// Round 07 · 30–45 min · 20 credits
Product sense.
For product-minded engineers: who the user is, what to build first, and how you’d know it worked.
More engineering loops now include a product round, especially for senior, staff, founding, and product-engineer roles. It checks whether you can think about users and outcomes, not just implementation. Hardmode runs product-sense interviews grounded in the company’s actual product and domain from the job description, so you practise the conversation you are likely to have.
Scope
What this round covers
- Identifying users and the problem worth solving
- Prioritising a first version and cutting scope on purpose
- Defining success metrics and guardrail metrics
- Balancing product goals against engineering cost and risk
Session
How the session runs
01 —
A product prompt
Built from the company’s domain: improve a feature, design something new, or diagnose a metric.
02 —
Structured discussion
Users, problems, solutions, prioritisation, then measurement.
03 —
Constraints
The interviewer adds real-world limits: a deadline, a small team, a risky dependency.
Personalised
Fitted to you
Your CV
Draws on products you’ve worked on and the domain of the job. Optional, and you can switch it off for any session.
Your difficulty
- Easy: A friendly interviewer who wants you to do well.
- Medium: A fair, professional interviewer. What most interviews feel like.
- Hard: A proper grilling, like a big-tech bar-raiser loop.
Review
What your feedback covers
- Where you anchored on users, and where to bring them in sooner
- Your prioritisation reasoning, with ways to make it sharper
- Metrics that tracked the goal, and guardrails to pair with them
Detailed and supportive at every difficulty · No score, no verdict
Prep
Tips before you start
- Start with who the user is and what they are trying to do.
- Make one clear prioritisation call and defend it.
- Pair every success metric with a guardrail.
// Next round
The rest of the loop
// Player 1
Get ready for hard mode.
Paste the job you want. Run the loop until the real one feels like a rematch.
20 free credits · No card required