Welcome, friend. You are here because you are the kind of on-the-ball, organized, inspirational individual we need to join our team in Europe. You are a rare find and we are grateful to have your consideration.
As a way for us to see you in action, we have prepared a realistic exercise where you will orchestrate the creation of a new microsite. The exercise should take between 2 and 3 hours. If you hit 3 hours, we encourage you to stop and let us know, as we don’t want to waste your time.
You can complete the exercise whenever is convenient for you. You can do it all at once, or in chunks. Because it is not interactive, each stage may not make total sense with regard to the last. That’s OK. Roll with it and if something is too confusing, feel free to reach out to Hiba.
You will receive a $250 stipend to complete the exercise. If you do not feel that this is a fair stipend for your time, let us know and we can figure something out. We want you to feel fairly compensated for your effort, as if this was a real-world gig.
Once you agree to do the exercise, please complete it within one week.
At each stage we have provided light instructions for how to move forward. Our handbook provides guidance on the normal manner of communication we use at Cantilever, which you can certainly take into consideration, but we are also interested in seeing how you “naturally” do things. So please interpret the prompts however makes the most sense to you.
Please note that this exercise also puts you in some tricky spots. This is not intended to be a simulation of what it’s like to work here 😂 There are deliberate errors and gaps in the workflow which we want to see how you deal with.
Part One: Planning
You are a Project Manager at Cantilever. You receive the following email from the Head of Sales:
Dearest Colleague, We have been selected by Hasbro to create a microsite for My Little Pony! The microsite is intended to celebrate the final season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on Netflix. It should provide episode information, video clips, and encourage people to sign up for Hulu so they can watch the whole series. They want the design to match the look of the show, with lots of pastels and character illustrations. They have a budget of $10,000 and they want the microsite to be live in 30 days to coincide with the upcoming virtual PonyFest event happening exactly 30 days from today, which thousands of MLP fans will attend. During the sale process we worked with Sheila [A designer at Cantilever] to put together an estimate for them. That is attached to this email. Please email her with any questions you may have, atty+designer@tyfujimura.comThe client, Ty, is ready to kick off any time next week. Would you mind reaching out to him? The client can be reached atty+client@tyfujimura.com. Be careful, the client is not very technical and doesn’t understand the web very well. Finally, the SOW we signed is attached as well. Please review it and get back to me with any questions or concerns you may have. Let me know if you need anything else from me in order to start. You can email me atty+sales@tyfujimura.comBest, Leandro Head of Sales @ Cantilever Pronouns: He/Him
You have a direct report, Mo. Mo is a junior PM who joined us as an apprentice. He is working under you this quarter to try and gain experience. You may want to get him involved or ask him to handle something. Mo’s email is ty+junior@tyfujimura.com
Attachments
| Name | Hours | Working Days |
|---|---|---|
12 | 5 | |
8 | 3 | |
8 | 5 | |
24 | 20 | |
8 | 1 |
Actions
- Follow up as you deem appropriate with all of the parties whose email addresses you have access to
- Take some notes on what you would do next in this project, and email them to
ty@cantilever.co
Part Two: Post-Launch
Congrats! Thanks to your hard work, the site launched on time and everyone at PonyFest was thrilled. The client was super happy and grateful for everything you and the team did to pull it off.
While you were reviewing the site, you also noticed that there was a mistake made during development. When clicking "follow us on Twitter", instead of leading to the Client’s twitter page, instead the site is pointing to the Twitter account for Kam (pronouns: they/their), our developer. Oops. Kam seems to have a bunch of new MLP-related followers even though they mostly tweet about vintage N64 games.
Kam is one of your reports. You have been working with them on their accuracy because they made another bad mistake on a project last month. You have given them positive feedback lately that they dealt with those situations and seemed to be turning a corner.
While you are diagnosing that problem, you get the following email:
Thanks a lot for everything you did with the MLP microsite. We wanted to add a few new videos from PonyFest and update the text. I just emailed Kam asking where I needed to go in order to add content to the website, and he told me that I don’t have the ability to add content myself but I have to go through you. We don’t have any additional budget to add content and I thought I would be able to change the content on the site like with our existing main MLP site. Can you take care of these additions for us? I have attached a word document with the updated text and links to new YouTube videos we just published.
Actions
- Write back to the client regarding the content changes. Write any additional internal emails you may want to send in order to resolve the situation.
- Write back to whomever seems appropriate about the bug in the code.
- Note any additional next steps you would want to take, and email a list to
ty@cantilever.co - Send your payment information and preference (check/paypal/Zelle) to
hiba@cantilever.co