The Live Problem Interview
Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 86%
Idiodi's single favourite interview question is not a question but a novel, non-traditional problem handed to the candidate live, in the room, with no take-home time and no right answer. The point is not the solution: it's to observe how they think, whether they reach for other people, whether they know what they don't know, and how they behave when they have no clue.
Origin
Christian Idiodi's own hiring practice, built on his conviction that collaborative problem solving — not solo brilliance — is the core competence of a product manager.
Core principles
- 01There is no magical right or wrong answer — the process is the signal.
- 02Collaborative problem solving beats individual problem solving; look for the candidate who names the designer, the engineer, the community they'd pull in.
- 03'I have no clue what to do' is not a failing answer — what they do NEXT is the answer.
- 04Competence can be coached; arrogance and ego cannot, and they are destructive to team culture.
- 05Candidates who instantly reach for a framework may be married to one way of working.
How to run it
- 1
Construct a novel, non-obvious problem
Pick a problem the candidate cannot have prepared for and cannot look up. Idiodi's example: a friend who has been legally blind and hearing-impaired his whole life just took a job requiring him to wake up much earlier — traditional alarm clocks won't work.
Pro tip Novelty matters more than difficulty. The problem must be unrehearsable.
- 2
Run it live, not as a take-home
Ask them to walk you through how they'd tackle it, in real time. The unpolished thinking is the data; a take-home hides exactly what you want to see.
- 3
Score the reach, not the answer
Look for: intellectual curiosity and good questions; explicit awareness of what they don't know; naming who they'd need (engineer, designer, the affected community); willingness to say they need help. Note the anti-signals: jumping straight to a solution with no evidence, or insisting they'd solve it alone.
Pro tip A great probe is whether they realise they can't just 'talk to 20 of them' if the users are deaf-blind — do they catch their own assumption?
Watch out Candidates who jump straight to solutions skew engineering-centric; candidates who run instantly to a named framework may be inflexible.
- 4
Weight empathy and humility as hard requirements
Treat arrogance, ego and 'I walk alone' energy as disqualifying, because they are disruptive to team culture and cannot be coached out — whereas most competence gaps can be.
In the wild
Idiodi tells the candidate about a friend who has been legally blind and hearing-impaired his whole life and has taken a job requiring a much earlier wake-up. Traditional alarm clocks obviously won't solve it. He asks the candidate to walk him through tackling it, live.
→ The responses split cleanly: solution-jumpers with no data (engineering-centric), framework-reachers (rigid), candidates who blithely say 'I'll talk to 20 of them' and then catch themselves ('how am I going to talk to them?'), and candidates who say they'd need a lot of help but know the community to start with — the last group is what he's hiring for.
Common mistakes
Grading the solution
There is no right answer. Rewarding a clever solution selects for people who perform confidence rather than people who navigate uncertainty well with a team.
Penalising 'I don't know'
Idiodi is actively more curious about candidates who admit they have no clue — because he then gets to see what they do when they don't have a clue, which is most of the real job.
Hiring competent arrogance
Skills can be coached; ego and lone-wolf behaviour are very challenging and disruptive to a team culture, and they don't get better with training.
Is it for you?
Best for
Hiring managers screening product manager candidates, especially where the pool has polished framework answers and you need to see raw thinking.
Not ideal for
Roles where the job genuinely is deterministic execution of a known craft, or interview processes with legal constraints on unstructured questions.
From the transcript
“I always give them a problem to solve that is probably my favorite question and it's not a traditional problem”
“it gives me a sense of how you think it gives me a sense of how you solve problems it gives me a sense of…”
“or people that jump straight to Solutions are more engineering Centric”
“I'm looking for empathy humility in some sense it is a competence thing because most of I can teach I can coach a lot of…”
From the episode
The essence of product management
Christian Idiodi (SVPG)