance next quarter.
  • Quality of success metrics defined for the mock account.
  • Soundness of the tactics to drive feature adoption and improve metrics.
  • Collaborative execution of the tactics with your team.
  • Clarity, organization, and persuasiveness of the mock QBR presentation.
  • Submit your mock QBR presentation as a PDF or PowerPoint file.

How to Hire A Customer Success Manager: 10 Skills to Assess

Try a Homework Assignment by Toggl Hire

Ready to add homework assignments to your hiring process? Our homework assessments provide invaluable insights for hiring managers evaluating candidates ‘ ability to solve job-specific assignments.

Take your interview process to a new level with our ready-made take home task templates

Designed to test the hands-on skills necessary for day-to-day work, these assessments offer a glimpse into a candidate’s potential future job performance . With over 500 pre-built tasks available in Toggl Hire’s library, you can quickly implement comprehensive tests that align with your hiring needs.

Toggl Hire’s homework assessments are highly flexible, allowing for either integration with other assessments or standalone use. Create your free account now to explore a few examples!

Juste Semetaite

Juste loves investigating through writing. A copywriter by trade, she spent the last ten years in startups, telling stories and building marketing teams. She works at Toggl Hire and writes about how businesses can recruit really great people.

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Dezkr - All things Product Management

Product Management Take Home Assignment Example

· 13 min read ·

Product Management Take Home Assignment Example

🔥 This blog is long. Answering a take home assignment well will bring you one step closer to your dream job. This blog is detailed to help you in every step of the assignment. So read on! But only if you have some time 🤣

Product Management Interviews can be long and arduous with a lot of stages. Each stage has a specific focus. If you are interviewing for a product manager role you will come across the product management Take Home Assignment. It is unique to product management roles and is used to surface specific skillsets. Over the years I have submitted so many of these that honestly I have lost count. As I progressed in my career and started hiring product managers I also created a few of my own to gauge the skills of prospective hires. In this blog we will look at the different aspects of the product manager take home assignment. We will also walkthrough a product management take home assignment example.

What is the Take Home Assignment

This is an exercise that the product manager needs to do on their own. The assignment is generally sent to you after the initial screen round or conversation with the hiring manager. The email contains:

Every company will tweak the format to meet their specific needs. Some might provide context and information that they’d like the candidate to use. Others might decide to keep it open ended and let the candidate make all the decisions.

What is the Goal of the Take Home Assignment

Through this exercise the hiring team wants to find out how you tackle different problems that you will most likely face on the job. The goal is to find out the following:

The Two Types of Product Management Take Home Assignment Questions

New product or service.

The question will be presented to you in the following format:

“You are a product manager at XYZ Corp and tasked with evaluating and launching a new product. What product will you choose? How will you go about evaluating the opportunity and launching the first iteration of the product.”

Update to Existing Product or Service

“You are the product manager for “X” product. Tell us one feature that you would like to implement to improve it.”

As we said earlier some teams like to keep it open ended to see where the candidate ends up with them. The example above is an open ended questions. Others might be more structured and ask you to include specific information.

Example of How to Structure Your Take Home Assignment

Every take home assignment should touch on the following

Start with Questions

Don’t start with brainstorming ideas! When you read the assignment there will be questions that come to your mind. Jot them down. Frame them in a concise and easy to understand manner and then send them back to the hiring team. You can choose to skip this step and make assumptions as you see fit. But let me ask you this - “Would you do that in the real world? At your current job, if you are not sure about something, what do you do? Do you make assumptions and start solving the problem? The answer is NO! You will talk to your manager or peers to understand more about the problem. So why not ask questions about your assignment! Once your basic questions have been answered you can move to the next step.

Define the Problem

Explain the problem you are going to solve with the new product or update to the existing product. Keep your description short and crisp.

Who is facing this problem?

Is everyone facing these issues? Or is it limited to a subset of users? Define the user persona that is facing this problem.

Why does it need to be solved ?

No product is perfect or solves all problems. Why do you think it is IMPORTANT to solve this problem over EVERYTHING else? Why would you prioritize spending time and resources on this versus other things?

How does it align to the organisational goals?

What is the vision of the company? Does the product team have goals that they want to achieve in the next 12-18 months? Does this align with those goals? You can gauge the organisation goals by looking at their public roadmap , website, releases or while talking to your interviewers. (In case the assignment is about a fictitious company, this may be included in the questions)

Learn 7 Ways to Do Market Research

What is your proposed solution?

How will you solve the problem you have described above? First describe the actions that will solve the problem. Then give a short description of the key aspects of the feature or product that will enable users to take those actions. I would encourage you to put in a wireframe along with the description. This does not mean that you spend hours and hours building high fidelity mockups. Create simple wireframes. You can either use a piece of paper and draw a rough sketch with your hand or use a tool like balsamiq which is simple and easy to use.

What are the risks associated with these changes?

Can your solution cause any unwanted issues for the users or the team? Is it going to make anyone unhappy 🤣 . Think about all the different stakeholders that your update will impact. Once you have identified the risks, try and outline what steps you will take to mitigate them. This section doesn’t need to be crazy long. As long as the hiring team knows that you’ve thought about it you’re good!

How will you measure success?

This is the place where you list out the metrics you will follow in order to gauge the success or failure of the release. It is one of the most critical sections of your assignment and carries a lot of weight. Don’t go overboard here. More is not always better. Think through which metrics truly reflect the performance of the product or feature. Stay away from vanity metrics 🤣 . With each metric add the following information:

30 Metrics Product Managers Should Know

Find out How Product Teams Use Data

The assumptions you have made

While working on the assignment you will have questions that will need to be answered. You will have some data but then it might not be enough to get you all the answers. You will need to make some assumptions in order to come to your conclusions. But that’s ok. In fact that is going to be the case every single time you launch a product or feature. So remember to state all your key assumptions clearly in your assignment. You can do it as a separate section or highlight them wherever they are relevant.

6 Key Stakeholders for Product Managers

You have cleared the screening round for your dream product management role in Amazon. You get an email from the recruiter on a take home assignment you need to complete. It looks something like this:

“You are the product manager for the Amazon app. What new feature will you add to improve the product?”

On the face of it this is an open ended question. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they want you to just pitch them whatever idea you might have 😀 . So don’t jump the gun yet and start brainstorming on the coolest idea already 🤣 .

“You are the product manager for reviews on Amazon. Recent feedback from customers has shown that they are not happy with how reviews on the site work? How will you go about solving this issue?”

This one requires you to look at a particular section of the platform.

Solution For Take Home Assignment

For the purpose of this blog we will use the open-ended question example.

First things first  let’s think about what questions come to mind after you have read the assignment?

Send over these questions to the hiring team to see if there is any additional information that the team can provide you. They might send you hard data or insight on which you can base your assignment. Or they can come back and tell you to make your own inferences.

Let’s assume that that the team comes back and tells you the following:

“Our data shows that reviews are an important part of customer conversion. In fact listings with more reviews are 5% more likely to sell than ones with less. However recent surveys have surfaced frustration among users with how reviews work. We don’t have any other information to share regarding the assignment.”

Alright, so this information answers some of your questions. For the remainder we will make and state our assumptions clearly. So let’s start building our assignment step by step as discussed in the last questions:

Users find it difficult to browse through reviews on Amazon.

Who is facing this Problem

All users are facing this problem. We are assuming that this problem is not limited to a particular category.

Why does it need to be solved?

Reviews play an important role in the buying decision of users. Recent feedback has shown that people are frustrated with how reviews work.

What is the proposed solution?

Empower users to search faster and find the right review.  This can be done by adding a search bar to reviews that let’s user type in a specific query. The reviews would filter in real time based on what the user types out.

Assumptions

Minimum Viable Product(MVP)

wireframes

Will this cannibalise an existing feature?

This update will cannibalize the usage of smart tags in our search results. Overtime we can analyze if one or both features are needed by the users.

What are the risks associated with the update?

Reviews have a high impact on conversion. An update that doesn’t work can negatively impact GMV

How will we mitigate the risk highlighted?

The release will be A/B tested first to validate its effectiveness before making it available to everyone.

A Practical Approach to A/B Testing

Additionally it would be useful to analyse if the user is using the search bar when the same search terms is present in the smart tag

What organizational factors do we need to consider before the release?

Before we start work on the update we need to align different stakeholders on proposed changes. And consider the following during these conversations:

Scheduling the A/B test at the right time across the right category is important for this update.

Disclaimers on the Take Home Assignment Example!!!

Common mistakes to avoid in take home assignments.

Not Asking Questions

Sometimes we are in a hurry to get started. Sometimes we are lazy. Sometimes we are so burnt out with all the interviewing that we decide to skip this step. Sometimes we just want to get it over with. Please ask questions 🙏

Overshooting the length

We can get a bit too excited and try to cram in too much information into our submission. It’s quite understandable. You have done all the hardwork and want to make sure that the hiring team sees that. But please stick to the length. Generally it’s 2 pages with font size 12. Being succinct and presenting information in a concise manner is an important skill that product managers need to posses. So when you turn in an assignment that’s too long it sends the wrong signal to the hiring team.

Not Using Appendices

This is true for any work that you present. Cramming in too many graphs or designs in the middle of your documents makes it difficult to read. Use the limited space you have to highlight the important findings and conclusions you have drawn. Leave all the grunt work out of the main submission and attach them as appendices.

Finishing in one sitting

Don’t try to hash out the entire assignment in one sitting on a Friday night 😆 . Take breaks! Come back and have a look at your assignment with a fresh set of eyes often.

Not citing references

It’s ok to search on the internet. You do that in the real world too. If you are using certain frameworks or citing data make sure to add the references as part of your submission.

Spending too much time to find the most kick*** innovative idea

We don’t want to discount the fact that outstanding ideas will get you brownie points. But your idea is only one of the factors in your submission. I’d rather see a mediocre idea that’s built on a structured approach rather than what sounds like a great idea but ends there and is not backed by logical reasoning, thinking and research.

Not balancing Quantitative and Qualitative data

Product Management isn’t binary, I wish it was 😀 . You can’t focus on only data or only qualitative feedback. You have to use both. You have to look at the hard data but also look at the organizational impact of the updates you propose. In order for any update to be successful it requires a cross-functional effort. So make sure that your assignment is balanced. It shows your ability to think analytically while leading pragmatically.

We hope that you have found the information we shared useful. If you are reading this blog you are probably starting to write your take home assignment.

Download The Take Home Assignment Example Template

Hopefully it will help you structure your assignment.

Remember - there are no bad ideas! So pick one and ask the right questions. Break a leg!

Checkout some of our other blogs that will help you prepare for your product Management Interviews

Product Management Interview Format

Product Management Interview Questions

6 Ways to Prepare for Product Manager Interview

RICE Prioritization Framework

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Table of Contents

How to quickly and successfully complete a take-home assignment.

  • September 15, 2020

Richard Chen

home assignment example

The take-home assignment has become more popular and important than ever in the Product Manager interview process. At Product Gym, we receive numerous questions from our members about case studies. Most of them are confused about the vague nature of case study prompts or lack of details about what is expected from the candidate.

If you do not have support, you just might be spending all your time working on these time-consuming take-home assignments. Since job hunting is a numbers game , you do not want to spend more time on one case study project than you need to!

let’s break down the take-home assignment with an example. We’ll be going through this case study assignment in the form of a conversation. We’ll go over the candidate’s work and ask them guiding questions to assess if their approach is the best approach to solve the problem.

Dear Product Gym, I am interviewing with a big-name tech firm, and I am on the final round. They have sent me a challenge, and I have to send it back by today at 5. Next Monday, I have to present it in 60 minutes with a 45-minute Q&A afterward. They said it is not necessarily 60 minutes of me presenting, but instead 60 minutes of chatting with the people in the panel. The Q&A is with a different group. The problem that they sent me is very open-ended: Create a product that would improve the health of an obese patient. Go through the problem, solution, product design, product development, product launch, and product rollout strategy. Include a research allocation plan because there is a $50,000 budget and put on the team.

The Take-Home Assignment Conversation

PG: That is a lot for someone to put together, especially in such a short amount of time. And, they are looking for lots of information. How far have you gotten so far?

Candidate: I decided that the problem I am going to solve is that there is too much information out there for patients to figure out the right plan. I created an app to connect patients to dieticians directly through text.

PG: Is it an SMS app where patients can go, “Hey, I am looking for this dietician,” and it would just connect them to that dietician?

Candidate: I was thinking more so that the patients would state what their needs are, and the app would give them a few dieticians to choose from. I am basing the model off of TalkSpace, an app that connects patients to mental health therapists.

home assignment example

In my app, the dietician would chat with the patient and come up with guidelines or a plan for them to follow. The patient would send pictures of their meals for the dietician to review at the end of every week. It would be based on a monthly subscription business model.

This is the basic version. Eventually, I want to make it so that people could share pictures of their food for others to comment on, like a chat forum.

Tackling Case Study Assignment Questions

PG: Is it a chat app or an SMS chatbot?

Candidate: It is not a chatbot because there would be real people on the other end. The reason it cannot be through simple text messages is that with dieticians, it has to be HIPAA compliant.

PG: If your budget is $50,000, why create an app for the take-home assignment when you could create a simple web app? 

You are breaking down the barriers and making it easier to communicate, and so people do not chat through web apps. That is my thought process now. However, I am open to creating a web app.

Candidate: The need is that patients are trying to lose weight, but the overwhelming amount of information makes it difficult for them to seek the right help. My prompt was to create a way to connect patients suffering from obesity with expert advice.

PG: Your reason behind the app solution is that it makes it easier to connect?

Candidate: I talked to a couple of patients and friends who have gone through significant weight loss. A recurring pattern I saw was that they had trouble figuring out who to talk to and were discouraged by the intimidation of having to set up an appointment, go into an office and see someone.

I believe that an app would break down that barrier and make it easier for patients to start that connection.

The Take-Home Assignment Process

Already confused about the candidate’s thought process how they came up with this idea? Make sure you watch our case study solution video with Roman, our case study instructor, to understand how the process works:

Finding an Easy to Use Solution

PG: In the research phase of the take-home assignment, did you ask them if they would install an app on their phone or use a web service?

Candidate: They said that anything that was not phone-based would complicate their daily lives.

PG: The reason I am asking is that if a client came to me wanting to develop this app and told me they had a $50,000 budget, they should know that at least a third of the costs would need to go into the marketing for this.

You would need a solution that is simple and easy to use. You would want to have a mobile web version or a simple website version of it with the accounts and everything set up to chat on there. That solution would be cheaper for you since you have to account for the budget.

The app would work, but you would still need the website because some people might find it easier to go onto their computer at home. In terms of convenience, the most convenient place might be your home.

How to Create a Budget and Timeline

Candidate: I have worked more on web-based products, so I struggle with budgeting. What sort of timeline should I give for creating something like this?

PG: I generally create a scope document first. It should outline the features that I need to have, the features that it should have, and those I want to have in this.

Once you have those need-to-have features figured out, that determines the shortest amount of time in which the app could be built and the minimum amount of money spent.

A need-to-have feature would be the ability to chat with a dietician. A should-have feature would be the ability to choose your dietician.

Candidate: So, the “need” feature would assign whoever is available, and the “should” would let them choose their dietician from a list?

PG: Yes. The “want” would provide a platform that helps them track their progress with the meal plan.  And for the “needs,” you would want to add accounts to collect data from the patients.

How to Present Your Take-Home Assignment Solution

PG: You want a slide that details the solution you came up with. In this case, that is the chatbot. Those are the core features which you wish to include in a section of your take-home assignment presentation. It should state:

  • Here is what the solution is.
  • Here is what the solution looks like.
  • Here is how a user would go through the process within this solution.

Candidate: Should I state them through a wireframe?

PG: Yes. What you can do is create a simple wireframe process that shows everything from signing up, selecting a dietician, and chatting with that dietician.

Candidate: Once I have the wireframe, I say, “Given this is how the app work, let’s figure out how to prioritize within our budget.” Is this when I bring out my scope?

PG: That is when you bring out the scope. Detail the core features you are going to build within the $50,000 budget and what you will have with that budget.

Present Your Go-to-Market Strategy

PG: Once you get past that, they are going to ask you about your go-to-market strategy. You will probably want to do some beta testing with a small group of users to refine the process, get feedback, and adjust before you go on to create, say, the analytics process. If you are collecting analytics, but you do not know what exactly you are collecting, then it does not make sense.

Candidate: How do I say that I am going to get to this small group of users?

PG: That would be your rollout plan. The first plan for any product is to get the core evangelists, the people who will rave and rant with your product and be happy to share it with others. This is to get some traction out there.

Figure out your target market. In your case, diet support groups might be an excellent place to start.

Candidate: I would give them the product for free and ask them to test it out for a month?

PG: Exactly. You are going to take all their feedback, learn from it, and make adjustments to your product .  

Then you can go into the beta phase, where you branch out more and even consider a small advertising budget to get a wider audience with more helpful feedback. By the time you are ready for version one, you will have enough data points and functionality to start collecting analytics.

Candidate: Should my evangelists be identified before beta?

PG: Yes, that is the initial rollout strategy. You want the evangelists to validate that what you have created makes sense. They would have been with you from the start to be more sympathetic towards what works and what does not work. 

From there, make adjustments based on their feedback and come up with a beta version. Evangelists can comprise up to 30 users, and the beta can have 500-1000 users.

Rollout Strategy vs Product Launch

Candidate: What is the difference between the rollout strategy and the product launch?

PG: The product launch would be after the beta. That is when you put in the money for the marketing to reach a broader audience who are not from your initial group of users. Once they come on, they should see the immediate value and expect a functioning product.

Candidate: One thing about dieticians is that they can only practice within the state, meaning I would have to launch the app state-by-state. How should I go about this?

PG: This would also be a part of your rollout strategy. You can test the app in one state, see how it goes, and then release it in others. You can replicate the model you created in, for example, New York in terms of the rollout, and make sure you are abiding by whatever specific rules for each state there are regarding dieticians. By that point, if you are rolling out to New York, your goal would be to get dieticians on board from the local state.

Candidate: I do the wireframes, and as far as the development part, should I have a roadmap or just a scope of the needs that I am addressing?

PG: I would select the technology you will use to build it out instead of a full-blown roadmap. For your budget, I would go with something like React Native. It helps create a mobile application framework. You need to have a back-end and a front-end working, and an API that connects both of them.

home assignment example

How to Manage Your Budget

Candidate: Should I put the $50,000 budget allocation before I go onto technology?

PG: It depends on the style. I would probably mention it first, and then define the budget for each phase throughout your presentation.

Candidate: How would I deal with paying out the dieticians beyond that first beta?

PG: That is why I said you should have evangelists. You could have the dieticians work with you without paying them, as they are the initial set of influential users on there.

You can say that the initial set of dieticians agreed to be part of the pilot program once the app has rolled out, you can consider what to pay out to the dietician.

The rest of the marketing should go towards   paid advertising .  You want to have a focus group to get feedback from the users, collecting that data, and making the right adjustments.  I would suggest reading up a little more on the rollout strategy to align with what you have come up with so far.

Candidate: Should I include the website as part of my rollout?

PG: Yes. The reason behind choosing React Native is that you can build both the website and the app simultaneously. That would make for more efficient use of your $50,000.

For the back-end, you could quickly build something on Firebase, at least for the first version. Firebase would speed up your development, and everything will be free as far as infrastructure costs. 

You would need a developer for the front-end and one for the back end. Since you have a designer, that would make it around $7,500 for each of those people for the project’s entirety.

Go Above and Beyond: Get Your Take-Home Assignment Reviewed by a Professional

You’ve worked through the assignment and put your solution into a slide deck to present to a panel of interviewers: congratulations! But if you want to go above and beyond to impress the hiring team, dedicate some time to getting your take-home assignment reviewed by a professional.

A fresh set of eyes may catch typos and grammar errors, but will also be able to point out the areas where you can improve the solution overall. A Product Manager who’s gone through multiple technical interview rounds is going to be able to assess your take-home assignment and solution from the perspective of the interviewer and use their experience to help you polish it.

At Product Gym, our interview coaches routinely check over members’ case study presentations, offering insight, constructive criticism, and tips on how to make their technical interview round a success.

Solving take-home assignments isn’t just a good practice for acing your interview — it’s also an excellent way to develop applicable Product Manager skills . That’s why we include classes on case studies in our program. Our case study curriculum was developed and continues to be taught by Senior Product Manager for Atlassian,  Roman Kolosovskiy .

Because we’ve been working with Product Manager job hunters for the past five years, we’ve had ample opportunity to test and perfect the strategy we teach our members on how to ace a take-home assignment. We’ve even compiled a bank of case study prompts that aspiring Product Managers have received in their interviews so that members can exclusively access to hone their problem-solving and storytelling skills

Nail Your Take-Home Assignment

Beginning to end, your take-home assignment should demonstrate how you approach a problem. You’ll want to do your research, have a clear understanding of your target market, and demonstrate how well you prioritize and plan with a structured approach. You got this!

Want one-on-one help solving case studies and acing the Product Manager interview? Product Gym’s coaches are available to help our members at every stage of the job-hunt. Schedule a free consultation with our career coaches to see if the membership program is the best fit for you. We’d be happy to answer any questions you have, and get you on track to landing the Product Manager job of your dreams.

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The Only Leading Metric to Measure Product-Market Fit and How to Use It

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Microsoft New Grad PM Interview Preparation and Experience: Spring 2022

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Types of Product Managers: Which Specialization Will Ignite Your Career?

Thing I Wish More Candidates Asked in Product Management Interviews

The One Thing I Wish More Candidates Asked in Their Product Management Interviews

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Ace the product management take-home assignment

Jeff Lee

As you progress through product management job interviews, you may notice that many companies ask for the PM candidates to complete a take-home assignment. This take-home assignment can consist of product design questions, metrics and analytics, and sometimes strategy.

The take-home assignment helps the interviewer assess two important qualities in the PM candidate: their thought process and their communication skills. In this article, I’ll discuss the overall strategy on how to tackle the PM interview take-home assignment so that you can progress further in your PM interviews and improve your chances of landing your next product management gig!

Clarifying your assignment

When you first get your assignment prompt, take 5 minutes to make sure you completely understand what the interviewer is asking. Oftentimes, you can pick up on subtle themes if you’ve completed enough of these take-home assignments which will help frame your answer in a favorable manner. Here are some things you should do to fully understand your prompt:

  • Deliverables/Answer the question : The first thing you should do is make sure you fully understand the deliverables. If the recruiter is asking for designs, a PRD, a file format, make sure you take all of those things into consideration.
  • Timeframe : Next, clarify with the interviewer when they’d like the assignment completed by and how long they typically expect interviewers to work on the assignment. Now is the time to ask for rescheduling if you think you can’t commit to the assignment at this time. While no one will be keeping track of the exact time you spend, you still want to be somewhere in the recommended ballpark. Additionally, this will help you block out the appropriate amount of time to work on the assignment.
  • Assumptions : If you have any major assumptions, feel free to ask the interviewer or recruiter to clarify them at this point. The answer may lead you to completely different approaches when it comes to your assignment. Don’t be afraid to gather this extra intel if the opportunity presents itself.

Managing your time

The take-home assignment usually requires a few hours of dedicated work time. Depending on your work style, I would recommend blocking out the anticipated time to complete the assignment. Here’s how you should organize your time:

  • Minimize interruptions : While working on your PM interview take-home assignment, I highly recommend minimizing any interruptions and focusing on your deliverables. The assignment requires you to communicate a lot of information and interruptions to your thought process may reflect in your deliverables. It’s important that you keep your writing direct, contextual, and concise - staying focused will help accomplish those goals.
  • First draft mentality : While you want your final product to be polished, try and take an agile mentality when completing your take-home assignment. Spend the minimal amount of time to work through your first draft as you’ll likely make multiple changes as you go. Once you’ve completed your draft, you can always go back in later to make changes, add details, and improve any areas that may be lacking.
  • Save time for review : I recommend not spending all of your allocated time in one sitting. It helps to come back to the assignment with fresh eyes and clear thoughts (after you’ve completed a full draft of course). Plan to come back to the assignment a few hours later to reevaluate the state of your responses.

Working on the assignment

The meat of the take-home assignment is actually sitting down and going through the thought experiment proposed by the interviewer. Here’s some tips on working on the actual assignment itself:

  • Be concise : A mark of a good PM is knowing when to add just enough detail without overloading the document with details. Use your best judgement in determining what topics can be skimmed over and which require precise explanation. Think of your writing as a prioritization of sorts, another skill PMs should be proficient at.
  • Fully articulate your decision-making process : While you want to aim to be concise, make sure you organize your thoughts in a way that helps the reader understand your decision-making process. Using a formal framework or template like a PRD (product requirements document) will help tremendously in this effort. Here’s a PRD sample by Jackie Bavaro that I highly recommend: https://medium.com/@jackiebo/asanas-spec-template-spec-training-33bfd9d4dd32
  • Utilize visuals : The old adage is that a picture is worth a thousand words. If you’re good with mockup and prototype software, utilize that to your advantage in your PM take-home assignment. Good design can really help you keep your deliverables concise, as well as communicate key feature ideas to your interviewer. It also helps to show that you have some level of competency in design principles. I recommend tools like Figma or Balsamiq .
  • List out open issues or possible doubts : Somewhere in your project, I highly recommend listing out any open questions, risks, and dependencies. This demonstrates to the interview a level of awareness that your solution may depend on some key assumptions. Additionally, the recruiter will appreciate your transparency, and likely applaud you for knowing the limitations of your solution.

Review your work

When you’re done with your assignment, it’s time to review your work one last time and make any final adjustments. Here are some ways to really polish up your work:

  • Ask for someone to review : It’s always a good idea to have fresh eyes take a look at your assignment and see if they can follow along. I not only recommend asking other PMs to review your work, but also friends who are not in the industry. If non-product people can follow along, then you know you’ve done a decent job of explaining your core ideas.
  • Play devil’s advocate : While it’s good to be confident in your proposed solutions, it’s also a good idea to look at the other side of the coin. Review your work from different perspectives: would this be a viable solution if you had zero resources? Is this solution measurable? Why are your competitors not trying this? Think of novel ways to poke holes at your assignment and address them.
  • Answering the prompt : At the end of the day, you want to make sure that you answer the prompt the interviewer gave you. It’s easy to get carried away in your work and forget where your end goal was. Take a moment to make sure you’re providing what the interviewer asked.

Submit your work/Gathering feedback

When all final touches are done it’s time to submit your work! If you’ve never done a take-home assignment before, pat yourself on the back. I like to keep a copy of all of the assignments I’ve done so that I can refer back to them whenever needed. Additionally, I encourage you to ask for feedback so that you can continue to improve your take-home assignment skills:

  • Submit your assignment on time : This goes without saying. Deliver your tasks as promised and on schedule. You don’t want to be making bad impressions this early in the process.
  • Be prepared to discuss further : Some interviewers may have a follow-up conversation for you to present your work or walk them through your assignment verbally. Be prepared to defend your decisions and discuss your process in detail.
  • Utilize feedback to improve : If the interviewer does provide feedback, make sure you make note. As I mentioned before, I like to keep copies of my assignments along with these notes to refer back to in the future.

It’s very likely you’ll come across some sort of PM take-home assignment during your PM interviews. Remember that this is a great opportunity to showcase your skills as a PM in a real-world scenario. Take the time to knock this assignment out of the park so you can advance quickly to the next step in the interview process! If you’re looking for more interview tips, check out my article on PM interview tips . For all your other interview needs, sign up for mock interviews with great coaches, or enroll in PM courses , all on Exponent!

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Take Home Interview Assignments

6 tips for managers and interviewers to do them right.

home assignment example

With a new year, many of us are looking for that new role. The Great Resignation of 2021 continues to accelerate, and I expect we’ll see lots of people and jobs in motion.

(want to listen to the podcast version of this newsletter? check the link below)

Maybe you’re interviewing now. Maybe you have roles to fill on your team. Maybe you are looking to switch jobs or companies. On either side of the table, whether interviewer or interviewee, take home assignments may play a part in the decision. This goes for many roles, from UX to product management to engineering and beyond.

We covered this topic (among others) in a recent Product by Design podcast.

But I want to dive a little deeper into tips for creating good take home assignments. This goes for interviewers and managers creating the work, as well as candidates who are given the assignments.

Take Home Assignments

Take home assignments include anything you ask a candidate to do outside of your actual interviews. It includes specific prep work that you may have a candidate do for an interview or round of interviews.

Kyle Evans - Product Thinking - Take Home Assignments for Interviews

I’m generally a fan of take home assignments. I like them when structured correctly. They give managers the ability to see aspects of a candidate that may otherwise be difficult to explore in standard interviews. They give candidates the ability to showcase more skills than just answering interview questions, whether that is writing, presenting, critical thinking, etc.

Take home work also allows for some flexibility and time to think. Rather than trying to answer questions on the spot, a candidate can think through it and prepare. I personally value that as a candidate, since I’m better at preparation than on-the-spot answers. I also value it as an interviewer because I get to see the best of someone, rather than potentially a flustered version of them.

All that said, it is important we structure take home assignments in the right way to get the most out of them and not to burden candidates.

So how do we do that?

Tips For Creating Take Home Assignments

Make it clear.

First, make the expectations for the assignment clear. If you want a candidate to create a presentation, tell them that. If you want them to prepare 3 wireframes, then tell them you are looking for 3 wireframes.

There may be some value in leaving work open-ended, so candidates can approach however they like. But that should also be clear.

When I was hiring for a UX designer, we created a take home assignment for our candidates with a specific problem area and a deliverable of 3-5 mockups they could walk us through. We tried to be very clear about what we hoped to see and what the purpose was. And it worked well.

As a candidate, if you feel like something is unclear, ask about it. Remember, hiring managers are people too, and often really busy. So they may have overlooked something or just not taken enough time to flesh out the details. Don’t assume that asking questions will hurt your chances. If something is unclear to you, it’s probably unclear to others, so don’t go away and get to work if you don’t feel like you understand. It will be a massive waste of your time and everyone else’s.

I struggled early in my career to ask enough questions. I felt like I should always understand, and if I didn’t, it was my fault. But that’s not necessarily the case. Don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Make it Appropriate for the Role

As a hiring manager, you should ensure that what you’re asking candidates to do is appropriate for the role. Meaning that a junior UX designer shouldn’t have to create a design system. Or a product manager shouldn’t create a strategy presentation for a new product you’re thinking about.

Those may be good tasks for a potential head of product or UX lead, but they are too much for more junior roles. Make sure that the ask is congruent with the role.

Make it Timeboxed

Along the same lines as ensuring that the take home work aligns with the role, you should also ensure that there is a way to limit the work as well.

This involves really thinking through the structure of what you’re asking. Since you can’t actually dictate how much time a candidate spends on a task, you need to be really thoughtful about what you’re asking someone to do.

Because, let’s be real, even if you said that you don’t expect something to take more than an hour or two, those Type A personalities who demand perfection of themselves will likely spend an order of magnitude more time on it, especially for opportunities they really want.

I know, because I’ve done that.

I recall an assignment I received several years ago. It involved preparing a presentation around a potential new product. It wasn’t supposed to be more preparation than an hour or two (yeah right). I spent several hours each night for a week working on that. And then at least 8 hours the final day before I sent it over. All told, I probably spent 20-30 hours working on it. An order of magnitude more than I should have.

I did a tremendous amount of research into the industry. I created not only a pitch, but an entirely new business model. I refined all the transitions and made the entire presentation really eye-catching and professional. It was absolutely insane.

By the end, I was not only convinced on the product, I was ready to pursue it whether or not I got the role I was interviewing for. I was almost ready to go raise funds and create my own company.

I didn’t though. And didn’t get the role either. Which worked out just great because that company ended up not creating the new business line, and doing a massive amount of layoffs shortly after we had spoken.

Regardless, the level of effort I put in was far too much. That is partly on me, but also on the manager for not structuring the assignment in a way that limits the time spent.

In my own interviews, I intentionally limit what I ask. Like I mentioned above, that may include limiting the number of wireframes. For product managers, I may ask for a one-page document, a half-page answer to a question, or a three-slide presentation on a limited topic. These give me the opportunity to see specific skills in action (like writing and presenting), without opening the door for endless hours of writing or preparation.

Make it Outside Your Company’s Problems

It’s easy to create a problem-set for the problems you’re dealing with as a company or team. But it’s not fair to ask candidates, who may have limited knowledge of your company or industry, to solve your specific problems.

Additionally, it’s hard to be objective about a candidate’s work when you are so close to the problems and solutions yourself.

This creates the potential for bias. If I give a candidate a take home assignment that very closely mirrors what we’re doing on our team or within our company, I may prefer the candidate who best approximates my own thinking on the issue. And that may blind me as a manager to candidates who arrived at different solutions, but had solid thinking as well as solid writing or presentation skills.

For all of this, I prefer to keep take home assignments more generic and further away from our company- and team-specific issues. Additionally, asking candidates to solve problems specific to your company gives the feeling that you’re asking them to do work for you before you even hire them. That generally isn’t the case, but it gives a bad impression.

Make it a Discussion, Not a Filter

I was reading recently about a company that uses a take home assignment as an initial filter. Before candidates even talk with a manager or recruiter, the company is sending them work to do to be considered.

Don’t do that.

Take home work should come later in the interview process, once the interviewer and the candidate feel like the role is a potential good fit. It should add to the conversation.

As an interviewer, you should only ask for things that you are willing to spend time reviewing and discussing. Take home work should be part of the interview process. If you ask for something as a manager, you should have an interview where you walk through the work, ask questions, and allow the candidate to discuss. This is true of presentations, written documents, etc.

As a hiring manager, I want to see the work, but also want to let the candidate tell me more. If a candidate prepares a presentation, it makes sense to let them present and discuss. If they create wireframes, we want to understand their thinking and ask questions. If they’ve prepared a business document or future press release (one of my favorites) we want to discuss and debate. That is what all these items are for, in an interview and on the job.

As a candidate, if you see companies using take home work as a filter, walk away and don’t look back. You’ve dodged a bullet.

Remember, an hour-long presentation by a candidate requires numerous hours of preparation. Anyone who has done public speaking or created presentations knows good ones require significant work. Potentially, dozens of hours could go into creating an hour-long presentation. Good writing and designing and coding is also labor-intensive and difficult.

As hiring managers, we should understand this difficulty. On top of that, interviewing for roles is rarely the only thing a candidate has on their plate. They may work full-time, have a family, or have other activities and responsibilities. We need to understand this and empathize.

This may include giving the right amount of time for a candidate to do the work they need.

I recall one company many years ago asking me to complete a take home assignment in a standard time-frame they give to all candidates. But that didn’t work for me because I had other things going on. I could understand that they want to level the playing field for all candidates by allowing for the same amount of time, but we have to understand that giving each candidate two days to work on something does not necessarily make it equal . Some candidates may have nothing else to do, and can dedicate 10 hours per day. While others may only have one spare hour per day.

Understand this. And work with candidates to create realistic expectations. The main point isn’t to filter them out, but to give them an opportunity to create good work. If that takes two days for one candidate and six days for another, that is fine.

As a candidate, if it doesn’t seem like your interviewer is showing much empathy or understanding, walk away. It is most likely they are looking for cogs to plug into a system, and believe that they just need to churn through enough people to get there. You want to be valued for the work you do and who you are, not simply for being a cog in the system.

As managers, take home work can be a powerful tool to understand potential candidates. It can give them a chance to show skills and understanding that is difficult in a standard interview format. As candidates, take home assignments can give you more flexibility and an opportunity to go deeper into certain skills you have.

But for take home assignments to be effective interview tools, they need to be structured correctly. Assignments should add meaningfully to the discussion and process, not detract from it or become too onerous. But with a few key tips, we can all make the most of our time, our interviews, and our skills we’d like to showcase.

Other Good Links

In Praise of Unglamorous American Invention (article) - Interesting article praising some lower-key inventions. It includes wood glue, which is near and dear to my heart as a woodworker.

“While some luthiers still use animal glue when they build stringed instruments—yes, the kind rendered from animal hides—most woodworkers have switched to PVA, and especially Titebond, and especially (for projects that need it) Titebond III, which inspires arias of awe all over the woodworking internet…”

The Surprising Power of The Long Game (article) - I’m always about the long game, and this was a good take on short vs long games.

“Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt-out and you can’t play a long-term game in everything, you need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do time amplifies the difference between long and short-term games. The question you need to think about is when and where to play a long-term game. A good place to start is with things that compound: knowledge, relationships, and finances.”

The Tech and Products that Stood Out At CES 2022 (article) - I love CES. It’s fun to see new products that may come soon. And other products that are so out there we may never actually see them. Engadget also wrapped up their Best of CES with more.

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Ready for more?

Here's What the Hiring Manager's Actually Looking For in That (Dreaded) Take-Home Assignment

home assignment example

Just when you think the you’ve nailed your interview, you hear this dreaded line:

As the next step in the process, we’d like for you to complete a short take-home assignment.

Suddenly, instead of doing a celebratory dance that you’re one step closer to the position, you’re thinking, “I’d better cancel my dinner plans for tonight, and tomorrow.” Quickly followed by, “Oh no! This is where they find out I’m a complete fraud !”

Before you panic about the assignment that’s standing between you and your dream job, take a deep breath and stop beating yourself up over it. It’s not exactly what you think—seriously, I used to assign them to candidates all the time, so I know.

Here are a couple things you need to understand about what hiring managers are actually looking for in this project.

Don’t Agonize Over Finding the “Right” Answer

If you haven’t been hired yet, you shouldn’t be expected to know all the nitty-gritty details about a company. And hiring managers know this!

Sure, the assignment is a great way for the company to see how you would address a real business problem, but it would be unrealistic to expect even the most qualified candidates to present a solution that could be implemented immediately. Again, I can’t reiterate this enough: The person who assigned this is completely aware of that fact!

And because of this, you shouldn’t stay up late focusing only on getting the “right” answer. Odds are, there isn’t only one right answer.

Depending on your expertise, this might manifest itself in a number of ways. If you’re a programmer who’s being asked to write some sample code, the hiring manager is going to be way more interested in how quickly you identify the mistakes you’ve made. And before you say, “Well, I won’t make any mistakes,” don’t worry, you will. The same goes for those of you who are writers, marketers, or sales people. You will mess up somewhere in the assignment.

When you’re brought in again (fingers crossed) and asked to discuss where you went wrong, be open and willing to find and acknowledge any errors. Bonus points if you can bring quick fixes and solutions to the table as well. One way to prepare for this conversation is to look at your take-home test before going back in to the office—you’ll almost always find a spot you’d like to revise.

Don’t Psych Yourself Out

How many times have you looked at the email outlining the requirements and thought to yourself, “If I can’t do this, how would I possibly excel in the actual job?”

Here’s the thing, though: If you weren’t capable of doing the job, you wouldn’t have been sent home with it in the first place.

In fact, the take-home assignment should actually be a huge boost to your confidence. When you’re asked to complete one, it’s a clear indication that the hiring manager’s excited to see how you’d tackle a problem similar to one the organization’s been dealing with. In other words, the company’s struggled with the issue in the past and would love to hear your input!

Of course, depending on exactly what you’re being asked to complete, you’ll want to take some additional precautions before diving in. But the mere fact that you’re moving to this step is a good indication you’re a top contender.

Keep in mind: The person who will review this assignment’s often juggling multiple calendars, interviews, and never-ending inboxes. No one adds more to his or her plate for fun. You’re in a great place!

Don’t Forget This Is Just as Much for You as it Is for the Hiring Manager

Most job seekers can’t count the number of times they’ve been told they should be interviewing a company as much as a company interviews them. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest reason is to make sure you actually want to join the company (how many of us have taken jobs just because we’ve needed them—only to regret it on day one?). However, as tired as you might be of hearing this kind of advice, it also applies to the assignment:

If you find it boring or not suited for your skills, don’t ignore this.

While it won’t be completely indicative of what your day-to-day will be like, many elements of it are probably pretty close. It’s OK if it’s challenging, but it’s not OK if you’re miserable from the minute you start it.

Back in my recruiting days, I worked with each hiring manager to develop take-home assignments that would give us clarity on whether or not a candidate would thrive in similar challenges. We didn’t always expect people to nail the assignment. In fact, in some cases, we liked a candidate so much, we just wanted to make sure he or she met our deadline. But, we did try to give the person an idea of what to expect. If that doesn’t line up for what you’re hoping to do in your next role, take that into consideration, especially if you’re ultimately offered the job.

Yes, an interview assignment can be daunting, but it’s nothing to lose your mind over. Take a deep breath, remind yourself that you can do this, and remember that while it’s an important piece of your candidacy, it’s not the only piece. You’ve gotten this far—now you only have a little bit longer to go.

Photo of stressed worker courtesy of Shutterstock .

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19 whiteboard and take-home design challenges for UX designers

During an interview for a UX designer role, you might be set a design challenge. UX design challenges aren’t meant to intimidate you – they are all about seeing your process in action. In this post, we share some tasks to try out before your next job interview.

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19 whiteboard and take-home design challenges for UX designers

Interviewing for a UX design job is already challenging. Add to it the pressure of completing a take-home design challenge in six hours or less mid-week. Or – worse – performing in front of an entire panel during a whiteboard interview.

It doesn’t have to be so scary, though. How can you remove some of the fear? Practice. Despite what your biggest fears are telling you, UX design challenges during the interview process aren’t meant to intimidate you. They were created to help employers evaluate your approach to design problems.

The UX design challenge is all about your process. No one expects you to come up with one fantastic answer to the challenge because there is no one correct answer. They’re expecting you to show your approach to the problem.

Design challenges during the interview process are created for a reason. The challenge will be written in a way that helps hiring managers understand how you’d approach a problem you’re unfamiliar with, see your process and check your cultural fit within the organisation. Design challenges are a simulation of the work you would do within the company you’re applying to.

Are you ready to practice? First, let’s talk about what you’ll face in a challenge. Then, we’ll cover some examples so you can prepare for your big challenge day.

What is a whiteboard UX design challenge?

Whiteboard challenges are usually limited to 30 minutes. Sometimes, you’ll get one hour to complete your challenge. These are done in front of the interview team. During a whiteboard challenge, your interviewers will give you a brief prompt. Then you’ll give them insight into your process.

Whiteboard interviews allow you to collaborate with the interview team, which will often also be your co-workers if you’re hired. Plus, they can see your approach to design happening in real-time.

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What is a take-home UX design challenge?

A take-home UX design challenge is usually done at home – hence “take-home.” Employers will give take-home design challenges to give you more time to dive deeper into the problem and devise a solution end-to-end.

Your interviewer will give you a brief assignment. Usually, you’ll get about a week to finish a take-home assignment. Most employers will give you an estimated time to complete the challenge. It can take three to six hours to finish your take-home assessment. Often, though, a take-home challenge can take longer than the company estimated.

UX design whiteboard challenge examples

1. Speed Costco checkout

“We want to improve the Costco customer experience by eliminating the long lines at checkout. We’ve decided a self-checkout process is our solution but we want to do better than the typical self-checkout at grocery stores. Our research has shown they’re even slower than the usual checkout lanes.”

Find the entire prompt on 100 Days of Design

2. Bank chatbot “You are a design director for a large national bank. Your bank wants to be ready to launch an app that will allow your customers to access their account information via a chatbot. How do you approach the challenge of providing information via a series of requests?”

3. Jeans “Shopping for jeans and other form-fitting apparel online could be time-consuming and frustrating. It’s hard to compare different styles and it’s hard to know for sure how they will fit. It’s a disappointing experience when you have to return an item that doesn’t fit quite right. How can you help customers select the style of jeans that they’re looking for in the right size?”

Find the entire prompt on UX Challenge

4. Elevator lobby

“Our elevators work great, however, with over 2500 people using our elevators every day, we need a better system to get everyone to the right one.”

5. Subscription fees “It’s hard to keep track of all the products and services that we have subscribed to every month. All we see is money deducting from our accounts, sometimes from services that we don’t need anymore. How can you design a product which helps manage subscriptions?”

6. Time machine

“We’ve invented an app that is easy to download onto your smartphone or smartwatch. It allows you to travel to any time in the past or future. But we’re having trouble designing the interface.”

7. Pet watch “No matter how much we love our pets, we still need to leave home to go to work, travel, run errands… leaving our pets home alone and sad. How can you enable pet owners to interact with their pets when they’re not at home?”

8. App for kids

“We run a bespoke toy company and want to build an app for kids to design their own toys (which we will build).”

9. Invoices “Managing multiple clients and projects is a part of running a business as a freelancer. However, sometimes clients don’t pay on time. How do you help freelance business owners keep track of payments from their clients and make sure that they receive payments from clients promptly for every project?”

10. Car locator “We have over 15,000 employees and all of their cars on our main campus. Employees have been ‘losing’ their cars in the lot. They forget which of the 5 giant parking lots they parked in and are wandering around clicking their door alarms to find their cars. The noise pollution at the end of the day is terrible. We already have a company app. We want to add a feature to help employees find their cars.”

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Ux design take-home challenge examples.

1. Janitors app

“We developed an app to help janitors stay on top of their job. It includes a way to inventory their supplies, recipes for cleaning solutions, an interactive space to upload a floorplan map to keep track of their workspace and a chart to keep track of their cleaning rotations. Your task is to design a single detail view for the map section of the app.”

Find the entire prompt on Designercize

2. Roommates

“Design a mobile product experience that appeals to millennials that makes it safe to find the ideal roommate in New York City. Design the experience from the perspective of a person who is looking for a roommate as well as the one who is looking for an apartment. Once the ideal roommate is found, what else can this product do to make the roommate experience better?

We are looking for you to identify pain points in the “finding/keeping a good roommate” journey and to find ways to solve those pain points.

Constraint: Stick to existing mobile capabilities of iOS and Android.”

Find the entire prompt on Prototypr

3. Gym class checkout

“We built a gym class discovery app. Currently, users can only discover gym classes – they can’t purchase them. To make our app profitable, we want to add a feature where users can purchase the classes they’re interested in through our app. Please design a full checkout process for our gym class discovery app.”

4. SmartHome Voice Assistance

“Imagine the Voice Assistance wants to understand how caregivers interact with the SmartHome devices to keep in touch with and help their clients. So far, the research has only been on the device owner’s side rather than the experience caregivers have. The team would like to present the results in six weeks.”

Find the entire prompt on DScout 5. Homepage

“Our drop shipping company created an A/I powered shipping and logistics app to help podcast creators earn passive income through the merchandise that promotes their show. Your task is to design the homepage of a website for our A/I powered shipping and logistics app for podcast creators.”

“GoPro’s current mobile app is only good for three things — to look at photos people have taken on their own cams, to edit those photos and to look at photos other people have taken around the world. For a camera that’s changing the world, this app is admittedly dull and doesn’t push the envelope.

GoPro Corp. has put you in charge of delivering a new mobile app, one that stands out from the photo environment today (Instagram. VSCO, and Snapchat), one that will appeal to Gen-Z. What does the perfect GoPro app do that’s new and groundbreaking?

Constraint: This is an iOS app, all suggested technologies need to be available on the market today or within the next 12 months.”

7. Price comparison site for teachers

“We created a price comparison site to help teachers save money on classroom supplies. It’s unfair that they have to spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms, so we want to help them at least find the best deals. Your job is to design a sortable list view for our site.”

8. Restaurant recommendations app

“We’re redesigning the settings options for our restaurant recommendations app. Users have complained that they’re receiving too many notifications, they can’t customise their recommendations enough, and that the settings are hard to change. Please create a settings view for our app to help foodies find restaurants they’ll love. You must include location, notification, international cuisine options, and dietary restrictions.”

9. Google “You are consulting Google on an important strategic decision for their enterprise offerings; they want to know whether it’s worth introducing a sales funnel management tool onto their Enterprise Gmail interface. Google believes that because a majority of their enterprise users discuss business on their email platform and because they are the lexicon of most people’s business contacts, they are in a position to both make the sales process more efficient and make the likelihood of closing business higher.

26% of Google’s Enterprise users engage in sales weekly, 40% engage in some sort of funnel management (whether sales, hiring, or some other decision funnel).

A typical sales funnel includes Leads, Inquiries, Prospects, Quotes and a new customer.

Recommend a funnel management flow to Google. Ensure the flow accounts for a user making initial contact with a lead from within Gmail and then managing that lead through the entire funnel. What else can Gmail do to put the odds of closing business in favour of their user?”

Where can I find practice tasks for UX take-home design and whiteboard challenges?

Example tasks for take-home and whiteboard challenges can be hard to find Here are four great places to get free practice tasks. We reference these sources in this blog post. But if you want more detailed, in-depth challenge examples – head to these sources:

  • 100 Days of Product Design
  • Designercize
  • UX Challenge

Now, go practice

Now that you have some prompts, it’s time to practice! Try creating a template framework that you’ll use for all of your challenges and speaking out loud as you practice. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable and say everything you’re thinking.

Most design challenges will be about the organisation that you’re applying to. They may be r eal problems that UX designers within the company faced or something inspired by their current projects. They were created to help employers evaluate your approach to design problems.

Whiteboard and take-home design challenges help employers see that you can perform well in five significant areas. They want to know that you can communicate effectively with their team. This means they’re looking to see you think critically and ask questions. Your interview panel is also checking to see if you’ll be able to collaborate well with the team they already have.

Then they’ll test your character. Your potential employers are also going to give you constructive criticism to make sure you can handle feedback. They’re testing how well you can perform on a deadline while working on a new problem. If you practice, you’ll ace your interviews.

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6 August 2024

Take-home assignments for product management candidates

Photo of Jens-Fabian Goetzmann

Jens-Fabian Goetzmann

13 March 2022 ‧ 7 min read

I've recently gone through the process of designing a product management interview process for RevenueCat. This is not the first interview process I've set up from scratch, but one of the questions that comes up every single time is whether a written take-home assignment should be a part of the process.

RevenueCat uses written assignments in most interview processes. However, they are not without criticism . Therefore, I wanted to be deliberate about the whether and how to ask for this kind of homework. In this article, I will walk through some of the pros, cons, and ways to mitigate the cons. At the end, I will also share what I ended up doing (spoiler alert: I did ask for a homework assignment, but it was a little bit different than the usual "design a solution" homework).

The drawbacks of take-home assignments

Let's start with all the reasons that speak against giving candidates written assignments.

Firstly and perhaps most obviously, take-home assignments require time , and often the response will be better the more time the candidate was able to invest. This biases against anyone who has less free time at their disposal – candidates with children, for example. Therefore, take-home assignments could be considered non-inclusive.

These assignments can also feel like free work . I am personally of the opinion that they never actually are free work , because the responses are unlikely to contain truly novel ideas and even if they do, the hard work is not the idea but fleshing it out and implementing it. However, the candidate might feel differently and therefore you might put off some good candidates by giving an assignment.

Assignments can also feel like an uneven burden . In interviews, the candidate and the interviewer spend the same amount of time on the interview. In assignments, the candidate spends much more time writing than the recipient will spend reviewing.

There is also the risk of cheating on an assignment by soliciting help, which might reduce the validity of the signal you get from an assignment.

There are also some specific points that make the responses to a written assignment not comparable with how a product manager would work in real life. Firstly, the candidate will have much less context than any real life product manager would have. Perhaps most importantly, they will not have access to customers to discover actual problems and solutions to those problems, which is arguably more important than having good-sounding ideas in isolation.

In addition, the more domain knowledge is required for (or helpful in) responding to the assignment, the more you might inadvertently filter out candidates who are great product managers (or have high potential for it) in favor of domain experts with poor product management skills.

Written assignments also completely disregard the fact that product management is a team sport . Asking a product manager to design a solution in the absence of a product designer is something that wouldn't happen in any but the smallest teams. You want to hire a product manager who can effectively collaborate with a designer to discover and design a solution, not someone who believes they have to know all the answers themselves.

The benefits of take-home assignments

Let's now look at what speaks for giving out take-home assignments.

Firstly, written assignment give better signal about how candidates think and deliberate . Interviews only give you signal on how well candidates can think on their feet. Most actual product management work, however, is done with the ability to research, reflect and form an opinion, not having to come up with solutions on the spot. In most circumstances, you would rather hire someone who comes up with great solutions with a bit of time than someone who comes up with just good ones on the spot.

Written assignments also test structuring problems and written communication . These skills are always important for product managers, but particularly so in today's remote and asynchronous work environment.

The assignment also acts as a filtering function for the candidate's interest . While this is to be taken with a grain of salt (because of the fact that different candidates may have different levels of free time available), you can say that candidates who are more interested in the domain will be naturally more diligent and thoughtful about their responses.

An interesting corollary to the previous point is that for candidates who are more interested in the domain and the problem you are solving (the “missionaries”), the assignment can actually generate additional excitement about the opportunity. These candidates will likely find working on the problem so intrinsically motivating that it gives them energy rather than draining it.

Lastly, take-home assignments can be a great way for candidates who are not currently in a product management position to show off their potential and their product sense. The best way to ask interview questions is often behavioral (“tell me about a time you…”), which can be tricky for candidates that aren't currently in a role where they can showcase a lot of product sense.

Alternatives and mitigation

Some of these drawbacks can me avoided or mitigated depending on how the take-home assignment is designed. Here are some options to consider.

If you just want to test written communication, you could just ask candidates for a writing sample , which allows them to reuse a work product they've already produced and therefore reduces the time investment that's required. Of course, this approach limits some of the benefits of the take-home assignment.

In a similar vein, you could ask candidates to give a presentation about one of their previous projects instead. This is often done in interview processes for designers ( portfolio review ). The biggest challenges with this approach are that product management can differ widely between different companies, and it also biases against candidates who haven't been in product management before.

Several of the drawbacks can be addressed by assigning a problem that isn't related to the company's own product, but rather a third party product . This makes it clear that the assignment isn't “free work”, and it also levels the playing field in terms of domain knowledge. However, it makes it harder to filter for candidates with enthusiasm for the space.

To reduce bias against candidates with less free time, it generally makes sense to time-box and/or length-box the assignment (i.e., “spend no more than 2 hours on this” or “submit no more than 2 pages”). Of course, you can't enforce a time-box, and a length-box is an imperfect substitute (in general, short documents are harder to write than long ones, so the more time you invest, the better a short document will get).

To make the assignment more alike real product management work, you can provide contextual information as part of the assignment that candidates have to analyze, for example, customer quotes or data points. On the flip side, the more information you include, the more time it will require from candidates to process that information before even starting to write.

More generally, it is often a good idea to limit the amount of domain knowledge required in the assignment (unless you absolutely need to hire a domain expert). Even if the assignment is about your own product, there are surely some product questions that are easier to answer without deep domain knowledge than others.

To avoid asking for activities that a product manager would never do without collaborating with their team members, consider not asking them to design a solution . Instead, you could ask for researching an opportunity, drafting a strategy, or writing up a one-pager for a mission or initiative.

Lastly, let's talk about some ideas to avoid the assignment feeling like “free work” or an uneven burden where the candidate invests a lot of time without receiving anything in return. Placing the assignment step late in the process (i.e., after panel interviews) is one way to achieve this. It does, however, reduce the leverage it provides for the process.

You can also make sure to provide detailed feedback or ensure to always have one face-to-face discussion after the assignment, even in the case that the assignment wasn't strong.

Finally, as an even more extreme measure, you could monetarily compensate people for their time spent on the assignment.

What we ended up deciding at RevenueCat

As with any tradeoff decision, there isn't a perfect solution for product manager take-home assignments. You can optimize for one aspect or another and give different weight to the various pros and cons. Here's what we ended up deciding for our recent product management role at RevenueCat.

Firstly, we did ask candidates to complete an assignment. Being a fully remote, globally distributed company, the ability to communicate well in writing was too critical a skill to not test for. We did not go for one of the alternative ways to test written communication (writing sample, portfolio review), because it makes different candidates harder to compare and it also biases against candidates who may not have something as impressive to show for reasons unrelated to their own performance.

We also chose to make the assignment about our own product, mostly for the reason of filtering for as well as spurring additional excitement for our domain. We did, however, push the assignment back in the process past the panel interview, so that it would feel more like a conclusion of the process instead of free work. Interestingly, the filtering function worked quite well in the sense that one candidate withdrew his application after seeing the assignment, stating that he didn't have as much interest in the space as he initially thought. I consider this a feature, not a bug – better to have found that out by means of the assignment than after joining the company!

In terms of the actual content of the assignment, we moved away from the typical "design a solution" prompt, because that's not something a product manager should ever do in isolation. Instead, we asked the candidates to come up with a 1-2 page proposal for how to break down and start operationalizing one of our strategic focus areas. The candidates had been given some context for the focus area in the interviews, and the assignment itself provided additional context as well. In addition to that overall prompt, we also included some guiding questions that we expected the candidates to cover (for example, “What information would you collect and how?” or “What risks do you see and how would you mitigate them?”).

The advantage of this kind of assignment, from my perspective, is that this is precisely the kind of work that I would expect product managers to do independently when tackling a new area. In real life, they would of course have more time and access to more information, but they would still have to start somewhere. This kind of assignment gives the candidates the ability to show how they would break down such an ambiguous and big problem into pieces that are small enough to handle.

Asking this kind of assignment question was a bit of an experiment, but one that turned out well so far. We will probably keep experimenting with this approach and further refine it.

Before wrapping up, I want to share one last aspect about written assignments that I have found absolutely crucial. Before looking at the first completed assignment, develop a list of questions to grade the assignment by. I don't just mean the general assessment rubric (e.g.,”clarity of communication”), but concrete and specific questions (e.g., “does the candidate identify trade-offs and do they make reasonable trade-off decisions?”). This allows a more objective assessment and comparison between different candidates' responses. It also ensures that compelling writing doesn't paper over the fact that a candidate hasn't covered all crucial aspects of the assignment.

I hope you found this article useful. If you did, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share thoughts and articles on product management and leadership.

About Jens-Fabian Goetzmann

I am currently Head of Product at RevenueCat . Previously, I worked at 8fit , Microsoft , BCG , and co-founded two now-defunct startups. More information on my social media channels .

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Here are 82 public repositories matching this topic..., siddhujetty / product-analytics-insights-collection.

My Solutions to "A Collection of Data Science Take-Home Challenges" by Giulio Palombo.

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adib / Card-Tray-Demo

A clone of Apple's Wallet app

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This repository contains all the take-home coding tests I've done during my job hunting in Robotics.

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cockroachlabs-field / sales-engineer-take-home-exercise

Quick technical exercise for those interested in Sales Engineering roles at Cockroach Labs

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jiminny / join-the-team

Interested in joining the Jiminny Engineering team? Start here!

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tachyonlabs / Android-Credit-Card-Input-Exercise

This was a from-scratch "take-home project" assigned to me by a company I was interviewing with for an Android Developer role. They liked my submission well enough to bring me in for onsites, so I thought I'd put it up on GitHub as another code sample, as nothing about it is specific to that company. See the README for full details.

  • Updated Jul 25, 2019

brotzky / lightyear.io

Dennis Brotzky's take home challenge submission

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adib / Cheesy-Movies

The hipster's movie app!

binghuan / MyRakutenSingapore

Coding Test from Singapore Rakuten

  • Updated Sep 22, 2022

techno-disaster / Take-Home-Projects

Flutter projects companies give as a take home assignment

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riccardogiorato / moonpay-full-stack-challenge

moonpay fullstack challenge - take home test

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anjali-chadha / log-analyser

Analyse log file to get user statistics

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ericmikkelsen / asana--take-home-test

Take home test for asana

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gordonbondon / exercises

Various coding exercises for interviews, take-home assignments, online challenges, etc.

  • Updated Jun 23, 2021

anjali-chadha / gdax-service

Web service providing quotes for digital currency trades using data from the GDAX orderbook.

  • Updated Feb 26, 2018

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COMMENTS

  1. 5 Examples of Take-Home Tasks for Different Roles • Toggl Hire

    5 thorough examples of great take-home assignments. Now that you better understand the how, the when, and the why of take-home assignments, we'll show you five examples. The example take-home assignments will cover tasks for: Developer - fixing a broken site. Product manager - redesigning a feature.

  2. Product Management Take Home Assignment Example

    Background. You have cleared the screening round for your dream product management role in Amazon. You get an email from the recruiter on a take home assignment you need to complete. It looks something like this: Example 1. "You are the product manager for the Amazon app.

  3. Take Home Assignment Templates and Examples

    A take-home assignment evaluates candidates' skills in a practical context, useful in fields like software development and design. Reforge can enhance the effectiveness of these assignments with strategies and insights that ensure they accurately assess creativity, problem-solving, and practical skills. Our resources help employers craft ...

  4. Acing the Product Manager home assignment

    1. Home assignments became very popular in the PM interview process. Although they are a bit controversial, they are still widely used by big and small companies. Just as your frontal interview ...

  5. [EXAMPLE 1] Product Manager Take Home Assignment

    December 20, 2018. by. Lewis Lin. There's a new trend in product management interviews: the take home assignment. Take home assignments can vary in their format. They can either be: Written tests that revolve around hypothetical questions. Written tests that revolve around case questions. Written tests that revolve around behavioral questions.

  6. Nailing Product Manager Take-Home Assignments

    Sample Slide 1+2 Slide 3 → Divider. This is a simple slide to break up the sections of your presentation. As part of your talk track for this slide, you can briefly review the prompt to set the ...

  7. A beginner's guide to UX take home assignments: tips for product

    Here is Femke's detailed UX home assignment. She explains the thought process that she has used on her short-deadline assignment. Long Deadlines (1 Week) Do not procrastinate and keep a steady pace: With more time comes great responsibility. Do not fall into a procrastination hole and trick yourself by saying you still have plenty of time.

  8. Product Take Home Assignment: REAL Example + Framework

    👩‍🎓 Book 1:1 Coaching With Me! 🧑‍🎓 @ https://calendly.com/diannayauTake home product assignments suck. Here's a framework to ace these assignments ...

  9. Complete a Take-Home Assignment Quickly and Successfully

    How to Present Your Take-Home Assignment Solution. PG: You want a slide that details the solution you came up with. In this case, that is the chatbot. Those are the core features which you wish to include in a section of your take-home assignment presentation. It should state: Here is what the solution is. Here is what the solution looks like.

  10. Product Management Take Home Assignment with Example

    In this Video we will go through the Product Management Take Home AssignmentChapters:00:00 introduction01:15 What We Will Learn02:09 What the Assignment Cont...

  11. Product Manager Take Home Assignment Examples

    Jens-Fabian Goetzmann. ·. Follow. 4 min read. ·. Mar 7, 2023. I have been asked quite a few times for examples for product manager take home assignment / homework assignment questions, so I decided to put together a list of some that I have given candidates or been given as a candidate. Some of these have been slightly anonymized.

  12. How to Master the PM Homework Assignment

    Next, we'll walk through three tips for approaching your PM take-home assignment. Frame the problem. Bring the solution to life. Acknowledge the gaps. To bring things to life, I'll show sample ...

  13. Ace the product management take-home assignment

    This take-home assignment can consist of product design questions, metrics and analytics, and sometimes strategy. The take-home assignment helps the interviewer assess two important qualities in the PM candidate: their thought process and their communication skills. In this article, I'll discuss the overall strategy on how to tackle the PM ...

  14. Take Home Interview Assignments

    Take Home Interview Assignments. 6 Tips for Managers and Interviewers To Do Them Right. Kyle Evans. Jan 11, 2022. With a new year, many of us are looking for that new role. The Great Resignation of 2021 continues to accelerate, and I expect we'll see lots of people and jobs in motion.

  15. What the Hiring Manager Wants to See in Your Take-Home ...

    In fact, the take-home assignment should actually be a huge boost to your confidence. When you're asked to complete one, it's a clear indication that the hiring manager's excited to see how you'd tackle a problem similar to one the organization's been dealing with. In other words, the company's struggled with the issue in the past ...

  16. 19 whiteboard and take-home design challenges for UX designers

    Usually, you'll get about a week to finish a take-home assignment. Most employers will give you an estimated time to complete the challenge. It can take three to six hours to finish your take-home assessment. Often, though, a take-home challenge can take longer than the company estimated. UX design whiteboard challenge examples. 1. Speed ...

  17. Take-home assignments for product management candidates

    Firstly and perhaps most obviously, take-home assignments require time, and often the response will be better the more time the candidate was able to invest. This biases against anyone who has less free time at their disposal - candidates with children, for example. Therefore, take-home assignments could be considered non-inclusive.

  18. My entire UX take-home assignment

    This was my first ever UX take-home assignment. I have been applying to UX jobs for the past few months and have had a fair amount of phone-screen interviews. So you can imagine my excitement when I finally broke past the first stage, the process looked like this: 📞initial phone screen with recruiter >. 🚀first zoom meeting with hiring ...

  19. How To Transform a Take-Home Assignment Into a Data Science Job

    The assignment overview provides some background on the task and a short description of what they expect you to do with the dataset. For example, in my take-home assignment for a data science position in Deliveroo, the task was to analyze the performance of their RGR (Rider Gets Rider) referral program compared to other marketing channels.

  20. homely

    Written by Pooja Sinha. UX Designer at :qure.ai / Previously :frogdesign :caringco / Talks about Design, Web3, Startups. For my first UI/UX interview ever, I was given a take-home assignment. This was mainly to gauge my skills and give them an idea of how I approach UI/UX. For the assignment, I had to design a….

  21. [EXAMPLE 2] Product Manager Take Home Assignment

    August 25, 2022. by. Lewis Lin. Here's another recent example of a PM take-home assignment. This assignment evaluates a PM's UX skills. It's very challenging; UX design is not trivial even for UX experts. And while the assignment doesn't say it explicitly, showing alternate designs, with a wireframing tool, is what the interviewer expects.

  22. Practice take-home case study (datasets/code included)

    Going through several of these ourselves, and getting tips from friends, we've compiled a practice take home case study. Let us know what you think and we look forward to your feedback! 10. Award. jambery. • 6 yr. ago. Awesome insights into a realistic dataset! 2. Award.

  23. take-home-test · GitHub Topics · GitHub

    Add this topic to your repo. To associate your repository with the take-home-test topic, visit your repo's landing page and select "manage topics." GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

  24. Oral Diseases

    Read the ODi and WHO Collaborating Centre for Oral Cancer Special Issue on Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders. Image descriptions & credits: Fig 1.Leukoplakia of floor of mouth (courtesy; Prof Ross Kerr), Fig 2.Leukoplakia of dorsum of tongue (courtesy: Prof José M. Aguirre-Urizar), Fig 3.Erythroleukoplakia of lateral tongue (courtesy; Prof Ross Kerr), Fig 4.