The Product Case 25 Top Case Studies & Solutions (A placement preparation guide to help you prepare for product case interviews) Meet Our Team (This book is a collection of the top weekend challenges conducted by PM School along with the winning solutions) Foreword Index 1. HobbyMatch (Hypothetical App) Case Study 2. Eatsure Case Study 3. Khatabook Case Study - IIT-KGP Challenge 4. Dream11 Case Study - BITS-Goa Challenge 5. Meesho Case Study 6. BookMyShow Case Study 7. BigBus (Hypothetical Product) Case Study 8. Nearbuy Case Study - IIFT Challenge 9. OkCredit Case Study - IIT-B Challenge 10. Aarogya Setu Case Study - BITS-Hyderabad Challenge 11. Mento Case Study - IIT Ropar Challenge 12. Bewakoof.com Case Study 13. Indiahikes Case Study 14. StepSetGo Case Study 15. OYO for Salons Case Study 16. LinkedIn Case Study 17. OLX Case Study 18. LinkedIn for Kids Case Study 19. WhatsApp Case Study 20. Splitwise Case Study 21. Uber Case Study - Expert Solution 22. Revolut Case Study - Expert Solution 23. EA Games Case Study - Expert Solution 24. Flipkart APM Deck - Uber - Expert Solution 25. Flipkart APM Deck - Expert Solution HobbyMatch (Hypothetical App) Case Study As the name suggests, HobbyMatch connects you to teachers for a hobby you want to pursue in your vicinity. For e.g., if you wish to learn guitar, you will be matched with guitar teachers in your area. You have decided to launch a Minimum Viable Product. For the MVP :1. Find out how big is the market opportunity 2. Provide neatly drawn wireframes for the MVP (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) 3. What will be the Tech stack for the MVP? (if you research online, you will be able to figure this out) 4. Provide a well-defined Go-To-Market Strategy Winning Solution by Shama Mohammad 2.Eatsure Case Study Problem Statement: You’ve been onboarded as a Product Manager at EatSure. As of now, an average user has the 2 most common food ordering apps on her phone, i.e., Zomato and Swiggy. A considerable proportion of orders of all cloud kitchen companies like Rebel Foods, etc. are processed via both these apps. An average user still prefers using Zomato or Swiggy despite cloud kitchen companies having their own respective food ordering apps. As a strategic decision maker, you have to work towards building product solutions to drive repeat purchase behaviour (Retention) on EatSure. Describe your chosen solutions and the value proposition to the end user. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain the feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Identify the goal that you are trying to achieve • Describe how the solution facilitates the goal • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Nishant Srivastava 3. Khatabook Case Study - IIT-KGP Challenge Problem Statement: You have recently joined as a PM at Dukaan by Khatabook. You observed that the users (i.e., small business owners) are able to create a shop easily but are able to sell only a fraction of the inventory they’ve put up on their respective shop. Hence, 80% users leave the platform after the first 15 days of creating their first shop. As a PM, you have to enable the users to sell more. By selling more, a user will trust the platform more. Hence, stick around longer on the platform. Also, selling more means more revenues for Dukaan. Suggest 3 new features that can be added which will help increase selling via Dukaan. Describe your suggested features and their respective value proposition both to the user (seller) and to the end customer. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain each feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Describe how these feature facilitates the goal of enabling the sellers to sell more • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Aditya Saha & Shraman Pal 4.Dream11 Case Study - BITS-Goa Challenge Problem Statement: You have recently joined as a PM at Dream11. You observe that in the fantasy sports category, a considerable amount of marketing budget goes in acquiring new users and converting them into real-money users. A user is defined as “converted” when he plays his first real-money (cash) contest. You’ve been entrusted with the job of increasing the conversion rate, i.e., the number of people playing their first cash contest out of the users who sign-up. Suggest 3 new Product solutions which will help increase the conversion rate. Avoid suggesting UI improvements or marketing solutions like push notification, mailers, etc. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain each feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Describe how these solutions facilitate the goal of increasing the conversion rate • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Kushagra Agarwal & Aseem Juneja 5.Meesho Case Study Problem Statement: You have recently joined as a PM at Meesho. You have observed that 60% users (i.e., resellers) leave the platform after the first 7 days of doing their first sale. As a PM, you have to enable the resellers to sell more. Selling more means more revenue for Meesho. Also, by selling more, a reseller will trust the platform more. Hence, stick around longer on the platform. Suggest 2 new big features that can be added which will help increase selling via Meesho. We’d recommend not suggesting UX/UI improvements or marketing solutions like sending notifications, etc. Instead, think of the next big thing! Describe your suggested features and their respective value proposition both to the user (reseller) and to the end customer. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain each feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Describe how these feature facilitates the goal of enabling the resellers to sell more • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Shoaib Hussain 6.BookMyShow Case Study Weekend Challenge Background: BookMyShow is the largest ticketing platform in India. The main source of business for BMS is events/tickets sales. Due to Covid, this category is not doing well. Also, multiplexes and concerts don’t seem to be resuming any time soon. BMS is planning initiatives to remain relevant to the user in the current times. Problem Statement As a PM, you must come up with changes in the product. List out improvements in existing features or suggest new features that can be added. Provide a name and a 2-sentence description for each solution. Select the highest value solution that you can identify that would help. Describe your chosen feature and its value proposition both to the user and to BookMyShow. Winning Solution by Ananya Nandan 7.BigBus (Hypothetical Product) Case Study You recently joined as the first PM at BigBus, an online bus booking platform. BigBus is like an OYO for inter-city bus travel in India, basically giving a predictable and standardized bus journey experience to the user. As the PM, your task is to reach the Product Market Fit in the near future. 1. What is the Total Addressable Market for your Product? 2. What are the features/value propositions which will go in your MVP? (Kindly detail/spec out the ideas along with wireframes and feel free to add flow charts or state diagrams as required). 3. How will you acquire the first 1000 users for BigBus? Winning Solution by Ashwin Shrivastava 8. Nearbuy Case Study - IIFT Challenge You’ve been onboarded as a product owner for Nearbuy. As a strategic decision maker, you have to work towards building a USP for your product so as to achieve any one of the following goals: • User Acquisition • User Engagement/Retention As a product owner, you must come up with changes in the product. List out improvements in existing features or suggest new features that can be added. Provide a name and a 2-sentence description for each feature. Select the highest value feature that you can identify that would help. Describe your chosen feature and its value proposition both to the user and to the Nearbuy product. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain the feature in detail • Identify the goal that you are trying to achieve. • Describe how this feature facilitates this goal • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Ananya Nandan & Munmun Mohanty 9. OkCredit Case Study - IIT-B Challenge Problem Statement: You have joined as a PM at OkShop. You observe that out of the users who sign-up, only 40% create their shop and only 2% are able to sell for the first time from the shop they created, i.e., the conversion rate is 2%. You’ve been entrusted with the task of increasing the conversion rate for OkShop. Suggest 3 Product solutions which will help you achieve it. Avoid marketing solutions like SEO, push notifications, email, SMS, etc. and minor changes in the UI. Describe your suggested features and their respective value proposition. Please ensure that you:• Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain each feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Describe how these feature facilitates the goal to be achieved • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Mrigi Munjal & Puneet Shrivas 10. Aarogya Setu Case Study - BITS-Hyderabad Challenge With the easing of lockdown and with people gradually accepting the new normal, concern about Covid is decreasing. Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) on Aarogya Setu are going down. With the number of cases in India still increasing, it makes sense to keep visiting the app and practice caution. You’ve joined Aarogya Setu as a Product Manager. Problem Statement: You’ve been entrusted with the task of keeping Aarogya Setu relevant to the population of India. Think of Product solutions to sustain/improve engagement during the new normal and also post Covid. Feel free to think of use cases beyond Covid. Can Aarogya Setu become the go-to health platform by the Government? Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts • Explain each solution in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Kashish Bulani & Shivangi Prasad 11. Mento Case Study - IIT Ropar Challenge Problem Statement: You’ve been onboarded as a Product Manager for Mento. As a strategic decision maker, you have to work towards building a USP for your product so as to achieve any one of the following goals: • User Acquisition • User Engagement/Retention As a PM, you must come up with changes in the product. List out improvements in existing features or suggest new features that can be added. Provide a name and a 2-sentence description for each solution. Select the highest value solution that you can identify that would help. Describe your chosen feature and its value proposition both to the user and to the Mento product. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain the feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Identify the goal that you are trying to achieve • Describe how this feature facilitates this goal • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning solution by Pranshu Garg 12. Bewakoof.com Case Study Problem Statement: You’ve been onboarded as a Product Manager for Bewakoof. As a strategic decision maker, you have to work towards building a USP for your product so as to achieve any one of the following goals: • User Acquisition • User Engagement/Retention. As a PM, you must come up with changes in the product. Provide a name and a 2-sentence description for your solutions. Select the highest value solution that you can identify that would help. Describe your chosen feature and its value proposition to the end user. Please ensure that you: • Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain the feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) • Identify the goal that you are trying to achieve • Describe how this feature facilitates the goal • Identify metrics that would help you measure whether a feature is achieving its goal or not • Identify metrics that may be negatively impacted and explain how you would monitor them Winning Solution by Shoaib Hussain 13. Indiahikes Case Study You’ve recently joined as the Head of Product at a trekking company IndiaHikes, which organises treks across India. You are able to convince the management to launch a mobile app. Your task is to build the MVP in the near future. 1. What is the Total Addressable Market for your Product? (Think user persona you’ll launch with) 2. What are the features/value propositions which will go in your MVP? (Kindly detail/spec out the ideas along with wireframes and feel free to add flow charts or state diagrams as required) 3. What will be your monetisation model? (Organising trek is one monetisation model. What could be the other categories?) Winning Solution by Ananya Nandan Winning Solution 14. StepSetGo Case Study Problem Statement: StepSetGo has been experiencing drop offs for users after sign ups. This means users download the app, signup and have the first session on the app but then never come back to the app. Assume that you have acquired the right users on the application. So, this is not an acquisition targeting problem. But due to some reason, users do not come back. Also, this is not to be thought of as a technical implementation problem. Almost 35℅ of the new users drop off on day 1 and do not return the next day. This number falls down further and we have only 20% of the users still retained after day 2. Looking at the current product experience, could you come up with solutions on how could these drop offs be reduced? Please note that these numbers are hypothetical. You could suggest new features. You could also study a few competitors to see if there are any best practices which could be adopted for the first few days on a user coming onboard. Winning Solution by Ayushi Joshi 15. OYO for Salons Case Study You joined as the first PM at a company which plans to launch an OYO for salons. 1. As a PM, find out how big is the market for this opportunity? (Guesstimate) 2. What are the features/value proposition you’ll be launching your product with? (Kindly detail/spec out the ideas along with wireframes and feel free to add flow charts or state diagrams as required) 3. What will be the key metrics you plan to track for your Product? Winning Solution by Jay Prakash 16. LinkedIn Case Study Problem statement LinkedIn wants to eat Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter's lunch in terms of getting people to spend more time on LinkedIn and have higher engagement there. Research shows that the total amount of time a user will spend on these 5 platforms is fixed and hence the only way LinkedIn can increase engagement and time spent on their platform is by eating into the amount of time people spend in these 4 other platforms. Questions 1. If you were the Head of Products at LinkedIn, how would you have approached this problem? 2. What all engagement levers or products would you have built in LinkedIn and why? 3. Please define your hypotheses and then come up with the wireframes showing what the new LinkedIn should be 4. If you had to articulate how much improvement will happen in engagement and retention numbers due to these additions/changes how will you arrive at those numbers Winning Solution by Vamshi Krishna Maganti 17. OLX Case Study In this exercise, you are the Product Manager for OLX and have been asked to improve the First Time User Experience to reduce drop-offs in the initial stage of a user’s lifecycle and increase the core actions on the app. ● What customer pain points are not being well served during the FTUE? ● Come up with at least 2 proposed Product solutions to improve FTUE. How would you measure success? ○ Provide UI mocks/flow charts and explain the feature in detail (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) Think of Product solutions. For e.g., if a new user wants to sell on OLX, showing her how much money other users made by selling items on OLX serves as a social proof for her to take the core action. (For OLX, the FTUE starts from app install and ends when the user browses items for the first time on the app. The core actions of OLX are buying and selling items near you. We want you to consider how OLX serves new customers who are not yet familiar with the service. ) Winning Solution by Prakhar Agarwal 18. LinkedIn for Kids Case Study Problem statement LinkedIn wants to eat Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter's lunch in terms of getting people to spend more time on LinkedIn and have higher engagement there. Research shows that the total amount of time a user will spend on these 5 platforms is fixed and hence the only way LinkedIn can increase engagement and time spent on their platform is by eating into the amount of time people spend in these 4 other platforms. Questions 1. If you were the Head of Products at LinkedIn, how would you have approached this problem? 2. What all engagement levers or products would you have built in LinkedIn and why? 3. Please define your hypotheses and then come up with the wireframes showing what the new LinkedIn should be 4. If you had to articulate how much improvement will happen in engagement and retention numbers due to these additions/changes how will you arrive at those numbers Winning Solution by Manali Sinha 19. WhatsApp Case Study You’ve recently joined WhatsApp as a Product Manager. WhatsApp is planning to get into “Dukaan-Tech” by leveraging its existing platform. The idea is to empower small business owners by helping them create online shops, order placement, customer support, etc. You’ve been entrusted with the job of building a Weekend Challenge for the same. Please do the following for the MVP 1. Find out how big is the market opportunity for this 2. Provide neatly drawn wireframes (Balsamiq/Figma wireframes preferred) Winning Solution by Priyanka Mahipala 20. Splitwise Case Study Every Product has a North Star Metric. NSM is the metric which everyone in a company is rallying around to improve. For Splitwise, the North Star is “No. of transactions posted”. You’ve joined Splitwise as a PM. You have to improve “No. of transactions posted” on Splitwise. You can improve it by acquiring more users or by improving the retention of the users. Problem Statement : Write a Product Requirement Document (PRD) covering 2 Product solutions to improve the North Star Metric for Splitwise. Choose any of the following templates for writing PRD Template 1 Template 2 Winning Solution by Akshay Jadhav 21. Uber Case Study - Expert Solution Raj lives in the suburbs of Bangalore with his wife and two kids. He wakes up at 6 in the morning drops his kids at school at 8 am and then starts his job. He drives for a cab aggregator and his day ends at approximately 9 pm each night. He makes gross earnings of Rs. 8000 per week while his costs included Rs. 3000 as weekly finance charges and an additional Rs. 2000/week for fuel, maintenance and insurance. If the minimum net weekly earnings that a semi-skilled labourer is making in Bangalore is Rs. 13000, so the driver partner should be making at least Rs. 15000/month to ensure that this VS solution is sustainable for the driver. What product solution be to bring in this additional revenue. Please detail out all the assumptions that you are making (if any) and provide a solid business case on the model that you are building. List out the pros and cons of the proposed solution. Contributed by Prajney Sribhashyam 22. Revolut Case Study - Expert Solution The purpose of the take home task is to help us understand how you think and approach some of the day to day challenges you’ll face in the Product Manager/Owner role at Revolut. ● It’s understood that you’d normally be working as part of a team, so will have to make some assumptions and will likely have follow-up questions. We ask that you call those out where appropriate. ● We understand that everyone is busy, so we ask that you aim to submit the task in a week’s time. The goal is to gain insight into how you think and your skills as a Product Manager Revolut’s budgeting feature helps people plan and manage their spending. We feel the first version could have been better. The initial designs can be found in PDF attached. The task is to re-envision the budgeting feature - suggest alternative approaches, identify missing features and shortcomings in the user experience based on problems and opportunities you’ve identified. Note, this is not the most current version of the feature, so please base your answer on the design provided. 1. Identify problems or improvements you’ve found. Why do you think they are important? 2. How would you solve them? Please provide flows or designs, we’d like to understand how you see the full customer journey. Wireframes are fine 3. How would you deliver them? Specify a roadmap/prioritization and why you’ve chosen the order you have 4. How would you measure success? Define metrics for your deliverables 5. For reasons beyond your control, you are 3 weeks behind schedule and there is a hard deadline for delivery (e.g. PR campaign that’s been committed to). What changes would you make and why? How would you manage communication around this? Contributed by Prajney Sribhashyam 23. EA Games Case Study - Expert Solution • • • • • Contributed by Prajney Sribhashyam 24. Flipkart APM Deck - Uber - Expert Solution Flipkart APM Tell us of a problem with a product which bothers you. •How would you use technology to solve the problem? •Propose more than one potential solution (max 3) •Compare and choose the best solution for the problem •How would you measure whether the chosen solution is working? •What might be the reason for this chosen solution to fail? Contributed by Prithvisankar 25. Flipkart APM Deck – Swiggy Expert Solution Flipkart APM Tell us of a problem with a product which bothers you. •How would you use technology to solve the problem? •Propose more than one potential solution (max 3) •Compare and choose the best solution for the problem •How would you measure whether the chosen solution is working? •What might be the reason for this chosen solution to fail? Contributed by Saurabh Bhatia Apply for the PM School program on pmschool.io Reach out to us on pmschool@hey.com ! Thank you for reading!
