Mentor Ring Chat Feb. 21

How to prepare for whiteboard challenges 📝

Mentors: KC, Roger, Betty, Lily

Mentees: Stephanie, Clare, Charlie, Annie

Rules of Thumb

Thinking like you are collaborating with your interviewers

• ask them questions like you are really working with them
• communicate what you wan
• can confirm current solutions or approaches with the interviewers before moving on to the next step. For example, asking them “What do you think?”, or “Is it okay for you if we do XYZ?”

They want to know your thinking process

• sometimes they give you challenges to see how you react and how you solve problems
• how you solve problems can be more related to the innate ability, but it can be trained
• If you are unfamiliar with that problem, just show them how you navigate thought the ambiguity, your thinking process matters

Develop a framework that works for you to solve problems

• everyone can have different approaches to solve whiteboard challenges

Asking questions to hone in on the direction

• design solutions don’t always need to be fancy, sometimes simple solutions work best because there can be tech or budget constraints

Icebreaker

How to warm up a whiteboard challenge and how to start to solve problems

5W1H framework

Who, why, what, when, where, how

AEIOU framework

A — Activities

E — Environments

I — Interactions

O — Objects

U — Users

3 circles: Users, Business, Technology

Roger: drawing 3 circles that represent Users, Business and Technology to start framing the problem space.

Value propositions

Betty: start solving problems based on values — business values, user values and social values

Practice

• Find a tool that works best for you
• real whiteboard, paper or digital tools such as Miro or Figma
• self-practice and record that with Zoom
• practice with friends to find different angles

Online Portfolio

For those who haven’t got the portfolio website ready or are finding project opportunities

Don’t be too long for each case study

• Betty: within 3 scrollings, can use some interactivity to hide or show contents
• Treating a portfolio as a product, find users to ask for feedback for and find out what they want to see
• Lily: can just show high-level insights on the online portfolio, and showing more in-depth thoughts and findings during the case study presentation to impress
• Roger: making a complete version, and only extract the 20% of it to showcase in the online portfolio, but share the 100% stunning version as a PDF if asked
• KC: making a linear version first, then prepare for a presentation slide to add storytelling, then tweak the portfolio based on the presentation

Know how to highlight

• The power of 3: keep highlights memorable and succinct
• Charlie: the ABC method derived from the dancing experience
• Roger: bottom-line-up-front (BLUF)approach to save time because hiring managers don’t have time

Collecting projects

• g0v: great resources to find projects to work on in Taiwan
• using online communities or forums to find projects to not only accumulate experiences but also get to work with different roles (PM, dev)