Scheduled for 1 hour interview with recruiter. Recruiter was well versed in company, culture & job responsibilities. Interview validated my interest in the company & gave me a salary range and expectations of skills & mkt. knowledge. They wanted to schedule phone interview with a mgr. and I gave them my availability. I didn't receive a confirmation of time or info on who I would be speaking to. Apparently their email app. and server created the issue. Got a call from a mgr. who apologized for being a few min. late. I was surprised because no one let me know he would be calling. He was gracious and told me he would talk to the recruiter and get it rescheduled. I was willing to do it then but he said he didn't want to me in the position of having a "fly by" interview with no chance to prepare. The recruiter got back to me & scheduled the interview for the next week. Great interview with VP. We shared a common view of the potential & approach for the product. I was enthused. I gained insight into the co. The process, as it was originally described, would have panel interviews and come back and do a presentation from material they would provide. They confirmed the panel interview and told me I would be receiving the project information prior to the interview. This confirmation came on a Tue. and the interviews were scheduled for the following Tue. I didn't receive the project info until Friday. The project req. were concise and indicated their interest was in how I evaluated the info. not in the accuracy. The Dir. that created the project said he'd be available to answer questions & that I should feel free to "reach out" if I had questions. I spent most of Friday looking at competition, Baaarvoice prods. and white papers. The target for their prods. don't have a significant interest in technology so no technology info available online. I called my resource, ask for more info on the specifics of the tech. and implementation, didn't get any substantial info. I was again reminded to reach out if I had questions. The time I had to work on the presentation was the weekend, I put together a presentation that was geared to showing the process involved in addressing the issues indicated by the project. The project had 4 parts and in all aspects I've had a a lot of experience preparing & presenting. Build a business case for building this new product How would you make this product a differentiator to clients and how would I pitch it? Pick a Post-deployment use case or 1 of my own, show them how I would communicate desired solution to the dev. team. What is the program or go to market strategy for the product? I created a presentation with the essence of what was asked for. It wasn't the quality of presentation I would normally provide. Normally you would have background on the companies dev. process, ROI perspective, cost, cust. input, and competitive info. Without that info you can't provide any real business case. I indicated where the savings and sales benefits were but couldn't quantify them with any accuracy. In terms of differentiation, I presented the value of the solution in relationship to a real world case. I defined the use case and presented an approach for dev. but with no knowledge of their actual technology, dev. practices, or perspective on build versus buy. I provided a market strategy that described the approach & players to involve that was consistent with every mkt strategy I've ever seen or been involved with. It was generic but provided the essence of the approach. I failed. They were disappointed that I didn't "reach out" & get specific info from the Dir. coordinating the exercise. The exercise was supposed to be about the approach & thought process, not accuracy. As it turns out the most important aspect of is to see if you will "reach out" and work with others to get more info. To succeed: Insure you insist on the full week that they usually allocate for this exercise. I was motivated to take this on over a weekend and not during business hours. I didn't want to wait in line again to get the interview setup. It was a painful process because of the number of people they had to schedule on their end. Ignore the emphasis on this exercise being about how you would approach it. The how, is oriented to how you would interact with your resource, not how you deal with the specific problem. Remember the drill doesn't change whether you just got out of school or you've been doing it for years. Go into this realizing it's time consuming, ask for specific measurement criteria. Not everything is as it seems. I have no hard evidence that if you're not between mid-20s and late 30s you have little chance of being hired. Take a look at the pics on the Glass Door page for Bazaarvoice. Look for the oldest person you can find. Maybe they just don't want their picture taken.