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The role of a product engineer at Quora requires you to do whatever it takes to accomplish a product goal that's usually a top level metric. There are typically many approaches to tackling a product goal and consequently there are a wide variety of projects a product engineer can have. Product engineers are also expected to participate in all stages of product development including ideation, planning, implementation, iteration, and launch decisions for their projects.I was a product engineer at Quora for 3.5 years before transitioning to management and I've worked with fellow engineers, designers, data scientists, and product managers on some major product areas that I can go over below.GrowthI worked on the activation side of growth where the focus was on new user experience and activating new and stale users. Quora aims to personalize each user's experience to show relevant content through various channels like Home Feed and Digest emails, so there is consequently a cold-start problem— if you just signed up, how can we know what's interesting to you? The team was focused on understanding users' interests to help surface more relevant content to them.Projects typically required many iterative experiments where even the smallest changes like rephrasing a message can have surprisingly large wins. From running growth experiments, I had many learnings in product intuition, metrics analysis, and ROI evaluation.NotificationsI later switched my focus and owned the notifications platform, a full-stack abstraction that all product teams use to build in-product notifications, growl notifications, push notifications, and emails. My team was responsible for scaling both the technical abstraction and the product experience.On the technical front, the abstraction had been bandaged over time and fell into a state where it was difficult for teams to create new notifications or modify existing notifications. There were also some restrictions in the types of product behavior it could support such as the lack of aggregation and limited notification retraction. As a result, I led an abstraction rewrite and company-wide migration to allow teams to easily work with the notifications abstraction and to unlock opportunities for new product behavior.For scaling the product experience, there were many concerns about the channel becoming less usable as the community grew, especially the more active you were. Quora is an open network with a lot of evergreen content where any user can interact with your new and old content in various ways and subsequently can potentially trigger many notifications. The openness of Quora can easily make the channel too noisy. For example, it's not unusual for an active writer to get hundreds or thousands of upvotes in a day, but what is the ideal experience in this situation? Do we send each individually? Aggregate? Maybe filter to only show the most relevant upvoters? If we aggregate, what are the rules for when and how to aggregate? If we filter, how do we determine if the notification is relevant? With each of these approaches there are various technical and product challenges to consider, and I've gotten to work on many experiments related to aggregation, relevance, and filtering with interesting learnings.FeedI later joined Feed Product, a team with similarities to notifications in terms of owning a full-stack abstraction that powers many types of feeds (e.g., Home Feed, Topic Feed, etc.) that other product teams can build on top of. The product abstraction handles fetching personalized content from the ranking service, caching architecture, rendering, and logging of user actions to use as training data for our ranking models.On the technical front, similar to notifications before, the abstraction was undergoing a transition of a rewrite to unlock new product behavior and to better platformize so that any engineer or designer could more easily iterate on feed. Feed proved to have more complexities to navigate than notifications with challenges from a more complex product and more dependencies to handle such as the ranking service.For the user-facing side, I worked mostly on Home Feed when you visit quora.com. Home Feed has many different types of content to show with potentially competing but important interests, and only one page to present everything in a consumable manner. While ranking can help figure out what stories are relevant to the user, the product side focuses on how to best organize information to make finding relevant content easier, how to convey why a story is relevant, and how to give users opportunities to express positive and negative feedback so that Quora can further improve feed quality. This is oftentimes a collaboration between product and ranking teams to reach a holistic product experience goal.OffroadI'd also like to call out Offroad, Quora's week-long hackathon, where everyone gets the opportunity to form teams with folks and projects outside your usual team. Ideas can range from internal tooling to user-facing product changes and projects may be launched 100% after the hackathon or spawn a larger staffed project to further pursue the effort. Some example projects I worked on include code quality tooling, internal pokemon reward system for timely bug-squashing, the original Write Page, and LaTeX rendering.So in summary, product engineers are in the unique position to tackle many types of challenges at Quora due to their ability to blend product and technical perspectives. From the breadth of challenges they tackle, product engineers often times are generalists who can quickly jump into different types of problems. I'd want to emphasize though that there are many kinds of product engineering roles available at Quora, some that can also be on the more specialized end, including native mobile Android and iOS, front end, and general product engineering— all with the focus on creating great product.

Oliver Wyman takes its recruiting process seriously.One of the things I love most about working there is that there is very little ‘dead weight’ among the employees - consultants and support professionals (SPs) alike.Pretty much everyone is sharp and good at their job and motivated to excel.They don’t make it impossible to get rid of any ’bad apples’ that slip through the hiring process, either. If someone’s not pulling their weight or doesn’t have the go-get-it attitude that’s necessary for success at Oliver Wyman, they are rapidly coached up or coached out.I love this.All of that is to say this - the interview process at OW is lengthy, in-depth, and well-considered.A phone interview with someone from the recruiting team will probably start the process, just as an initial screening and to talk about the applicant’s resume as well as the position for which they are being considered.If that goes well, a phone conversation with the hiring manager (for support professionals) or a Principal or Partner (for consultants) is a likely next step. This is to start evaluating whether the applicant has the intelligence and drive we’re looking for and can string two sentences together.In-person interviews are multi-session and vary between consultants and SPs.Consultants might have two case interviews: one where they’re presenting to a group of three or four people, from Partners to Senior Associates, and one where they’re presenting one-on-one to a Principal or Partner.For these, the applicant is given a ‘case’ to study - basically a simple business problem for which they are tasked to find a solution or solutions.Say for example, “WalMart is considering opening a chain of high-end coffee shops inside their Super Centers. Determine whether this would be profitable and if it’s a good business decision or not.”The applicant can ask for a reasonable amount of data - “What would be the average price point of the coffee shops?” and “How many customers visit a Super Center on average per day?” for example - but they have to ask the questions; the data isn’t handed to them, and they must fill in the blanks for some things.Their thought process and how well they can articulate it is more important than whether they come up with the ‘correct’ answer or not.There will also be at least one fit interview, maybe two, one-on-one with whatever additional consultant is available and is helping with this interview session.The fit interviews are where we try to determine whether the applicant would be a good fit for the corporate culture in general and the office or practice culture for which they are being considered.Support Professionals will probably meet with as many Partners and Principles from the office as could be rounded up - two or three or four - for half an hour each. They will also have fit interviews with other SPs from that office and/or the department for which they are being considered.Right now we are recruiting for the ‘other’ Executive Assistant role in Houston; my partner in crime left me a couple of weeks ago. They are taking my input extremely seriously, since I have to sit next to and work very closely with this person on a daily basis - nobody will be hired for that position if I say I can’t work with them.I love this.After the interviews, each interviewer has an evaluation form to complete that correlates to the type of interview they did. (Human Capital has to chase everyone down and get them to submit these; this can be a chore sometimes.)Then the recruiting team, in cooperation with the Office Leader, Practice Leader, and/or hiring manager, makes a decision on whether the candidate has a place with Oliver Wyman in that particular role.If an offer is made and the applicant accepts, there is a lengthy background check that can take a week or more. OW does not do pre-employment (or random) drug testing that I’ve ever heard of.I love this.After the background check comes back, the applicant is called with the good news and a start date is determined. Oliver Wyman, in my experience, is quite flexible with start dates; by the time an offer is made we absolutely know we want someone to join us and it’s worth collaborating with the new employee to find what works best for them.On their first day of employment someone will probably take the new hire out for lunch. They will definitely be greeted with a warm welcome; that’s just how we roll.Guess what?I love this.

Why not make the students/participants play a game? This will help them to understand the present trend.Like YouIn this digital era, an attempt to motivate people to understand and experience Digital Marketing, ‘Like You’ persuades the participants to form teams and create a Facebook Page for a particular product and they go about doing marketing the page in a span of two days. Within these two days, they are supposed to get the maximum amount of likes for the page, inbound activities; page visits, etc., thereby comprehensively understanding the marketing analytics of a particular social media. The social media used need not be necessarily Facebook but requires only a single platform for the sake of evaluation of the teams.Through the game, many concepts can be taught. Here it isn't just theoretical knowledge, participants gain practical knowledge too.