Product Case Interview Breakdown

My long term question in product interviews has been - "you're tasked with building a ride sharing solution for individuals under 18 - how would you go about it?"

I saw this weekend Uber released ride sharing options for 13-17 year old teens in California, marking it as a good time to find a new interview question, and share the points I asked about and what I was looking for in this article, hope it may help any product managers out there prepping for interviews!

1. What would be the audience segment/age group you would target?

The answer I was looking for was 12/13-17. Reasoning:

• It is easier to go to the groups closer to the ones you serve with your current product in terms of pain points and resulting solutions.
• It is better to start tackling the easiest problem with the highest chance of success (and serving younger kids is a tougher problem with many more challenges).
• You want to narrow your group and not keep it too wide in the 6-17 range to not have to solve many different problems at once, but also not making it too narrow in the 16-17 range to have enough TAM to make it worth while the investment.
• You don't want to start with a product that has a massive safety risk associated with small kids.
• You don't want age gaps that may brake your service, i.e. if you choose 12-15, and you're not serving 16-17 these members wont be able to continue using the product they signed up for as they grow.

Answers I got here that didnt hit the right segmentation are:

• "12-15, since at 16-17 you can already get your license and drive or take the bus." While true, Ride sharing apps serve everyone over 18 who may have a license as well, that clearly hasn't been a show stopper as they proved there's strong demand for the service.
• "Younger aged kids who can't take public transportation, etc." Risk here is too large and you'd want to start with the groups closer in characteristics to the audience you serve since the complexity of needs of younger kids and the risk is much greater.

2. What are the pain points of the audience you're serving you need to take into account?

Most PMs got this portion right, however, they usually got it right for 1 or 2 sides of the marketplace, where in-fact, there are 3 personas in this specific marketplace who all need to be thought through: the teenager, the parent, and the driver.

Each of them has a key role in creating the marketplace liquidity and flywheel for this product to work, and identifying you're solving for a marketplace that has different challenges on all sides is a key skill PMs have to think through all the time.

3. What metrics you'd prioritize to track to understand how the initiative is going.

This question is designed to understand analytical skills, 'dive deep', and whether the interviewee has commercial sense (thinks of business outcomes as well).

Key groups of metrics I'm looking to hear about belong to all 3 personas in the marketplace, cover cold start, engagement, repeat usage, breadth (number of users) and depth (number of rides), member sentiment (reviews/NPS), and commercial results (Avg price / Revenue / Profit). The most common miss in this Q outside of not going into depth is I learned many PMs don't have revenue as top of mind, but as someone else's problem and miss covering it, which may be a reflection of past roles / responsibilities. Whatever you do as a PM - understanding the bottom line to the business matters, and for 'for profit' businesses, the bottom line is Revenue. Its critical to understand how it moves and how to influence it so you can grow it.

4. The CEO would like to have one dashboard with one metric to see how this business is doing on a weekly cadence, what would be the one metric you'd show them?

This question is testing the ability to understand the bigger picture (what does the company optimize for overall in this initiative), commercial and analytical sense. Surprisingly this question also had the most misses in my interviews. The answer I'm looking for is number of Completed Rides or Revenue - both work (as its a newly launched product, where at later stages Revenue becomes number 1), as a reflection of growth over time that represents matching of supply and demand - the overall goal.

Answers I often got that missed this are:

• Avg rides per member - goal here goes to examine repeat usage, and that's an important metric at the team level, but if you have to choose just one for the CEO to track weekly - that might miss the mark since it may not be sensitive enough to move frequently (i.e. maybe its 1.3 for quite a while), and mostly, its not a holistic representation of the business's growth.
• NPS / Average Rating - Also important, but may not be fast to movement, and also misses the mark on not being the #1 metric.
• Unique Riders - breadth and riders is indeed critical for growth and should be a top line metric, but if you have to choose only one - you want the bottom line (Revenue) or as close to it as possible (Completed Rides), and number of riders without knowing avg number of rides per rider doesn't provide that by itself.

5. Why didn't a ride sharing app launch this until now?

The right answer here is prioritization. Its a complex problem that has 3 and not 2 sides to its marketplace, where safety is a massive concern, on top of regulation considerations and PR risks. Among all things a company can do, its likely a good grow opportunity and strategic lever to appeal to audiences younger in their life-cycle, but not a top priority for a business early on in its cycle to tackle. However, given I have been asking this question for quite a few years now, that time in the cycle has now come (congrats to the team that launched it, whoever you are! :)

I'm in the hunt for new interview questions - let me know if you have recommendations!

#productmanagement #leadership #growth #productgrowth

Opinions are my own only!