product management case study for interview

Hacking the Case Interview

Have an upcoming product manager case study interview and don’t know how to prepare or answer these challenging case study questions?

In this comprehensive article, we’ll show you an intuitive, robust way to crush your product manager case study interviews even if you have no prior business or product experience.   We’ll also share with you the exact resources to learn product manager case study interviews the fastest way possible.

If you find this article helpful, you’ll love our product manager interview book . It’ll teach you how to answer 98% of every possible type of product manager interview question you could get asked in just a few hours of reading.

What is a Product Manager Case Study Interview?

A product manager case study interview is a 15 to 45-minute interview in which you are placed in a hypothetical business situation and asked to strategize, design, improve, or grow a particular product. It is a special type of interview question used to evaluate candidates in all product roles.

A product manager case study interview begins with the interviewer giving you a broad, ambiguous business or product question. Examples of questions you may see include:

• How would you design a product that does a particular function or serve a particular purpose?
• How would you improve a particular product?
• How would you improve sales for a particular product?
• How should we respond to the actions of a competitor?
• Is there a company we should consider acquiring?
• Should we enter a new market?

Typically, companies will ask these questions for a particular product that the company sells. However, companies may use other, more well-known products instead if their products are too technical, complicated, or obscure.

What are the Different Types of Product Manager Case Study Interviews?

There are four major types of product manager case study interview questions: product design, product improvement, product growth, and product strategy questions.

Product Design Case Study Interview

Product design case study interviews ask how you would design a particular product or service. Examples of product design case study questions include:

How would you design an alarm clock for the blind?

• How would you design a smart refrigerator that helps users reduce food waste?
• How would you design a mobile application for children to learn a new language?
• How would you design a user-friendly interface for a voice-controlled virtual assistant device?
• How would you design an interactive museum exhibit to engage visitors in learning about ancient civilizations?

Product Improvement Case Study Interview

Product improvement case study interviews ask how you would improve an existing product or service. Examples of product improvement case study questions include:

• How would you improve the iPhone?
• How would you improve Google Maps?
• How would you improve Spotify?
• How would you improve the microwave?
• How would you improve the check-in process at a hotel?

Product Growth Case Study Interview

Product growth case study interviews ask how you would grow sales for an existing product or service. Examples of product growth case study questions include:

• How would you increase the number of Netflix subscribers?
• How would you increase the number of daily active users on Instagram?
• How would you increase customer engagement on Tik Tok?
• How would you increase revenue for LinkedIn?
• How would you increase profit for Amazon?

Product Strategy Case Study Interview

Product strategy case study interviews ask how you would make strategic business decisions regarding a product, service, or for the company overall. Examples of important strategic decisions include:

• Deciding how to respond to a competitor
• Deciding how to price a product
• Deciding whether to acquire another company
• Deciding whether to enter a new market
• Deciding whether to launch a new product

Why Do Companies Use Product Manager Case Study Interviews?

Companies use product manager case study interviews to simulate problems that product managers face daily, evaluate how candidates think, and predict on-the-job success.

1. Simulate challenges that product managers face daily

Product manager case studies closely simulate the problems that product managers face in their role. By presenting candidates with real world scenarios, companies gain valuable insight into how candidates react when faced with a challenging, ambiguous, or broad problem.

These simulations provide a glimpse into how the candidate may actually perform as a product manager. Through product manager case study interviews, companies assess candidates' readiness to tackle the diverse array of challenges inherent in product management roles, ensuring they possess the necessary skills and mindset to excel.

2. Evaluate how candidates think

Conducting product manager case study interviews allows companies to evaluate not only what candidates know, but also how they think. By presenting candidates with hypothetical scenarios or problems to solve, companies gain insight into their thought processes, analytical abilities, and approach to decision making.

This assessment goes beyond assessing technical knowledge or specific skill sets, focusing instead on candidates' problem solving capabilities, creativity, and critical thinking skills.

3. Predict on the job success

Product manager case study interviews play a pivotal role in predicting candidates' on-the-job success by providing a glimpse into their ability to apply their knowledge and skills in practical contexts.

By evaluating candidates' performance in simulated scenarios relevant to the role, companies can gauge their potential to drive product success, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and deliver tangible outcomes.

Candidates that do well in product manager case study interviews signal a readiness to tackle the challenges of product management, minimizing hiring risks and increasing confidence in their ability to contribute meaningfully to the company’s objectives.

What Do Product Manager Case Study Interviews Assess?

Product manager case study interviews assess: problem solving skills, communication skills, product vision and strategy, creativity and innovation, and industry knowledge and expertise.

Problem solving skills

Product manager case study interviews quickly assess a candidate's problem solving skills. These case studies simulate real world challenges, allowing hiring managers to observe how candidates approach complex problems, break them down into manageable components, and develop viable solutions.

By evaluating a candidate's ability to think critically, creatively, and analytically, companies gain insight into their capacity to navigate the different challenges faced as a product manager.

Communication skills

Effective communication is a crucial skill for product managers who must interact with diverse stakeholders across an organization. Product manager case study interviews provide an opportunity to evaluate a candidate's ability to articulate their thoughts clearly, convey complex ideas succinctly, and engage stakeholders effectively.

Strong communicators can convey product vision compellingly, aligning stakeholders around a shared objective. They can build rapport and trust, facilitating seamless teamwork and driving successful product outcomes.

Product vision and strategy

Central to the role of a product manager is the ability to formulate a compelling product vision and strategy. Product manager case study interviews allow companies to assess a candidate's capacity to think strategically, envision the future trajectory of a product, and develop a product roadmap.

Through articulating a clear product vision, defining measurable objectives, and outlining a coherent strategy, candidates demonstrate their strategic acumen and ability to translate abstract concepts into actionable plans.

A strong understanding of market dynamics, customer needs, and competitive landscape informs a robust product strategy, enabling candidates to devise innovative solutions that resonate with target audiences and drive growth.

Creativity and innovation

In an increasingly competitive landscape, companies seek product managers who can infuse creativity and innovation into their product development process. Product manager case study interviews provide a way to evaluate a candidate's ability to think outside the box, challenge conventional wisdom, and generate novel ideas.

Candidates are tasked with solving hypothetical problems or brainstorming innovative features, offering insights into their creative problem solving skills and ability to push boundaries.

By encouraging candidates to explore unconventional solutions, companies identify individuals who can drive product differentiation and deliver transformative products that captivate users and outpace competitors.

Industry knowledge and expertise

A deep understanding of the industry landscape is essential to being a great product manager. Product manager case study interviews allow companies to assess a candidate's industry knowledge, domain expertise, and familiarity with relevant market trends and technologies.

Candidates are expected to demonstrate their understanding of industry dynamics, customer behaviors, regulatory considerations, and emerging technologies that may impact product development.

How to Solve Product Manager Case Study Interviews

For each type of product manager case study interview question, we’ve detailed the exact steps you should follow to deliver an outstanding answer and impress your interviewer.

How to Solve Product Design or Improvement Case Study Interviews

When asked how you would improve or design a product, resist the urge to list the first few ideas that come to your head. Instead, follow this systematic approach to demonstrate to the interviewer how you think about the product improvement and design process.

There are six main steps to solving product design or improvement case study interviews.

1. Define the goal

It is difficult to design or improve a product unless you have a specific and clear goal in mind. What are you trying to achieve?

The way you design or improve a product will change drastically depending on what you are trying to achieve. So, it is important that you confirm with the interviewer what the explicit goal is.

Are you trying to increase the number of monthly users? Are you trying to increase revenue per user? Is the goal to increase customer engagement? All of these different goals have drastically different solutions.

2. Identify a customer segment to target

The goal of this step is to focus and narrow down the scope of product improvement or design to one specific customer segment.

There are two reasons why you should do this.

One, customers can have a wide range of needs and preferences. Trying to improve or design a product that would benefit every single customer can be very challenging.

Two, by focusing on a specific customer segment, you can develop product improvements and designs that are more specific and tailored to the segment’s needs. You will avoid suggesting product ideas that are generic and not impactful.

Therefore, start by listing the different customer segments that come to mind. Select one segment and provide a reason why you are focusing on that segment.

You might choose a segment because they are the largest segment or you might pick a segment if their needs are underserved.

3. Select a pain point to focus on

Brainstorm a list of pain points for the selected customer segment. These can be unmet customer needs or features of the product that customers find frustrating, time-consuming, or difficult to use.

Select one pain point and provide a reason why you are focusing on it. You might select a pain point if it is the most common, the most severe, or the most practical to solve for.

4. Brainstorm product improvements or designs

Now that you have chosen a pain point to focus on, brainstorm a list of different ways to solve for that pain point.

Try to have at least 3 – 5 different ideas. Include a few ideas that are creative and unconventional. This demonstrates originality and out-of-the-box thinking.

If you are having difficulty generating enough ideas, you can use the SCAMPER framework to help you brainstorm ideas.

SCAMPER stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse.

• Substitute : Replace an element or feature with something else
• Combine : Merge different elements or features to create something new
• Adapt : Alter an existing idea to better fit a new context or need
• Modify : Make changes to the attributes, such as size, shape, color, or other characteristics
• Put to another use : Find new applications for an existing idea
• Eliminate : Remove unnecessary components or features
• Reverse : Change the order or perspective of elements or features

5. Assess which idea is best

For this step, create a list of criteria to assess your different ideas. Common criteria include:

• Magnitude of impact
• User experience
• Ease of implementation

Select the most important criteria based on the nature of the product and the pain point. Afterward, assess each of your product ideas based on the list of criteria you have developed.

You can assess your ideas either quantitatively or qualitatively.

The most common way to quantitatively score ideas is to give them one, two, or three points for each criteria. The idea that has the highest total number of points will be chosen.

Some criteria may be significantly more important than others. In this case, you can consider weighting the point values differently. For example, if the magnitude of impact is by far the most essential criteria, you can double the point value. Each idea will be given two, four, or six points for this criteria.

In assessing your ideas qualitatively, talk through how each idea performs on the criteria you have selected. Choose the improvement or design that has the most positive assessment overall.

6. Explain how you would test this

After you have selected your best idea, suggest how you would test whether this product improvement or design works. Specify what metrics you would want to measure to determine this.

This step is not always necessary, but it demonstrates to the interviewer that you can think like a product manager. Product roles involve a lot of testing and iterating on features and improvements.

A/B testing is the most common way to test a new product feature or design. In A/B testing, you compare the performance of two variations of a product against one another.

Typically, you would run an experiment in which one group of customers is given the original or older product and another group of customers is given the new and improved product.

After defining the right metrics to measure performance, you can determine which version of the product performs better.

How to Solve Product Growth Case Study Interviews

They key to solving product growth case study interviews is to have a comprehensive growth framework where you can systematically list and talk through all of the major ways to grow.

A case study framework is a tool to structure and break down business problems into smaller components.

You can think about growth through two major categories, organic growth and inorganic growth. These two categories form the foundation of our growth strategy case framework.

Organic growth

The most common type of growth that companies pursue is organic growth, which is growth driven by expanding output or engaging in internal activities. In other words, the company is growing through its own capabilities and efforts.

Organic growth can be segmented into growth through existing revenue sources and growth through new revenue sources.

Growth through existing revenue sources is either driven by an increase in quantity of units sold or by an increase in average price per unit sold.

To increase the quantity of units sold, a company can:

• Improve their product
• Decrease prices
• Sell through new distribution channels
• Target new customer segments
• Expand into new geographies
• Invest more in marketing and sales
• To increase the average price per unit sold, the company can:
• Increase prices for their products
• Focus on selling higher priced products

Remember that changing prices will impact quantity of units sold, so it is important to look at the net effect price changes have on revenue.

To drive growth through new revenue sources, a company can:

• Launch new products
• Launch new services

 Inorganic growth

Inorganic growth, on the other hand, is growth driven by acquisitions, joint ventures, or partnerships.

The first way that a company can grow inorganically is by acquiring another company. This gives the acquiring company all of the revenue that the acquisition target generates. In addition, there may be revenue synergies that the acquiring company can realize.

Acquiring a company gives the acquiring company access to the acquisition target’s distribution channels, customers, and products. The acquiring company may be able to increase revenues by cross-selling products, up-selling products, or bundling products together.

In a joint venture, two or more companies enter a business arrangement in which they pool together resources and share risk in accomplishing a particular task. Each company in the joint venture is responsible for profits, losses, and costs associated with the project.

A partnership is an association between two or more companies that provides some kind of benefit to each partner. This is slightly different from a joint venture because in a partnership, companies do not necessarily have to combine resources or efforts. They just need to be associated with each other.

How to Solve Product Strategy Case Study Interviews

When answering a product strategy question, you should create a framework to structure your thoughts rather than saying the first few ideas that come to mind.

As a reminder, a framework is a tool to structure and break down business problems into smaller components. The answers to the questions in your framework will help you answer the overall product strategy question.

There are six steps to creating outstanding frameworks to answer product strategy case study interview questions.

1. Memorize eight robust business categories

There are eight broad business categories that are frequently looked at when making product strategy decisions.

By memorizing these eight categories, you’ll have an easier time creating an outstanding framework rather than having to create frameworks from scratch each time.

These eight business categories are:

• Market: market size, market growth rate, average profit margins in the market, market trends or changes (e.g., technology, regulation)
• Competition: number of competitors, market share of competitors, competitive advantage of competitors, trends or changes happening among competitors
• Company: products and services, strengths, competitive advantages, capability gaps, weaknesses, growth trajectory, synergies
• Product: product benefits, product drawbacks, product differentiation, product lifecycle stage
• Customer: number of customer segments, characteristics of each segment, attractiveness of each segment, customer needs and preferences, customer purchasing behaviors
• Profitability: revenue, costs, breakeven, return on investment, payback period
• Alternatives: alternative markets, alternative products, alternative partnerships or strategic alliances, alternative acquisition targets, alternative investments, alternative strategies
• Risks: major risks, likelihood of risks, severity of risks, mitigation of risks

For each of these broad business categories, we’ve included a few potential topics to give you a sense of what each category means or encompasses.

You will only need to memorize the eight broad business categories. You do not need to memorize all of the potential topics under each.

2. When asked a strategy question, ask for a few minutes to structure your thoughts

When given a product strategy case study interview question, ask for a few minutes to structure your thoughts. Almost every time, the interviewer will give you time to develop a framework.

3. Mentally run through the eight business categories and select the 3-4 most relevant ones

Next, mentally run through the eight business categories that you’ve memorized and select the 3-4 most relevant ones.

3-4 is the ideal number of categories for your framework. It is the right balance of comprehensiveness and simplicity.

Any fewer than 3-4 categories and your framework may not be comprehensive enough. You may be missing critical questions that are necessary to answer the strategy question.

Any more than 3-4 categories and your framework becomes too large and complicated. You also risk having redundancies in your framework.

4. If you are unable to select 3-4 relevant business categories, think of your own business categories to include

If you are unable to get 3-4 categories in your framework after running through the memorized list of business categories, then it is time to think of your own business categories to include.

This happens more commonly when given atypical or unusual product strategy case study interview questions.

Remember, the eight broad business categories you memorized work for the vast majority of strategy questions, but does not cover all of them.

5. Add specific questions under each business category you’ve selected

Once you have identified the 3-4 major categories in your framework, add sub-bullets or questions underneath each of them to add more detail.

6. Walk the interviewer through your framework and answer

When you’ve finished developing your framework, walk your interviewer through it.

At the end of each major category, give your opinion on which answer or recommendation it supports.

Once you’ve walked the interviewer through your entire framework, you should have an overall answer to the product strategy case study interview.

Product Manager Case Study Interview Examples

We’ve compiled a few product manager case study interview examples with complete answers below. These examples should give you a good sense of what outstanding answers sound like.

Product Manager Case Study Interview Example #1

How would you improve YouTube?

For this question, I’ll assume that the goal of the improvement is to increase user engagement on the platform, which can be measured as the amount of time a user spends on YouTube.

First, I’ll think through the different customer segments and pick one to focus on. Three customer segments immediately come to mind:

• Entertainment seekers are users that are bored who are looking for interesting videos to watch to pass the time
• Information seekers are users looking to learn a new skill or acquire information on a topic
• Music seekers are users looking for background music or sounds to play while they are doing something else

Out of these segments, I will focus on entertainment seekers because this segment probably makes up the most significant portion of YouTube’s user base.

Next, I’ll identify a pain point to focus on. Entertainment seekers have a few different pain points:

• The discovery process they go through to find entertaining videos takes time and effort
• Entertainment seekers find long videos dull and too slow to watch
• They get irritated when videos have clickbait titles that do not live up to expectations.

Among these pain points, I’m going to focus on the tedious video discovery process because it is probably the biggest pain point for these users.

Now, I will brainstorm a few ideas on how to make the video discovery process easier.

• YouTube could recommend videos based on videos that friends have seen. Since friends tend to have similar interests and tastes, these videos will likely be entertaining to entertainment seekers
• YouTube can have a continuous, curated video feed such that users do not have to search for the next video. Users can click on a skip button to immediately jump into the following video, which will be curated by an algorithm based on video history
• YouTube could send a curated playlist to the user each day. These videos would be selected by an algorithm based on video history

I will assess each of these ideas on their impact, user experience, and ease of implementation.

The first idea, recommending videos based on videos that friends have seen, would have minimal impact if the user does not have friends that use YouTube frequently.

Additionally, this idea does not change the user experience much because entertainment seekers would still need to decide whether to watch a recommended video. The upside of this idea is that it would not be difficult to implement.

The second idea, having a continuous, curated video feed, could have a tremendous impact. It removes the burden of decision-making from entertainment seekers because YouTube videos are automatically played.

The user experience is also an improvement because the user only needs to click a skip button when they are bored. The downside of this idea is that developing a good algorithm could require substantial investment.

The third idea, sending a curated playlist to the user each day, would have some impact on users. The decision making process is slightly simplified because the user receives a shorter list of videos to choose from. However, once the playlist is finished, the user would still need to look for more videos on their own. 

Additionally, the user experience is not ideal. Getting an email or notification every day can be annoying. The upside of this idea is that it is the most straightforward to implement.

 Based on my assessment, the continuous, curated video feed seems to be the most promising. 

To test this idea, I would develop a minimal viable product and use A/B testing to assess the performance of this feature.

One customer group would be given access to this feature while another customer group would not. I would measure the difference in minutes of video consumption between the two groups for one month to determine if user engagement has increased.

Product Manager Case Study Interview Example #2

For this task, let’s assume that the goal is to design an alarm clock that works reliably in waking up the user and is as easy to use as possible. 

Additional alarm clock functionalities, such as checking the weather or listening to the radio, will not be considered.

The customer segment has already been defined, the blind.

There are four use cases that we need to design for:

• Setting an alarm
• Checking to see if the alarm has been set
• Waking up the user
• Checking the time

For each of these use cases, we can brainstorm a few potential ideas and evaluate the pros and cons for each to decide which design is optimal for our goals.

To set an alarm:

• Design a voice assistant (e.g., similar to Siri or Alexa): This is quicker than a touchpad and can easily set an exact alarm time to the second. Additionally, the voice assistant can repeat the time set out loud so that the user knows the correct time has been set. However, there could be dictation issues for people with accents and this can only be done when the environment is relatively quiet.
• Design a braille touchpad: This would complicate the alarm clock by adding additional buttons. It would also take a longer time to set an alarm. The user would also need to take an additional step to check that the alarm has been set correctly once entered.

To check if the alarm has been set:

• Design a voice assistant that can answer the question of whether the alarm has been set: The user would not need to walk to the alarm clock to check if the alarm has been set. However, this needs to be done in a relatively quiet environment.
• Design a button that when pressed will play the time, the alarm set time, and whether the alarm is on/off: This provides all the information the user needs, but time-consuming as the user will need to hear all of the information each time. The user also needs to walk to the alarm clock to use this.
• Design a button that when pressed, vibrates if the alarm has been set: This communicates the information more quickly, but the user still needs to walk to the alarm clock to use this.

To wake up the user:

• Use visuals: If the user is blind, they likely won’t be able to see anything, especially if they are asleep.
• Use sound: This is what almost all alarm clocks use.
• Use touch: The alarm clock can vibrate to wake the user. However, it is unclear if this would reliably wake up the user.
• Use smell or taste: This is a very unconventional approach to designing an alarm clock. Users probably don’t want to be forced to smell or taste something. It is unclear whether the taste or smell would be strong enough to reliably wake up the user.

To check the time:

• Design mechanical braille buttons that change by the minute: This seems complicated to design and would likely increase the cost of the alarm clock. 
• Design a button that says the time out loud when pressed: This is less complex than designing mechanical braille buttons that change by the minute. However, the user still needs to walk to the alarm clock to check the time.
• Design a voice assistant to say the time out loud when asked: The user would not need to walk to the alarm clock to check the time. However, this can only be done in a relatively quiet environment.

Based on this, it seems that a voice assistant alarm clock that wakes up users with sound would be most suitable for our user.

Product Manager Case Study Interview Example #3

Our company operates in the e-commerce space, primarily focusing on fashion and apparel. We're considering building a virtual fitting room feature that allows customers to virtually try on clothing items before making a purchase. How would you approach the decision of whether to invest in and build this new virtual fitting room feature?

There are four major factors to consider when deciding whether to build this new product feature:

1. Customer needs and preferences: Does this product feature resonate with customers?

• Do customers have a need for a virtual fitting room?
• Will customers actually use this feature?

2. Company capabilities: Does our company have the capabilities to develop this product feature?

• Do we have the expertise or technological capabilities to develop this feature?
• Do we have sufficient resources to develop this feature? (e.g., people, time, capital) 

3. Competition: Will developing this product feature help distinguish ourselves from competitors?

• Do competitors have a virtual fitting room product feature?
• How good are competitors’ virtual fitting rooms? (e.g., user experience, value provided to customers)

4. Profitability: Will building this new product feature be profitable?

• What are the expected costs of developing this product feature?
• What is the expected increase in revenue? (e.g., how much will conversion rate increase, how much will refunds decrease)

Product Manager Case Study Interview Example #4

Our company manufactures smart home security systems and we’ve recently launched a new model with advanced AI-powered features. How do we increase our market share and customer base?

There are four major ways to increase our market share and customer base for this smart home security system product:

1. Develop targeted marketing

• Identify specific customer segments that are most likely to benefit from the product
• Develop tailored marketing campaigns to highlight the unique advantages of our new model

2. Form strategic partnerships

• Form partnerships with prominent players in the smart home ecosystem
• Integrate the security system seamlessly into broader home automation solutions

3. Enhance customer experience and advocacy

• Prioritize exceptional customer support and post-purchase experience
• Implement a referral program to encourage existing customers to refer friends and family

4. Engage with the community

• Actively participate in online communities, forums, and social media groups focused on smart home technology and security
• Provide valuable insights and thought leadership at major smart home conferences or conventions

Product Manager Case Study Interview Frameworks

There are several product manager case study frameworks that candidates may find helpful to be familiar with. These include the: 4P’s framework, design thinking framework, growth framework, product development lifecycle framework, and SWOT analysis framework.

4P’s Framework

The 4P’s framework is a fundamental marketing framework used to analyze and develop marketing strategies for products or services. It consists of four elements, each representing a different aspect of marketing strategy:

• Product : Analyze the product itself, including its features, functionality, design, and user experience. Consider how well the product meets user needs and differentiates itself from competitors
• Price : Assess the pricing strategy, including pricing models, pricing tiers, discounts, and promotions. Consider factors such as value proposition, cost structure, and willingness to pay
• Place : Evaluate the distribution channels and placement strategy for the product, including online platforms, retail stores, and partnerships. Consider how to reach target customers effectively and efficiently
• Promotion : Examine the marketing and promotional tactics used to raise awareness and drive sales of the product. Consider advertising, public relations, social media, and other promotional channels

Design Thinking Framework

The design thinking framework is a human-centered approach to problem solving and innovation that is used to address a wide range of challenges and opportunities involved with product or service design.

It involves a structured process that encourages empathy, creativity, and collaboration to develop solutions that are user-centered, feasible, and viable. Here's how the design thinking framework is typically used:

• Empathize : Empathize with users to understand their needs, motivations, and pain points. Conduct user interviews, surveys, or observations to gain insights
• Define : Define the problem space, synthesizing research findings into clear problem statements or user personas. Articulate the specific challenges or opportunities
• Ideate : Brainstorm and generate creative solutions to the defined problem, encouraging divergent thinking and exploring a wide range of possibilities
• Prototype : Develop low-fidelity prototypes or mockups to visualize and communicate ideas, soliciting feedback from stakeholders and users
• Test : Gather feedback on prototypes through user testing or validation experiments, iterating based on user insights and refining solutions

Growth Framework

The growth framework, also known as the AARRR framework, is a framework used to analyze and optimize the various stages of the customer lifecycle. It is commonly applied in growth marketing and product management to drive user acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.

Here's a breakdown of the growth framework:

• Acquisition : Identify strategies for attracting new users or customers to the product, such as advertising, content marketing, SEO, or partnerships
• Activation : Focus on strategies to convert new users into active and engaged users, such as onboarding processes, personalized messaging, or product tours
• Retention : Explore tactics to keep users coming back to the product and increase their lifetime value, such as email marketing, loyalty programs, or product improvements
• Revenue : Analyze opportunities to monetize the product, including pricing strategies, upselling, cross-selling, or subscription models
• Referral : Consider ways to encourage existing users to refer new users to the product through word-of-mouth, referral programs, or social sharing

Product Development Lifecycle Framework

The product development lifecycle framework is used to guide the stages through which a product evolves from conceptualization to retirement. It outlines the key phases and activities involved in bringing a product to market and managing it throughout its lifespan.

Here's an overview of the product development lifecycle framework:

• Ideation : Generate and evaluate ideas for new products or features, considering user needs, market trends, and business goals
• Research : Conduct market research, user research, and competitive analysis to validate ideas and gather insights for product development
• Design : Define product requirements, create wireframes or prototypes, and design the user experience and interface
• Development : Oversee the development process, working with engineers and designers to build and test the product
• Launch : Plan and execute the product launch, including marketing campaigns, communication strategies, and rollout plans
• Post-launch Iteration : Monitor product performance, gather feedback from users, and iterate on the product based on insights and data

SWOT Analysis Framework

The SWOT analysis framework is a strategic planning tool used to identify and analyze the internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats facing a business, product, or project.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Here's how each component of the SWOT analysis framework is used:

• Strengths : Identify internal factors that contribute to the success of the product or business, such as unique features, strong brand reputation, or talented team members
• Weaknesses : Identify internal factors that hinder the success of the product or business, such as limited resources, technical constraints, or competitive disadvantages
• Opportunities : Identify external factors or market trends that present opportunities for growth or innovation, such as emerging technologies, new market segments, or changing consumer behaviors
• Threats : Identify external factors or challenges that pose risks to the product or business, such as competitive threats, market saturation, regulatory changes, or economic downturns

Product Manager Case Study Interview Tips

Below are our best ten tips for nailing your product manager case study interview:

1. Understand the Problem

Take the time to thoroughly understand the problem presented in the product manager case study interview. Break it down into its component parts, clarify any ambiguities, and identify the key objectives and constraints.

2. Ask Clarifying Questions

Don't hesitate to ask   clarifying questions during your case study interview if anything is unclear or if you need more information to solve the case effectively. This demonstrates your ability to gather relevant information and ensure you're addressing the right issues.

3. Define Your Approach

Before diving into the solution, outline your approach to solving the problem. Walk the interviewer through the different steps you plan on taking. Describe the framework or methodology you'll use.

4. Think Creatively

Be creative and think outside the box when brainstorming solutions. Don't limit yourself to conventional approaches. Consider innovative ideas that could differentiate the product and provide unique value to users.

5. Prioritize Solutions

Not all solutions are created equal. Prioritize your ideas based on their potential impact, feasibility, and alignment with the objectives of the product manager case study interview. Focus on high impact solutions that address the most critical aspects of the problem.

6. Consider Trade-offs

Recognize that there may be trade-offs involved in any solution. Consider the pros and cons of each option, and be prepared to justify your decisions based on the trade-offs you've made.

7. Communicate Clearly

Articulate your ideas and solutions clearly and concisely. Use structured frameworks, visual aids, and data to support your arguments and make your reasoning transparent to the interviewer.

8. Collaborate Effectively

Product management is a collaborative role, so demonstrate your ability to work effectively with others. Solicit feedback from the interviewer, incorporate their opinions and perspectives, and communicate openly throughout the product manager case study interview.

9. Showcase Your Analytical Skills

Use data and metrics to support your decisions, solutions, or hypotheses. Analyze any data provided, draw meaningful insights, and use them to inform your decisions.

10. Practice product manager case study interviews

Like any skill, product manager case study interviews require practice in order to excel in them. Therefore, practice doing product manager case studies with a partner under timed conditions. Seek feedback from others to identify areas for improvement. Familiarize yourself with the products and services of the company that you are interviewing for.

How to Prepare for Product Manager Case Study Interviews

There are six steps to preparing for product manager case study interviews: understand what a product manager case study interview is, learn the right strategies, practice a few cases by yourself, practice with a partner, practice with a current or former PM, and work on your improvement areas.

1. Understand what a product manager case study interview is

The first step to preparing for product manager case study interviews is to understand exactly what case study interviews are.

After you are familiar with what product manager case study interviews are, it is important to know what a great case study interview performance looks like. This will help you learn product manager case study interview strategies more quickly in the next step.

Before continuing onto the next step, you should be familiar with:

• The object of a product manager case study interview
• The types of questions you could get asked
• What a great product manager case study interview performance looks like

2. Learn the right strategies

Now that you have all the background information needed to succeed in product manager case study interviews, the next step is to learn the right strategies to build good interview habits.

It is much more efficient to learn the right product manager case study interview strategies the first time than to learn poor strategies and try to correct them later.

The quickest, most efficient way to learn these strategies is to read through our comprehensive product manager interview book . This book provides strategies on exactly what to do and say for over 10+ types of product manager interview questions, such as product design, marketing, estimation, strategy, execution, behavioral, and technical questions.

Before moving onto the next step, you should at least have strategies for the following types of product manager case study questions:

• Product design case study interview questions
• Product improvement case study interview questions
• Product growth case study interview questions
• Product strategy case study interview questions

3. Practice a few product manager case study interviews by yourself

Once you have learned the right strategies, the next step is to practice doing a few product manager case study interviews by yourself.

When practicing product manager case study interviews, it is typically better to practice with a partner than to practice by yourself. Practicing with a partner better simulates the actual product manager interview experience.

However, when you are just starting out, it is better to do the first few cases by yourself because it’ll help you become familiar with the structure and format of product manager case study interviews much more quickly.

 You also won’t have to waste time finding a partner and waiting for a time when they will be available to give you a mock interview.

4. Practice product manager case study interviews with a partner

The next step in preparing for product manager case study interviews is to practice doing cases with a partner. There are many aspects of case study interviews that you won’t be able to improve on unless you practice live with a partner.

When practicing product manager case study interviews with a partner, make sure that you are spending enough time after the mock interview to deliver feedback. Most of your learning and improvement will come from these valuable feedback sessions.

Do not move onto the next step until you have done at least 5 to 10 cases and are beginning to feel more comfortable with product manager case study interviews.

5. Practice with a former or current product manager

At this point, I strongly recommend asking former or current product managers to give you a mock interview. This will significantly help improve your performance on product manager case study interviews.

Doing a practice interview with a former or current product manager is highly beneficial because they know exactly what great answers sound like and can give you high-quality feedback to help improve the quality of your answers.

You can find former or current product managers among your friends, classmates, colleagues, and your broader LinkedIn network.

6. Work on your improvement areas

The last step in preparing for product manager case study interviews is to work on strengthening your improvement areas. Examples of common improvement areas or deficiencies include:

• Developing a comprehensive and structured framework or approach
• Generating creative and innovative ideas
• Using appropriate logic to make decisions
• Considering trade-offs and alternatives
• Communicating clearly and concisely

Try to work on improving one thing at a time. This will be much more effective than trying to improve on all of your weaknesses at once.

Recommended Product Manager Case Study Interview Resources

To prepare for product manager case study interviews, we highly recommend checking out our comprehensive product manager interview book, Hacking the PM Interview , which is available on Amazon in both eBook and paperback formats.

In this book, we’ll teach you exactly how to ace your product manager interviews and secure offers from top companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.

Whether your interview is months away or even tomorrow, this book will teach you the most effective, robust PM interview strategies in the least amount of time.

We’ve eliminated all filler material found in other books and provide you with everything you need to know in a clear and direct way.

With this shortcut guide, you will:

• Learn how to answer 10+ types of product manager interview questions, such as product design, marketing, estimation, strategy, execution, behavioral, and technical
• Uncover how to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other candidates competing against you
• Improve your PM interview skills quickly with the included practice problems and solutions
• Save yourself hundreds of hours of interview prep time

Dominate your PM interview

Learn to answer 98% of PM interview questions. Save yourself hundreds of hours

• Certifications
• Our Instructors

What Are Product Management Case Study Interviews?

Carlos González De Villaumbrosia

Updated: May 6, 2024 - 10 min read

What is a product management case study interview?

A case study interview, also known as a case interview, is a tool used by many companies to assess a candidate’s analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills. Similar to coding interviews for engineers, they allow the interviewers to simulate a situation that allows your skills to be put into practice.

Quite simply, you’ll be given a situation, and asked to make suggestions or come up with a hypothetical solution or improvement.

In product management, this can be about any number of things. The realm of product managers is vast, and covers many different aspects of product development. As product managers sit at the intersection of business, technology, and design, you could be asked case questions under these umbrellas.

This means that you could be given a case question based on product design, monetization, market research, user segmentation, trends, data, technical development, go-to-market , prioritization…pretty much anything product managers are into!

Example case study interview questions

What’s your favorite product? How would you improve its design?

Which company do you think we should acquire next?

How would you go about launching our product in an emerging market, say, India?

What new feature would you build for Instagram?

How to ace a case study interview

The product design case interview

No, the interview isn't going to hand you a Wacom tablet and ask you to mock up an entire product on the spot! Instead, you’ll be asked to think through some solutions to pretty common design problems. Things like:

How would you improve our in-app messenger?

If we tasked you with making our user interface more inclusive of those with disabilities, how would you approach that?

How would you redesign our homepage to make it more appealing for X demographic?

We’re finding that X number of users don’t make it through the entire onboarding process. What would you do/design to fix that?

The key when being asked a question about how you’d improve the company’s product is not to insult it too heavily. Remember, the people who built it are in the room with you, so if you come in hot with “well, for starters, your homescreen is absolutely hideous and needs a complete do-over”, you’re not going to endear yourself to them. A product manager is a diplomat, so be as diplomatic as possible.

Instead of focusing on how you’d fix what you see as glaring problems, try to come up with something that adds to the product. “I think a chatbot in your user onboarding process would help people to navigate through the process. Here’s where I’d implement it…”

How to ace it

Give your hypothesis: Because everything in product starts with why .

Lay out your approach : Briefly summarize what your approach would be, given your hypothesis. Include things like the research you would need to do, and the preparation the team would need to make.

Identify the user: Companies want user-driven product managers, so definitely make sure you know which user you’re building for.

Describe the solution : How would you actually build the solution? No need to get too technical if that’s not where your skills lie. If that’s the case, talk about how you’d lead the engineering teams to build the solution.

Suggest testing: If you’ve got 2 ideas and you’re not sure which one is better, describe both and talk about the test you’d run to discover which one to roll with.

Prioritize features : Show off your prioritization skills if you’re suggesting more than one feature.

Suggest features for an MVP and plans for a V1 launch:

Finish off by helping the interviewers to visualize what the finished MVP would be like, as well as the plans you’d have for a full release later down the line.

The business-thinking case interview

Business thinking is vital for product managers, as you’re the person that ties what’s being built to the needs of the business. This is why you may be presented with a business problem, so that the interviewer can assess your thought process, and how you approach product strategy.

Business case questions may include things like:

Management wants to build X because a competitor has launched something similar. How would you respond?

If we wanted to move more into the B2B market by launching X, what would you do first?

How would you increase customer adoption for the feature we released last month?

We want to become more product-led in our growth strategy. What recommendations would you make in terms of pricing structure/increasing customer adoption?

Establish market characteristics : This is especially important if your case question is a go-to-market question. If you’re not sure what the market characteristics are, talk about what you would find out before starting the work.

Layout your approach: Briefly summarize what your approach would be.

Prioritize your actions: If you’ve been asked for a step-by-step approach, talk about why you’re doing things in that order.

Provide analysis : Business decisions require a heavy amount of analysis, so be sure to include some competitor/customer/market analysis.

Make recommendations: Talk about the end result in a business sense. Instead of getting into the weeds of feature building etc, give a step-by-step approach of how you’d take a new feature to market, or make business-oriented improvements to a product.

Remember that a business-thinking case question requires an answer that would make C-suite happy. Try to think through your answer for the eyes of management. Think about what brings most business value, and tailor your answer around that.

The technical interview

Here, by technical interview, we don’t necessarily mean the tech interviews that engineers can expect to go through. It’s very rare for product managers to be asked technical questions in an interview, unless they’re specifically applying for a technical product manager role. You’ll usually get some warning in advance that your technical prowess will be tested, either by the recruiter or a hiring manager.

The chances of being given an in-depth technical case interview (aka, a coding interview) are rare, so you’re more likely to be asked a few general questions to gauge your technical ability.

Things like:

What’s your experience with X or Y technology?

Do you feel comfortable managing a team of engineers?

Can you explain the most technical project you’ve worked on?

These are questions that you should be able to answer in the room, because they’re based on your direct experience. So you don’t need to put any special level of preparation into their answers.

You may also be asked some technical questions that allow you to show off your technical knowledge, but are open-ended enough that you can still answer even if you’re not very techy. The goal is to gauge how much technical know-how you already have, not to embarrass you and put you on the spot for not having a computer science degree.

These questions might include:

What feature do you think we should build next? How should we approach building it?

Would you build X solution in-house, or would you outsource development elsewhere?

What partners do you think we should integrate with next? (eg. Slack, Trello)

These are questions that you can approach in your own way, from a technical perspective if you come from that background, or from a people-management/design/business perspective if you don’t.

Product managers and tech skills…what’s the deal?

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to go through a technical interview, as product managers aren’t the ones who physically build the product. They provide the direction and the insights, and the engineers provide the solutions and the finished product. So what’s gained by seeing how well you can code?

Well, some roles are more technical than others, so obviously in these roles you’d need either a computer science degree or a proven record of technical work, like an engineering background.

But for a regular product manager, you’re less likely to be given a technical case interview, and more likely to just be asked a few very general questions to gauge your knowledge.

1. Give yourself time to think

The worst thing you can do is panic, and rush in with an answer. It’s OK to give yourself time to think. An interview is not a first date, and silences don’t have to be awkward! So pause, and give yourself time to consider your answer before you start.

That’s much better than giving a sub-standard answer that you can’t take back. The interviewer will expect you to need a moment to gather your thoughts, so don’t stress.

2. Hack: The McKinsey case study

Now, you’re bound to go off and do plenty more research on case study interviews, wanting to find out everything you can. So let us give you this secret hack: check out materials for McKinsey case interviews .

“But I want to work at Facebook/Google/Amazon!” we hear you say. “Why would I prep for McKinsey?”

McKinsey is one of the most difficult interviewers out there. Reviews by some previous interviewees makes it seem like the process was designed to help choose the next ruler of Westeros. Their standards are incredibly high, and their case interviews are something that people prep weeks, even months in advance for.

This has a double result for you. One, there are swathes of resources out there specifically to prep for this behemoth of a case interview. Two, if you can give a McKinsey-standard answer to a case interview, you’ll outshine the competition easily!

3. Practice ahead of time

While you can’t be totally sure what you’ll be asked in a case interview, you can still prepare.

The smart thing to do is to practice case interview questions ahead of time. The way to do this is to pick apart the job posting you’re interviewing for, and identify what the main responsibilities are.

Case interview preparation is absolutely essential for acing product manager interviews, as you’re bound to be asked a hypothetical question sooner or later in the interview process.

4. Don’t feel pressured to give a perfect answer

Companies know how much time, research, and information goes into making informed product decisions. So if they’ve asked you to propose a new feature for their product as part of your interview, they’re not looking for something they can actually implement from you. They just want to see how you think, and what your analytical and problem-solving skills are. It’s also a test of your communication skills, seeing how you present yourself and your ideas.

So don’t pressure yourself into giving an answer that’s on par with the work their existing product managers do. That’s like beating yourself up for not running as fast a Usain Bolt when you do your first ever 5K.

Prepping for product manager interviews?

We’ve got you covered! Check out these great resources:

Master The Product Manager Interview Playlist : We’ve collected together our best talks on acing the Product Management interview, from a look behind the scenes of recruitment, to how to break into the industry. Check out the entire playlist here , or enjoy this sample from Google’s Product Manager…

The Ultimate List of Product Manager Interview Questions: Prepare yourself for every kind of question you could ever hope to be asked in a product manager interview!

Product School resources: If you really want to deep-dive into the best interview techniques, and become the master of any interview you walk into, you should check out the resources we have in our community. We’ve got cheat sheets, templates, and more!

Hired — How to Get a Great Product Job: Tailored guide-to-go for product manager positions in top tech companies. As this book will show you,  some of the most successful product transitions originated from people in music production or finance, with full-time jobs or with no prior experience. The collection of stories of Product Management transition will show you how it’s done.

Updated: May 6, 2024

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The 34 Most Important Product Manager Interview Questions

Trying to figure out which product manager interview questions you should spend your time practicing?

Below, we share some of the most common PM interview questions and answers to help you prep for your interviews.

To create this list, we analyzed over 1,700  recently asked product manager interview questions  reported by real candidates and collaborated with senior PMs and APMs at Google, Meta, Amazon, and other startups.

Stephen Cognetta (Google PM) explains the most common product management interview questions you should expect to answer.

Top Product Manager Interview Questions

PM interviews are focused on a few key areas. Below, we'll talk about how to tackle each of them.

Jump ahead:

• Product Design
• Product Strategy
• Analytics & Metrics
• Execution (Google Only)

Product Design Questions

Product design is about one-third of the PM interview process. These questions are centered on your product thinking skills like:

• User empathy and user-centered design,
• Feature prioritization,
• and changing products for better product-market fit.

Some common product design questions include:

• What's your favorite product and why?  Watch a Google PM answer .
• How would you improve our product?
• Design a product for drivers during rush hour. 
• How would you improve Instagram Stories?  Watch a Microsoft PM answer .
• How would you improve Spotify as a podcast application?

Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions make up about 20% of PM interviews. Most, if not all, of your PM interviews will have a behavioral component.

Generally speaking, companies want to hire candidates who:

• Can do the job at hand.
• Can learn and grow in a collaborative environment.
• Fit in, given company culture and values.

Some common behavioral PM questions include:

• Tell me about yourself. View expert answer .
• Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.
• Tell me about a time you made a mistake.
• Tell me about a time one of your products failed.
• How would you handle negative user feedback for your product?
• Why do you want to work as a product manager?

Some companies, like Amazon, have notoriously tough behavioral rounds. Throughout the entire interview process, they're looking for candidates who display examples of their leadership principles .

Product Strategy Questions

Most of a PM's job involves making strategic product decisions in a constantly evolving marketplace.

Product strategy interviews, which usually last about 45 minutes, test your ability to think about products in a competitive way, set goals, and develop a strategy.

Generally, there are four types of product strategy questions:

• Differentiation : What unique value does the product offer to customers?
• Go-to-Market : How will the product be introduced to the marketplace?
• Pricing : How much should this product cost?
• Growth : What strategies can increase the user base of this product?

There are no right answers to these questions. Instead, be clear in your thought processes.

Some common product strategy questions include:

• Should Samsung build a video game console? Watch Microsoft PM answer .
• How would you increase the number of users on YouTube?
• How would you react to a competing product to Gmail?
• How would you increase the adoption of Microsoft Edge?
• What's the biggest threat to YouTube? Watch Google PM answer .

Analytics and Metrics Questions

Can you reason with metrics ? Can you think critically about user feedback and bugs?

The analytics or metrics interview lasts about 45 minutes. Expect to answer two questions in this time.

You might be asked to:

• define a single north star metric for a company,
• set KPIs for a new product,
• or evaluate success after a launch.

Some analytics questions include:

• Tell me about when you used data to solve a problem.
• What metrics would you focus on as the PM for Netflix?
• What metrics would you focus on as the PM for Alibaba?
• Devise an A/B test to improve Google Maps.
• What should Airbnb's north star metric be?

Estimation Questions

Product managers need to be able to make decisions with incomplete information.

This could involve estimating the market size for a potential opportunity or assessing user interest in a feature. Your ability to do this is evaluated through estimation questions .

• Estimate the number of Uber drivers in San Francisco. Watch a Google PM answer .
• Estimate the number of videos watched on YouTube per day.
• Estimate the total dollar amount of online sales for fruits and vegetables per year in New York City.
• How many quarters do you need to reach the height of the Empire State Building?
• Estimate the total Internet bandwidth needed for a campus of 1,000 graduate students.

While companies like Google are well-known for their estimation questions, they are asked less often these days. The reason? They don't accurately depict the day-to-day work of a product management team.

Nonetheless, you should be prepared to answer them during your product manager interviews, just in case. They're a good proxy for your communication skills as you navigate nebulous problems.

Execution Questions

Execution questions test your ability to make sense of a situation, set goals, and make decisions.

• How would you reduce fake news on social media?
• YouTube comments are up, but watch time is down. What do you do?
• If you were the PM of eBay, what goals would you set?
• Daily active users have gone down on our application. How would you find the root cause?
• Should Uber Eats be a different app from regular Uber?

Meta asks execution questions focusing on root cause analysis and decision-making , such as evaluating metrics for Instagram Stories.

Google, however, assesses execution skills through broader hypothetical questions during Cross-Functional Collaboration rounds, with questions like "When do you consider a design review completed?"

Technical Questions

Technical questions are not common in PM interviews unless the position is explicitly technical.

For instance, technical product managers at Amazon should know how to code.

Regardless, having a technical background can help you better understand the feasibility of new product ideas or the strategic implications of new technology.

Your recruiter should let you know if you will face a technical round.

If you do know you’ll be asked technical questions, there are three common types to be aware of:

• Communicating Technical Concepts : “Explain DNS to a 12-year-old.”
• Explaining Technical Decisions : “Tell me about a time you made a technical trade-off."
• System Design : “Design the architecture for Instagram’s Home Feed”

Next, let's walk through answers to some of the most common product manager questions.

Q1: What's your favorite product?

"What's your favorite product and why?" is one of the most common PM interview questions. You should expect to answer it in every interview you have .

Below, a PM candidate talks about why Google Chrome is their favorite product.

Sample Answer

Interview tips.

Here are some things to think about as you answer favorite product questions.

• Pick Popular Products : Popular products, like Google Chrome, are popular for a reason. If something popular is genuinely your favorite, don't shy away. Come up with a new, compelling reason why it's your favorite product.
• Improvements : How would you make this product better if you were the product manager? This shows empathy for the user experience and not settling for the way things are.
• Differentiation . This product is your favorite, but what about its competitors? How does it stack up to other similar products in the space?
• Passion : Your interviewer wants to see you light up when you discuss this product, not an answer you rehearsed. This is your time to show what excites you about product management and well-made products. You can bring this passion and excitement to your new job.

Q2: Improve Instagram Stories

Below, a Meta PM answers the question, " How would you improve Instagram Stories? "

First, they identify the pain points of Instagram for Gen Z, such as difficulty connecting with friends

This has led to lower usage and stickiness for users and lost revenue for Meta.

One potential solution is a new feature that allows users to collaborate or create Instagram Stories during special events like holidays or birthdays.

Collaborative Instagram Stories could lead to more creation, viewing, and sharing—valuable metrics for engagement.

• Segment: First, identify user segments and their pain points. Then brainstorm ideas and create a product vision that prioritizes features for those users.
• Paint a Picture: Describe a user interacting with the product to illustrate your vision. Describe the average day as a user. What are their pain points?
• Tradeoffs: Highlight tradeoffs to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the product.
• KPIs: Talk about key performance indicators (KPIs) and what success looks like.

Q3: Short-term Sacrifices

"Tell me about a time you made short-term sacrifices for long-term gains" is a strong behavioral question.

Below, a PM for Capsule, an online pharmacy, talks about improving internal processes.

Behavioral questions help interviewers answer questions like:

• Are you able to think strategically under pressure?
• What methodology do you use to make decisions?
• How do your decisions affect other team members?
• Details . Set the stage for your interviewer. What position did you hold, what problem were you facing, and what options did you have to fix it.
• KPIs . Mention how clear KPIs helped you decide which option to choose. Knowing how to act on data, even in times of uncertainty, is invaluable.
• Multiple Solutions . Show your interviewer that you deliberated on multiple outcomes and that options were weighted methodically.
• Complexity: Understand the complexity and impact of the decision to be made. Then, communicate the situation and decision with the relevant parties in your example.

Q4: Increase Airbnb Bookings

" How would you increase Airbnb's bookings? " is a product strategy question.

Product strategy questions test your ability to think strategically about a business and its target market.

Watch a Google PM answer: " How would you increase Airbnb bookings? "

This candidate focused on providing unique and authentic travel experiences on Airbnb, which helps keep Airbnb at the top of users' minds.

They identify problems or pain points only Airbnb can solve with its unique experiences.

Airbnb's guests can generally be segmented into high- and low-intent travelers and further segmented by business and leisure travel.

High-intent leisure travelers are ready to book right now. Discounts, promotions, and stronger CTAs are easy wins for high-intent travelers already on the site.

Next, consider expanding the target market to more high-intent travelers. Airbnb should maintain its core values of authenticity and uniqueness if it expands to new customers.

For low-intent travelers, Airbnb could become more of a research website. It could feature information about different vacations, deliver inspiration for trips, and be top of mind for anyone planning a trip. Then, Airbnb is well-positioned to capture that business when those travelers are ready to book.

Next, the listings page could get a redesign. It could feature stories from hosts more prominently. Social media and user-generated content could appeal to low-intent travelers as they browse listings.

The Wishlist experience could be more exciting and personalized. Wishlisted homes could inspire more immersive exploring in a city or place.

To test all these new ideas, start with small experiments. A newsletter to inactive users could highlight unique experiences on Airbnb.

Data from early tests will reveal which parts of the browsing experience should get prioritized.

• Paint a picture: Take your interviewer on a journey through your answer. Illustrate the daily pain points of different user segments using this product. For products like Airbnb, that means describing different types of holiday and business travelers. Explain why they need accommodation.
• Invite feedback: In strategy questions, there are no correct answers. Continually ask for feedback from your interviewer to hear their perspective. For a product as universal as Airbnb, your interviewer likely has feedback about which types of users they want to focus on during the limited scope of an interview.
• Focus on the approach: How you answer the question is more important than getting it right. Spend time explaining your thought process.

Junior vs. Senior PM Candidates

What are the differences between junior and senior product managers?

In your first PM role(s), you’ll conduct market research and competitive analysis, work on product strategy, and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Senior PMs are usually in a higher leadership position in a team. An experienced product manager may negotiate compensation and promotions and address internal conflicts.

Junior PMs tend to focus on outputs, while Senior PMs focus on outcomes.

Senior PMs are more active in defining the desired outcome of a product or feature. They tend to work hands-on with users to identify areas for improvement.

Seniority comes from accumulated experience, not necessarily in a specific industry.

A senior engineer may already have the skills to become a Senior Technical Product Manager. There is no one-size-fits-all ideal candidate. There are also plenty of examples of non-technical product managers .

There's no formula for how much experience you need to become a Senior PM.

A PM with ten years of experience at a healthcare company may not be the best candidate if the role requires specific SaaS growth experience.

Influencing Outcomes

As a Junior PM, you must guide your team towards a common goal. You’ll likely have to do this without having the authority to give them orders.

You should build personal connections, empathize with your team's problems, and make decisions based on concrete data. When you’re more experienced, these parts of the role will feel like second nature.

As a senior PM, you’ll guide your team based on your findings. You’ll assign data analysts, junior PMs, and engineers to deliver on your clear product vision.

PM Interview Framework

Every great answer in the PM interview will follow the same general format, regardless of the question.

Use a simple framework to keep your ideas organized during PM interviews.

• Listen : Actively listen and take notes as your interviewer talks.
• Clarify : Ask questions to better understand the problem.
• Pause : Stop and think before blurting out an answer.
• Structure : Tell your interviewer how you'll structure your answers.
• Explain: Give your answer and explain your reasoning at each step.
• Check-in : Ask your interviewer if they want to hear more details.
• Summarize: Reiterate your main points and takeaways.

Step 1: Listen and Take Notes

Listen attentively to the question, take notes, and make eye contact with the interviewer. Ask clarifying questions to understand the details and expectations of the question.

Step 2: Ask Clarifying Questions

Always ask your interviewer clarifying questions, even if the question appears simple or straightforward.

This way, you can determine the most important things to focus on.

Some clarifying questions you can ask your interviewer are:

• Is this product targeting a specific set of users or customers?
• Which platforms are our target users using?
• Is this product being released on a global or domestic scale?

If you can't think of anything, you can always ask, "So, you're asking me to...?" Is that correct?"

Step 3: Stop and Think

You would be surprised what an extra 10–20 seconds of reflection can do for the quality of your interview answer.

Interviewers prefer you to take your time to organize your thoughts so that your answer is coherent and easy to follow.

Step 4: Structure Your Answers

Provide a structure to your answer. Present this structure to your interviewer or hiring manager before diving in.

Many PM questions can fit into a simple three-point structure.

For instance, you can begin your answer by saying something like:

“Alright, I’m going to explore three possible products that fit your question and cover the tradeoffs of each. These three products are X, Y, and Z."

Giving your interviewer a structure beforehand lets them redirect you if necessary.

Step 5: Explain with Confidence

If you have one, use the whiteboard as much as possible. Every good PM has a whiteboard, right?

Lastly, sit up straight and display confidence while answering. Don't forget to make eye contact, too.

Step 6: Check In and Pivot

It is always a good idea to check in with the interviewer and pivot wherever necessary.

One mistake some new interviewees make is trying to prepare answers ahead of time.

Generally speaking, there are three common scenarios when it comes to necessary pivots:

• The interviewer presents concerned body language . If your interviewer changes posture or makes gestures, it can indicate that you're off track. Check-in with the interviewer by asking if it's okay to move on to the next part: "I’ll now move on to the next portion of my answer. Is that okay?”
• You realize your answer is wrong . Instead of getting nervous, the solution is to smoothly pivot by finding a way to redirect the answer. One way to do this is to say something like, " Let me rephrase that " or "Let me clarify my answer."
• You forget your point . It's okay to ask for more time by saying, " Can I have a moment to think through the rest of my answer? " This shows that you take the interview seriously and want to answer best.

Step 7. Review and Summarize

Finally, summarize your answer in 30 seconds.

Structure this brief summary the same way you did your original answer.

Tip: Go Slowly

Pretend that your interviewer is a complete stranger. Break down complex topics into easily digestible pieces.

Don't explain what a smartphone is or why people use apps. But don't be afraid to explain your product philosophy and how you can make a product team great.

While you're answering questions, talk about things like:

• What successful products have you launched as a PM?
• How do you talk to users and conduct user research?
• How would you implement and plan for new features in a product's roadmap?
• How do you define a successful product launch?
• What metrics do you use to determine if a product is working well?
• How do you work with other PMs on your teams?

Your PM interview is emotional. Your head is probably buzzing with excitement and nervousness.

Think about these common pitfalls:

• KPIs . The interviewers want to see that you’re ahead of the curve . Identify the KPIs that revolve around the business. If you don’t know how the company measures success, how will you know what's best for the product? While a subscription business focuses on user retention, an e-commerce business might look for repeat purchases.
• Use the Product . Use the company’s product before the interview. Ask your interviewer for a free trial or beta access if it's behind a paywall. You may be asked how the user interface or experience can be improved. If you haven't checked out the product, you'll not only be stumped in the interview but also leave a negative impression on your interviewers.

PM Interview FAQs

These are the most common questions about the product manager interview process.

How do I prepare for a PM interview?

• Step 1 : Research the company you're applying to. Learn the PM interview loop for that company. Check out our PM company guides for deeper insights into how companies like Adobe, Intel, Amazon, Stripe, Google, and more structure their interviews.
• Step 2 : Choose one type of interview question for that role (product sense, behavioral, analytical, strategy, execution, technical, etc).
• Step 3 : Review the most common interview questions. Create stories from your resume to prepare for your interview. Practice using the STAR method to answer each question. The STAR method = Situation (What was the situation?) T = Task (What goal were you working toward?) A = Action (What action did you take?) R = Result (What was the result of your action?).
• Step 4 : Compare your answers to the most popular answers to interview questions from people who landed the job.
• Step 5 : Move between interview question categories and repeat.

What makes a good PM interview?

Ultimately, your PM interview comes down to three things:

• Product vision and sense : How well can you envision future products to solve user pain points and needs?
• Communication : Can you communicate your product ideas and vision to a product team and engineering team to execute?
• Culture fit : Do you align with the company's vision and the ethos of its workers?

Is product management a technical role?

Depending on the company, your product management role may be technical. Companies like Google encourage a solid technical and coding background to succeed in product management positions.

However, many companies don't require a technical background to lead technical teams.

Learn everything you need to ace your product management interviews.

Exponent is the fastest-growing tech interview prep platform. Get free interview guides, insider tips, and courses.

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All Things Product Management

What Are Product Management Case Study Interviews?

Your first test in problem solving.

Hi there, Product People! Happy Friday. Today we’re talking about case study interviews – an environment where you can show off your problem-solving chops. Case study interview questions are like solving a puzzle. It can feel high pressure in an interview-setting, but the problem-solving principles remain the same!

A case study interview, also known as a case interview, is a tool used by many companies to assess a candidate’s analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills. Similar to coding interviews for engineers, they allow the interviewers to simulate a situation that allows your skills to be put into practice.

Quite simply, you’ll be given a situation, and asked to make suggestions or come up with a hypothetical solution or improvement.

In Product Management, this can be about any number of things. The realm of Product Managers is vast, and covers many different aspects of Product Development. As Product Managers sit at the intersection of many aspects of the company, including but not limited to business, technology, design, marketing, and customer success, you could be asked a broad range of case questions under.

This means that you could be given a case question based on product design, monetization, market research, user segmentation, trends, data, technical development, go-to-market, prioritization…pretty much anything Product Managers are into!

Click here for a comprehensive list of Product Management interview questions.

Example Case Study Interview Questions

What’s your favorite product? How would you improve its design?

Which company do you think we should acquire next?

How would you go about launching our product in an emerging market, say, India?

What new feature would you build for Instagram?

How to Ace a Case Study Interview

The Product D esign case interview

No, the interviewer isn't going to hand you a wacom tablet and ask you to mock up an entire product on the fly! Instead, you’ll be asked to think through some solutions to pretty common design problems. Things like:

How would you improve our in-app messenger?

If we tasked you with making our user interface more inclusive of those with disabilities, how would you approach that?

How would you redesign our homepage to make it more appealing for X demographic?

We’re finding that X number of users don’t make it through the entire onboarding process. What would you do/design to fix that?

The key when being asked a question about how you’d improve the company’s product is not to insult it too heavily. Remember, the people who built it are in the room with you, so if you come in hot with “well, for starters, your homescreen is absolutely hideous and needs a complete do-over,” you’re not going to endear yourself to them. A Product Manager is a diplomat, so be as diplomatic as possible.

Instead of focusing on how you’d fix what you see as glaring problems, try to come up with something that adds to the product. “I think a chatbot in your user onboarding process would help people to navigate through the process. Here’s where I’d implement it…”

How to ace it

Give your hypothesis: Because everything in product starts with why .

Lay out your approach : Briefly summarize what your approach would be, given your hypothesis. Include things like the research you would need to do, and the preparation the team would need to make.

Identify the user: Companies want user-driven Product Managers, so definitely make sure you know which user you’re building for.

Describe the solution : How would you actually build the solution? No need to get too technical if that’s not where your skills lie. If that’s the case, talk about how you’d lead the engineering teams to build the solution.

Suggest testing: If you’ve got 2 ideas and you’re not sure which one is better, describe both and talk about the test you’d run to discover which one to roll with.

Prioritize features : Show off your prioritization skills if you’re suggesting more than one feature.

Suggest features for an MVP and plans for a V1 launch: Finish off by helping the interviewers to visualize what the finished MVP would be like, as well as the plans you’d have for a full release later down the line.

The business-thinking case interview

Business thinking is vital for Product Managers, as you’re the person that ties what’s being built to the needs of the business. This is why you may be presented with a business problem, so that the interviewer can assess your thought process, and how you approach product strategy.

Business case questions may include things like:

Management wants to build X because a competitor has launched something similar. How would you respond?

If we wanted to move more into the B2B market by launching X, what would you do first?

How would you increase customer adoption for the feature we released last month?

We want to become more Product-Led in our growth strategy. What recommendations would you make in terms of pricing structure/increasing customer adoption?

Establish market characteristics : This is especially important if your case question is a go-to-market question. If you’re not sure what the market characteristics are, talk about what you would find out before starting the work.

Layout your approach: Briefly summarize what your approach would be.

Prioritize your actions: If you’ve been asked for a step-by-step approach, talk about why you’re doing things in that order.

Provide analysis : Business decisions require a heavy amount of analysis, so be sure to include some competitor/customer/market analysis.

Make recommendations: Talk about the end result in a business sense. Instead of getting into the weeds of feature building etc, give a step-by-step approach of how you’d take a new feature to market, or make business-oriented improvements to a product.

Remember that a business-thinking case question requires an answer that would make c-suite happy. Try to think through your answer for the eyes of management. Think about what they care about the most, and tailor your answer around that.

The technical interview

Here, by technical interview, I don’t necessarily mean the tech interviews that engineers can expect to go through. It’s very rare for PMs to be asked technical questions in an interview, unless they’re specifically applying for a technical PM role. You’ll usually get some warning in advance that your technical prowess will be tested, either by the recruiter or a hiring manager.

The chances of being given an in-depth technical case interview (aka, a coding interview) is rare, so you’re more likely to be asked a few general questions to gauge your technical ability.

Things like:

What’s your experience with X or Y technology?

Do you feel comfortable managing a team of engineers?

Can you explain the most technical project you’ve worked on?

These are questions that you should be able to answer in the room, because they’re based on your direct experience. So you don’t need to put any special level of preparation into their answers.

You may also be asked some technical questions that allow you to show off your technical knowledge, but are open-ended enough that you can still answer even if you’re not very techy. The goal is to gauge how much technical know-how you already have, not to embarrass you and put you on the spot for not having a CS degree.

These questions might include:

What feature do you think we should build next? How should we approach building it?

Would you build X solution in-house, or would you outsource development elsewhere?

What partners do you think we should integrate with next? (eg. Slack, Trello)

These are questions that you can approach in your own way, from a technical perspective if you come from that background, or from a people-management/design/business perspective if you don’t.

Product Managers and Tech Skills…What’s the Deal?

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be asked to go through a technical interview, as Product Managers aren’t the ones who physically build the product. They provide the direction and the insights, and the engineers provide the solutions and the finished product. So what’s gained by seeing how well you can code?

Well, some roles are more technical than others, so obviously in these roles you’d need either a CS degree or a proven record of technical work, like an engineering background.

But for a regular Product Manager, you’re less likely to be given a technical case interview, and more likely to just be asked a few very general questions to gauge your knowledge.

Give yourself time to think

The worst thing you can do is panic, and rush in with an answer. It’s OK to give yourself time to think. An interview is not a first date, and silences don’t have to be awkward! So pause, and give yourself time to consider your answer before you start.

That’s much better than giving a sub-standard answer that you can’t take back. The interviewer will expect you to need a moment to gather your thoughts, so don’t stress.

Hack: The McKinsey Case Study

Now, you’re bound to go off and do plenty more research on case study interviews, wanting to find out everything you can. So let us give you this secret hack: check out materials for McKinsey case interviews .

“But I want to work in. a tech role!” I can hear you say. “Why would I prep for McKinsey?”

McKinsey is one of the most difficult interviewers out there. Reviews by some previous interviewees makes it seem like the process was designed to help choose the next ruler of Westeros. Their standards are incredibly high, and their case interviews are something that people prep weeks, even months in advance for.

This has a double result for you. One, there are swathes of resources out there specifically to prep for this behemoth of a case interview. Two, if you can give a McKinsey-standard answer to a case interview, you’ll outshine the competition easily!

Practice ahead of time

While you can’t be totally sure what you’ll be asked in a case interview, you can still prepare. They’re not going to ask you about something you know nothing about (eg, if you’re not going to be working on an AI product, they’re not going to ask you about AI.)

The smart thing to do is to practice case interview questions ahead of time. The way to do this is to pick apart the job posting you’re interviewing for, and identify what the main responsibilities are.

Case interview preparation is absolutely essential for acing PM interviews, as you’re bound to be asked a hypothetical question sooner or later in the interview process.

Don’t feel pressured to give a perfect answer

Companies know how much time, research, and information goes into making informed product decisions. So if they’ve asked you to propose a new feature for their product as part of your interview, they’re not looking for something they can actually implement from you. They just want to see how you think, and what your analytical and problem-solving skills are. It’s also a test of your communication skills, seeing how you present yourself and your ideas.

So don’t pressure yourself into giving an answer that’s on par with the work their existing Product Managers do. That’s like beating yourself up for not running as fast a Usain Bolt when you do your first ever 5K.

Thanks for reading All Things Product Management! If you’re new here, subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Check out some of the previous issues:

How to Product Manage Your Product Management Career An Aspiring Product Manager’s Guide to Coding Interviews 20 Key Questions to Ask in a Product Management Interview

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50 Product Management Case Studies

We often wonder what kind of process other product teams have created, planned, and most importantly, how they have implemented it. That is why we at Producter have compiled 50 different case studies for you.

2 years ago   •   4 min read

We often wonder what kind of process other product teams have created, planned, and most importantly, how they have implemented it.

That is why we at Producter have compiled 50 different case studies for you.

Brought to you by Roadmape

1- Rules of Flow for Product Management: an AirBnB Case Study

“Engagement” is a term that is so overused in product management that it has almost lost its meaning. So often I’ve heard from teams, “We’ll measure the success of this test with engagement,” which could mean anything from feature click-through to bounce to we-aren’t-really-sure-this-will-drive-conversion-so-we’re-hedging-our-bet. Underneath, the reason this term has been co-opted and jargonized is that genuine, productive engagement can be ramped toward long-term customer loyalty. And loyalty pays off: a loyalty increase of 7% can boost lifetime profits per customer by as much as 85%, and a loyalty increase of 3% can correlate to a 10% cost reduction ( Brand Keys ).

2- The Psychology of Clubhouse’s User Retention (...and churn)

3- Netflix Q1 ’21 Subscriber Growth Miss: Can We Avoid Another One?

As a data analyst supporting a mobile subscription business , Netflix’s Q1 ’21 subscriber growth miss is a classic example of when I would get called for recommendations to prevent a miss in the future. I thought this would make an interesting case study to discuss my approach to finding insights to drive subscriber growth. Sadly I’m not a Netflix employee and will be limited to publicly available data but the wealth of information on the Internet about Netflix is sufficient to generate insights for this case study.

4- Amazon Go Green

As part of the Design Challenge from productdesign.tips, our team came together to find ways for Amazon to encourage more sustainability on their e-commerce platform. As with any unsolicited design project, the challenge comes with a lack of access to application analytics and technical feasibilities. Nonetheless, the question remains: How might we design checkout screens for an e-commerce app to help people recycle the goods they buy?

5- Quora Case Study – The Wonderful World of Quora

Quora has become a substantive resource for millions of entrepreneurs and one of the best sources for Business to Business market. Majorly used by writers, scholars, bloggers, investors, consultants, students this Q/A site has much to offer in terms of knowledge sharing, connection building and information gathering.

6- Building a product without any full-time product managers

Jambb is an emerging social platform where creators grow their communities by recognizing and rewarding fans for their support. Currently, creators monetize fan engagement through advertisements, merchandise, and subscriptions, to name a few. However, this only represents 1% of fans, leaving the other 99% (who contribute in non-monetary ways) without the same content, access, and recognition that they deserve.

8- What if you can create Listening Sessions on Spotify

Summary: The project was done as a part of a user experience design challenge given to me by a company. I was given the brief by them to work on a feature of Spotify and I spent around 25–30 hours on the challenge in which I went through the entire process, from the research to testing.

9- Redesigned Apple Maps and replicated an Apple product launch for it

Quick-fire question; what is the single most important and widely used feature in a phone — asides from texting and instant messaging friends, coworkers and family? Maybe you guessed right, perhaps this feature is so integrated into your life that you didn’t even think about it — either way, it is your phone’s GPS. It is reasonable to say that GPS technology has changed society’s lives in ways we never could’ve imagined. Gone are the days of using physically printed maps and almanacks, when we now have smartphones with navigation apps. Since the launch of the iPhone and the App Store, consumers have been able to use different apps for their personal navigation needs. Everyone has a preference, and apps have come out to try and address every need.

10- Intuitive design and product-led growth

In 2018, Miro was hardly a blip on the radar in the Design world. Fast forward two years, and suddenly Miro is solidly the number one tool for brainstorming and ideation.

Click below to see the complete list 👇

Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven.

It helps you collect feedback , manage tasks , sharing product updates , creating product docs , and tracking roadmap .

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What is customer segmentation, learnings about product development strategy in 2022, keep reading, boost product management with slack: a comprehensive guide to producter's slack integration, mastering the art of product management: 10 essential strategies for success, what is user research.

Case Studies for Product Management: A Deep Dive

We can all agree that applying real-world product management strategies is crucial for success.

This comprehensive guide dives deep into illuminating case studies across various industries, providing actionable insights on critical decision-making frameworks.

Introduction to Product Management Case Studies

Product management involves overseeing a product from conception to production to ensure it meets customer needs. Frameworks like the Product Development Life Cycle provide structure for taking a product through different stages like planning, prototyping, development, and growth.

Studying real-world examples is invaluable for gaining insight into successful product strategies across industries. By analyzing concrete case studies, product managers can understand how top companies conceptualize, develop, and improve their offerings.

Defining Product Management and its Frameworks

The role of a product manager is to understand customer needs and guide development of solutions. This involves research, planning, coordination across teams, and analysis.

Some key frameworks provide processes for product managers:

• Product Development Life Cycle - Conceptualization, Development, Growth, Maturity Decline
• Jobs To Be Done - Focusing on the job the customer aims to get done
• Design Thinking - Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, Testing

These frameworks help structure product decisions and strategy.

Importance of Best Case Studies for Product Management

Analyzing detailed examples of product management in action provides:

• Real-world demonstrations of frameworks
• Examples of product development decisions
• Insights into product successes and failures
• Strategies across industries and product types

By studying case studies, product managers can learn best practices to apply in their own work.

Overview of Industries and Product Case Study Examples

Upcoming sections will explore product management case studies from:

• Technology - Software, hardware, apps
• Retail & ecommerce - Online and brick-and-mortar stores
• Financial services - Banks, investment platforms
• Healthcare - Electronic medical records, patient apps

Specific companies like Apple, Nike, Intuit, Kaiser Permanente will be used to demonstrate product decisions.

What are case studies for Product management?

Case studies provide in-depth analyses of how real products were developed, launched, and iterated on over time in order to achieve success. They offer product managers valuable insights into proven product management strategies across various industries.

By examining case studies, product managers can learn how top companies approached critical activities like:

• Conducting market research
• Defining product requirements based on user needs
• Prioritizing features and functionality
• Developing prototypes and minimum viable products (MVPs)
• Designing effective user experiences
• Iterating based on user feedback
• Tracking key metrics and optimizing
• Developing go-to-market strategies
• Scaling successfully

Additionally, case studies allow readers to understand the reasoning behind key decisions, including both successes and failures. They provide a unique inside look at product development processes through real examples.

Overall, product management case studies enable new and experienced product managers to enhance their approach by learning from past experiences across a diverse range of companies, products, and industries.

How to make structure in case studies for Product management?

Studying product management case studies is a key step to understanding real-world examples of product strategies and decision-making. When analyzing case studies, having a clear framework helps extract key insights. Here are four steps to structure your analysis:

Evaluate the Need

• What customer problem does the product solve?
• How was the need validated through research?
• What metrics indicate the market size and demand?

Validate the Solution

• How does the product solution address the key pain points?
• Were experiments and prototypes done to validate assumptions?
• What early traction or usage metrics demonstrate solution fit?

Set Goals and KPIs

• What key goals and objectives guide the product roadmap?
• How do key performance indicators track progress towards goals?
• What metrics align to the customer and business goals?

Evaluate Decisions and Outcomes

• What key decisions shaped the product strategy and features?
• How did experiments and iterations impact the product direction?
• What final business and customer results were achieved?

Using this structure ensures you gather insights across the product lifecycle - from identifying needs, defining solutions, to measuring outcomes. Analyzing case studies this way quickly reveals the key decisions and strategies behind a product's success.

What are the 4 types of case study?

Case studies are an effective way to showcase examples of successful product management strategies and provide valuable insights into real-world scenarios. There are four main types of case studies:

Illustrative Case Studies

These provide a descriptive overview of a product, business, or industry. They tell the story of a product's development, struggles and successes. Illustrative case studies help set the scene and provide context.

Exploratory Case Studies

Also known as pilot case studies, these are condensed case studies performed before implementing a large scale investigation. They aim to gather preliminary data and help determine the focus, design and feasibility of a larger case study.

Cumulative Case Studies

These aggregate quantitative information from several sites or sources. They compile data in order to answer a research question, like assessing the performance of a product across a variety of markets.

Critical Instance Case Studies

These examine a single instance of intense interest. They provide valuable insights from a business success or failure. For product managers, these help illustrate how even minor details can impact product adoption and performance.

How to prepare for case study interview for product manager?

Preparing for a case study interview as a product manager candidate requires focused preparation across four key areas:

Understanding the Case Study

• Research the company, product, industry, and business context thoroughly to identify potential issues and scenarios the case study may present.
• Review your knowledge of key product management frameworks like market sizing, PRD writing, prioritization matrices, and financial modeling to brush up on core competencies.

Knowing the Interviewers

• Understand the background and seniority level of the interviewers. More senior panelists may expect more strategic thinking vs tactical execution.
• Identify any particular viewpoint an interviewer may bring given their role - engineering, design, growth, etc.

Setting Assumptions

• Clarify any assumptions you can make about the case details upfront instead of getting derailed later.
• Be ready to set limitations around scope, resources, timelines, budgets, or success metrics if not explicitly provided.

Applying Strategy

• Use an open-ended, discovery-based approach for broad business challenges without an obvious solution path.
• Leverage a more narrow, focused analytical strategy for executional cases with clearer parameters.

Following this four-step approach when preparing for a case study interview enables product manager candidates to systematically evaluate the situation, tailor their approach, and demonstrate strong analytical abilities sought after in PMs. The ability to clarify, strategize, and execute under ambiguity is what interviewers look for.

Product Development Case Studies

This section features examples of innovative and user-focused product development processes that led to successful outcomes.

Apple iPod's Intuitive Design Principles

Apple's development of the iPod is a great case study for simple, intuitive product design centered around understanding user needs. When Apple was developing the iPod, they focused extensively on the user experience and identifying pain points in existing MP3 players.

Some key insights that guided the iPod's design:

• Users wanted to easily carry their whole music library with them
• Managing and scrolling through huge song libraries was tedious
• Existing players had complex, confusing controls

To address these issues, Apple designed the click wheel interface to make scrolling through songs incredibly simple and fast. The intuitive menu system also made adding songs easy. And using a compact, hard drive-based design allowed the iPod to store thousands of songs so users could carry their whole library.

The end result was a revolutionary product that felt almost magical to use because it understood and solved core user needs so well. The iPod's intuitive design shows how focusing on user experience over specs can lead to market-defining products.

Iterative Improvement in Google Maps

Google Maps exemplifies a data-driven, iterative approach to product improvement. After launching Maps in 2005, Google constantly monitored usage metrics and user feedback to guide improvements.

Some key iterative changes:

• Added more business information and integrated reviews after seeing people search for places
• Improved driving directions with features like traffic data and alternative routes based on user complaints
• Added Street View and walking directions to address user needs beyond just driving

This methodical improvement process, driven by real user data, allowed Google Maps to completely dominate digital mapping and navigation despite strong competition from established players like MapQuest early on.

The ongoing success of Google Maps highlights that launching the perfect product out of the gate is nearly impossible - you need an iterative process fueled by usage metrics and user input.

Amazon Kindle: Filling the Market Gap

The Amazon Kindle provides an excellent case study in identifying and addressing gaps in existing markets. The Kindle team realized there were no truly great hardware devices focused exclusively on long-form reading.

They saw an opportunity to create a better reading experience by analyzing pain points with physical books:

• Books can be heavy and bulky during travel
• Finding new books means physically going to stores
• Paying for individual books adds up in cost

To solve these user problems, Amazon designed the Kindle ereader hardware to be extremely portable while giving on-demand access to Amazon's massive ebook library.

Additionally, they offered subscriptions and cheaper pricing models for digital content through the Kindle Store ecosystem. This revolutionary approach filled the market gap for dedicated digital reading hardware and content delivery that consumers were waiting for.

The runaway success of Kindle highlights the opportunities in understanding pain points with current solutions and addressing them with innovative new products.

Product Management Case Study Framework

Case studies provide invaluable insights into real-world applications of product management best practices. By analyzing examples of successful and failed product launches, product managers can identify effective frameworks to guide strategic decision-making. This section explores key frameworks evident across product management case studies and how cross-functional teams, market validation techniques, and lean principles contribute to positive outcomes.

Utilizing Cross-Functional Teams

Collaborative teams comprising diverse expertise increase the likelihood of creating products that effectively solve customer needs. Case studies demonstrate that supporting collaboration between product managers, engineers, designers, and business stakeholders leads to:

• Enhanced understanding of customer problems
• Validation of product solutions against real user needs
• Improved transparency and buy-in across organizations

For example, the case study XYZ shows that increased coordination between product and engineering during development boosted software quality by 34%. Similarly, early designer inclusion at ACME refined the user interface and improved conversion rates after launch.

Market Research and Validation

Case studies consistently highlight the importance of upfront market analysis and continuous customer validation to create successful products. Common factors include:

• Comprehensive competitor analysis to identify market white space
• Dedicated qualitative and quantitative market research around problem/solution fit
• Multiple rounds of prototype tests with target users at each product stage gate

The case study for 123Workforce illustrates this. By gathering over 500 customer discovery interviews, the product validated strong demand for a new employee scheduling tool. This market validation supported business case approval to build an MVP.

Lean Product Development Techniques

Case studies demonstrate that lean principles enable effective product iteration based on real user feedback versus internal assumptions. Specifically:

• Minimum viable product (MVP) releases help fail fast and cheaply
• Continuous build-measure-learn loops rapidly incorporate user inputs
• Evidence-based prioritization focuses on the highest customer value features

For example, PlanHub’s early MVP launch gathered inputs from initial users to refine core features rather than overinvesting upfront. This lean approach facilitated quicker time-to-market and product-market fit.

In summary, case study analysis provides frameworks to help product managers incorporate cross-functional participation, customer validation, and lean methods for successful product outcomes.

Product Launch and Marketing Case Studies

This section highlights creative, strategic product launches and marketing initiatives that generated significant consumer interest.

Dropbox's Innovative Referral Program

Dropbox pioneered referral marketing in the SaaS industry with its onboarding flow that rewarded users for sharing the product. This helped Dropbox rapidly acquire customers in a capital-efficient way in the early stages.

Some key aspects of Dropbox's referral scheme that made it effective:

• Frictionless sharing: Users could easily access a unique referral link to share Dropbox with friends and family. The seamless referral integration incentivized sharing.
• Reward structure: Both referrer and referee got extra storage space for signing up, appealing to primary needs of users.
• Virality: Strong incentive structure combined with easy sharing options enabled Dropbox's impressive viral coefficient.

The referral program strategy supported Dropbox's rapid user base growth and helped establish it as a leading file hosting/sharing SaaS application.

Leveraging Slack's Freemium Model

Slack employed a tactical shift from a paid-only model to a freemium pricing strategy. This opened doors for viral enterprise adoption by allowing teams to try Slack's communication software for free up to a usage limit.

Key aspects that made Slack's freemium work:

• Generous free tier: The free version provided enough value for small teams to collaborate. This established stickiness.
• Self-service signup: Smooth self-service signup enabled easy adoption by businesses without sales interaction.
• Virality features: Free teams could invite other free teams, propagating usage. Upgrades were natural with business growth.

Enabling teams to try the product risk-free via the freemium version supported Slack's rapid business growth . It helped position Slack for success in the team communication software market.

Peloton's Premium Positioning

Peloton pioneered the high-tech fitness bike concept with integrated digital content. Its marketing focused on positioning Peloton as a premium product to justify the $2000+ pricing.

Strategic aspects of Peloton's positioning:

• Targeted high-income consumers who valued premium brands as status symbols. This supported the elevated pricing.
• Curated aspirational brand content around exclusive lifestyles to promote product desire. Raked in sales despite pricing.
• Stimulated engagement via leaderboards and social features to lock in recurring subscription revenue.

The premium marketing positioning strategy enabled Peloton to drive rapid sales growth despite its high ticket prices relative to traditional exercise bikes.

Product Management Case Study Interview Insights

Case study interviews are a crucial part of the product management interview process. They allow candidates to demonstrate their analytical thinking, problem-solving abilities, and understanding of user experience best practices. Preparing for case study questions and mastering methods like the STAR approach can help PM candidates stand out.

Mastering the STAR Method

The STAR method is an effective framework for structuring responses to case study interview questions. STAR stands for:

• Situation - Set the context by concisely outlining the background of the case study.
• Task - Describe the problem you need to solve or goals you need to achieve.
• Action - Explain the step-by-step process you would take to address the situation. Show your analytical approach.
• Result - Share the outcome of your proposed actions and how they achieve the desired goals. Quantify the impact if possible.

Using the STAR method demonstrates you can methodically break down complex issues and drive towards solutions. When executed well, it highlights critical PM skills like prioritization, metrics-driven thinking, and cross-functional collaboration .

Analytical Thinking and Problem-Solving

Case study interviews evaluate your comfort with ambiguity and your capacity to structure unclear problems. Interviewers look for analytical thinking - your ability to synthesize data, identify root causes, and balance tradeoffs.

Shine a light on your analytical abilities by:

• Asking clarifying questions before diving into solutions
• Mapping out all stakeholders and components of the system
• Determining which metrics are most important and relevant to track
• Proposing hypotheses before making decisions
• Quantifying the impact of your recommendations with estimates

This showcases your aptitude for breaking down and solving complex product challenges.

Highlighting User Experience Outcomes

While analytics are crucial, PMs must balance quantitative rigor with qualitative empathy. Case studies let you demonstrate user centricity - evaluating ideas through the user's eyes.

To highlight UX sensibilities, discuss how your solutions:

• Simplify or improve key user flows
• Reduce friction during onboarding
• Increase retention by solving pain points
• Improve satisfaction via new delighters

This underscores the customer value created and your ability to advocate for users. Quantify improvements to showcase your user focus.

Ongoing Product Management Case Studies

This section focuses on outstanding examples of continually evolving products by listening to users and proactively addressing their needs.

Duolingo: Mastering App Gamification

Duolingo has refined their app over time to balance user enjoyment and motivation to drive engagement. For example, they introduced timed practice sessions and streak bonuses to incentivize daily use. They also gamified the experience with virtual rewards and levels to make language learning fun. As a result, Duolingo has over 500 million downloads and has become the world's most popular language learning app. Their case demonstrates the value of continually optimizing gamification elements based on usage data.

Amazon: A Culture of Customer Obsession

Amazon's customer-centric culture focuses on constant refinement of the user experience. For example, they use customer feedback and behavior data to surface relevant products and recommendations. They also optimize delivery speed and convenience through initiatives like Prime and same-day delivery. This obsession with understanding and serving customers has helped Amazon dominate multiple industries online. Product teams can learn from Amazon's disciplined approach of aggregating signals from users and translating insights into interface improvements.

Uber: Strategic Market Expansion

Rather than rapidly expanding globally, Uber tailored its rollout strategy city-by-city. This allowed them to adapt their product and operations to address local needs. For example, they integrated cash payments in India where credit card use is lower. They also customized promotions and subsidies by market to balance growth and profitability. Uber's patient but deliberate expansion enabled sustainable gains that a rushed, untargeted strategy may have compromised. Their expansion playbook demonstrates the merits of crafting versatile products that serve regional variations.

Key Takeaways and Best Practices

The product management case studies explored demonstrate several essential insights and best practices:

The Centrality of User-Centricity

Deep understanding of user needs and putting the customer first were critical success factors across many examples. Companies that made user research and testing core to their process were best able to refine their offerings.

The Power of Continuous Iteration

Few companies got their product right from day one. The most effective demonstrated a commitment to constant iteration based on user feedback rather than striving for perfection at launch.

Innovative Strategies in Action

We saw clever approaches to pricing, promotion and user acquisition. For example, one company offered free plans to students to drive adoption and another used influencer campaigns on social media to increase awareness.

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7 Product Management Case Studies To Live and Learn By

Product strategy case study

Product manager interview case study examples, bonus: two more resources you didn’t know you needed.

You will have some successes and make some mistakes. That is ok. The point is to learn from your mistakes, adapt and continuously improve.

For any product manager working in an Agile environment, this philosophy works pretty well with the iterative approach that Scrum and its related methodologies encourage. But, it is also worth learning from others who have been ‘doing’ in environments similar to yours. 

Why make avoidable mistakes when you can learn from what’s worked well for other product managers?

To help out with that, we’ve put together a collection of product management case studies. 

Want to learn from other product managers with remote teams? Looking for tips on the best way to prioritize ? Then we have you covered.

Get started with product management templates

.css-uphcpb{position:absolute;left:0;top:-87px;} 7 product management case studies and examples of product management in action

Roadmaps and prioritization case studies.

Where better place to start than the holy grail of product management excellence, roadmaps and prioritization techniques?

Prioritization and roadmapping may be interdependent, but they still serve very different functions. Your roadmap is ‘when you will build’ and your prioritization list tends to be ‘what you will build’ within that time frame. These two product management case studies focus on how teams used airfocus to improve their processes and productivity.

Aligning your roadmap and agreeing to your prioritizations is a mission-critical component of successful product teams. Our client, Mirrorweb , is an archiving solution provider that assists its clients with compliance requirements — and is a fantastic case study of how roadmapping and prioritization can make a product team more effective. 

Jamie Hoyle, the VP of Product needed to achieve two key objectives:

Visualize project management trade-offs and effort.

Make quantitative product decisions collectively and collaboratively.

Jamie chose airfocus based on a few stand-out features:

Easy to update and share roadmaps . This was an improvement from their previous situation, where their roadmap was updated monthly. 

Scoring matrix. This ranks features by relative effort and customer value. Bonus: It works in real-time, and you can customize your settings based on feedback loops.

New features, technical debt and client requests can be attributed to the roadmap to easily measure impact.

With airfocus, the Mirrorweb team was able to work with greater clarity and communication, despite moving into a fully remote set-up.

Then there’s NAMOA Digital , an end-to-end process management software solutions provider. NAMOA Digital’s team faced similar challenges related to roadmaps and prioritization. André Cardoso and the rest of his business solutions team knew that they had to solve a few key issues, including:

Lack of a strategically structured and prioritized request list.

No process for deciding where to invest the team’s resources. 

Missing an efficient and collaborative prioritization process.

No easy method to share roadmap decisions or align the whole organization with an agreed product strategy .

Andre was using excel formulas to create his prioritization criteria and kanban boards for workflows. By switching to airfocus , he was able to simplify and optimize the product management process with these key features:

Consolidated roadmap and prioritization list in an easy-to-access tool.

Customizable prioritization. Set your own total priority calculation with adjustable criteria, making deciding what to build next a breeze. Teams can contribute to the business goals or criteria.

Ask any world-class PM , and they’ll tell you that product strategies are a framework , not a ‘vision’. Frameworks are more useful when they are tangible and that’s why your product strategy should work to inform your roadmap, objectives, key results ( OKR ) and ultimately your backlog too.

Tech travel company, Almundo, transformed into a product-driven company with product-led growth by defining its strategy first. Their Head of Product, Franco Fagioli, approached setting the product strategy in a pragmatic way by asking the right questions: 

What is our organization’s purpose?

Where is our playground? Think segment, vertical, and channels.

How will we succeed? Define your approach by picking your Porter strategy . Will lower cost, differentiation, or focus be more valuable for your product, for example?

What capabilities do we need now? What skills will be required to deliver against the strategy and who do you know you can provide them?

What systems do we need? Are you going with Slack or Teams? What will be your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system?

An insight for Almundo’s team was to recognize that the answers to these questions existed at different levels within their organization. Almundo's three levels needed to be merged into one framework. 

Corporate level

Strategic Group level

Individual Business level

Your team can tweak this approach according to the complexity of your set-up. In Almundo’s case, the team chose an iterative approach that combined the inputs into one roadmap. The roadmap covered their objectives, key results (OKR) and backlog.

So what does this product management case study teach us about product strategy?

Define your North Star . Start at the top and go through each level.

Prioritize and define . Keep OKRs minimal. A good guide is to stick to three objectives for the next quarter. Don’t add any KRs that you don't really need. Think like Mari Kondo.

Quarterly planning meetings . To start, these will cover future plans. Once you have the first quarter behind you, you can include learnings and results.

When you have a clear strategy in place, take a look at the elements related to delivering on that strategy . As you probably noticed, having good tools can make or break the creation and implementation of your strategic goals.

Cut through the clutter of PM Content with our bi-weekly digest

Remote product management case study.

Oriflame is a long-standing airfocus client . They are a remote-working beauty brand with a presence in 60 countries. Although this global spread can add value in some ways, Product Managing Director, Joakim Wissing, was struggling to communicate his product strategy across a business that was divided into silos.

By implementing airfocus, he solved his two key issues:

A lack of cohesion and inconsistent understanding of the product strategy .

A reactive approach to project prioritization.

airfocus offered Joakim and his team solutions they couldn't get from their existing software.

Setting business values. Leaders can compare the value and costs of projects.

Strategic remote collaboration. Teams can think ahead by planning the year’s priorities with remote games of Priority Poker . The results are integrated into one system that makes them easy to share, access and update.

Integration. airfocus has two-way Azure DevOps integration. This means that features, epics and stories are continuously synced and remotely accessible.

Increased transparency. Agile methodologies tend to function best in organizations that have a culture of transparency and good communication. Great tools will help your organization increase these critical components.

Product prototyping case study

Whether you are doing your first prototype to test market fit or using prototypes to test out new features, it is worth checking in on how other teams approach this phase.

For Agile teams, one of the best product management case studies is the prototyping method used by the team working on a prototype for the Barbican, a highly-regarded arts and culture center in London.

The team worked over one sprint of two weeks to produce a prototype that combined the Barbican’s scattered ecosystem of various event advertising apps and a booking website . Their objective was to solve existing problems by creating one native app/website with all event information and ticket booking.

While the team had no distinct role definitions, Emily Peta, a UX designer , managed the workflow and the process stages. With one sprint to work with, the team still made sure to follow a comprehensive process that covered a number of crucial stages:

Competitor analysis

First, Emily’s team explored existing solutions that they could adapt for quick wins.

Keep your product strategy in mind, however, and remember what your brand stands for.

Remember Instagram trying to be TikTok? That was not a good look (and it wasn’t well received).

Product and user definition

The team then conducted ten user interviews and screening surveys to get an understanding of what people wanted from an exhibition app. Their affinity diagram highlighted three distinct phases:

Before: Users want to look for interesting exhibitions and book to see them.

During: Everything users want to do once they arrive at the exhibition.

After: Users want to share photos and leave reviews.

Considering their time constraints, they wisely focused on the ‘during’ phase and chose to answer one question: ‘How can we improve the experience of the user during an exhibition?’

To start finding solutions to this question, Emily and her team created:

One user persona (and while this is a good start, depending on your audience, you will likely need more than one).

Outcome statement. A good outcome statement should provide answers to these loose categories:

Next up, the team mapped out the user flow for the persona. This is an important high-level flow, so don’t skip it out. This user flow was used to plan the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) features along with a few other inputs and prioritization games like Crazy Eights. The outcome here was a focused list of features to start prototyping.

Technical requirements

Before moving into prototyping, it helps to consider the technical requirements that might affect your product. In this case, to meet the Barbican’s ‘during’ requirements, the solution needed to use Bluetooth and GPS for people on the go, so the decision was made to build an app and not a website.

Speeding through this stage — or worse, not doing it at all — can quickly send the development process off course.

Prototyping and testing

Finally, Emily and her team were ready to create low-fidelity mockups, testing them with users and then iterating based on the feedback. This is not a purely linear process, so look at it as a feedback loop: iterate, iterate, iterate but know when to stop.

Once the team was satisfied that the lo-fi prototype was good to go as an MVP, they mocked it up in InVision as a high-fidelity, interactive prototype that could be used for further testing and briefing build teams.

This is probably one of the best times to embrace the ‘fail fast’ philosophy. Being precious about prototypes defeats the purpose. Be ready to make mistakes and improve based on your learnings.

Customer/user feedback case study

It’s never too early to start listening to customers and/or users, and there are a whole bunch of ways to do this at different stages. For any team that has a product in the market already, real-time user analytics is super important to feedback into your decision-making processes.

Gumtree, an established trading website, has a wide range of products and customers. They needed a robust, real-time reporting tool to help them understand the requirements of so many different user types.

Sax Cucvara, Gumtree’s analytics manager chose Qualaroo based on the tool's ability to provide:

Segmentation . Gumtree was able to segment users by category, location and interest.

Easy implementation. The team could set up granular surveys in no time, getting real-time results to feedback back into feature iterations.

Customer feedback is important, so make sure you are getting quality feedback regularly. Tools like airfocus Portal and AI Assist , can make collecting and analyzing feedback much easier and less time-consuming.

Backlog prioritization case study

Rounding off our list of product management case studies, we’re back to the story of an airfocus client and what other teams can learn from them.

As any product manager knows, prioritizing your backlog is just as important as prioritizing your roadmap. Getting these aligned and in an easy-to-share format can save your team time and effort.

Our client, Flowe, is a digital bank subsidiary of Italy’s Banca Mediolanum. Marco Santoni is the data product manager on their Data Platform team and manages the internal product from features to analytics.

One of Flowe’s key challenges came from the Azure DevOps system's inability to prioritize their backlog. They frequently had over 150 ‘new’ items at any given time and no objective way to prioritize the tickets. After looking into a few tools, Marco went with airfocus because it offered:

Seamless integration with Azure DevOps. You can import existing roadmaps.

Priority Poker . Teams and stakeholders can collaboratively prioritize their backlog against three KPIs: development effort, business value, and productivity.

Real-Time results for ‘quick wins’ and ‘don't dos’ are based on prioritized scoring.

By implementing airfocus, the Flowe team can present their roadmap to the entire company weekly. This aligns everyone against a common goal and ensures increased transparency.

Product management is a team game. Having a transparent and collaborative approach is even more important in the current remote working era. airfocus facilitates easy and open collaboration across teams and geographies.

Interested in streamlining your processes and turning objective prioritization into a company-wide goal? Chat to our team for a demo.

When interviewing for a product manager position , you'll often be asked about various case studies you were involved in. Of course, it's good to have a few stories on hand and to know what kinds of questions to anticipate during these interviews. 

Here are a few product manager interview case study questions you might get.

How would you prioritize these features for this product?

You may be asked how you would prioritize certain features for an imagined or real product. For example, say a new smartphone is coming out, and the goal is to launch with three new features. 

How do you determine which feature to complete first, second, and third, and which can be sacrificed to finish the others? 

If you run into this sort of question, it's important to ensure you have all of the relevant information, such as the target demographic, what has made the product successful in the past, etc. So ask questions, or imply that you would collect the answers to these questions and then work from there. 

How would you suggest we launch this product in a new region?

Another question you might be asked during a product management case study for PM interview is how you would launch a product in a new region . Again, this question pertains to a real-world example, so it's important to have a solid answer prepared. 

It can be helpful to start by collecting more information from the interviewer or explaining what information you would collect. Then, formulate a strategy . That strategy could include specific features you would introduce, marketing campaigns you would engage in, and more. 

How would you improve our in-app messenger?

Sometimes, you may be asked something very specific, like how you would improve an in-app feature that already exists. As you may have guessed, you want to glean as much information from the interviewer as possible or state which information you would collect. 

Then, list some potential strategies based on your experience. What kinds of features would you launch or remove ? Would you prioritize performance, response times, etc.? How would you manage a budget? Lean on your past knowledge and experience to help you answer the specific question at hand.

Want to know about solutions to future problems that you didn’t even know exist yet? We can help you out with even more product management case studies for that. Dig in here.

Starting a new product management job and wondering how to approach your first few months?

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Table of Contents

Product management case study with solution: how to solve the crm marketing case study.

• May 26, 2022

Here’s some good news: You don’t need years of experience to come up with an impressive Product Manager case study solution that will get you hired. If you’ve read our ultimate guide on  how to solve a Product Manager case study , you know any that case study question can be solved in four simple steps: 

• Evaluate the need 
• Validate the need 
• Set a goal for the feature
• Decision making

Keep in mind that your case study solution should be situational and contextual to the company your interviewing for. The above steps can help you get it right. 

With that in mind, how do you solve CRM Marketing case studies? Read on for a product management case study with solution walkthrough by one of our Product Gym coaches, Cody Chang , to give you a practical idea. 

We recommend you try solving the case study along with us : think about the questions first, then compare your own product manager case study solution with what we propose. Here’s what we’ll cover:

CRM Marketing Case Study Prompt 

While conducting customer interviews, you discover that service professionals (pros) get a lot of inbound phone calls they aren’t always able to answer right away. For these customers, service pros not getting back to these calls quickly can result in lost business. 

Determine whether you should bring a solution to market. If you do, what does this solution look like and what steps would you take to get it to market? In a 1–3 page document or several slides, outline the steps you’d take to go from zero to one on this idea and bring it to market. 

Here are some things to consider (not exhaustive): 

• How do you validate the problem exists? 
• How do you validate the solution? 
• What is your solution? 
• How do you bring the solution to market? 
• How do you know if it’s successful or not? 
• Who are your key stakeholders? 
• How do you monetize this solution? 

You will need to make a variety of assumptions throughout this exercise, please state those assumptions in your document. Please plan to spend no more than two hours on this exercise and send it back to me at least three hours ahead of our scheduled time. 

Want to follow along as you read the case study solution? Get more insight by watching the full presentation walk-through:

Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 1

To get started, let’s recap the information above in a simplified form: 

• Company:  A CRM marketing tool. 
• What they do:  Connect tradespeople with leads. 
• Problem:  The tool is getting leads to the tradespeople, but they are not answering leads. 

In this scenario, we’re imagining a service professional, such as an HVAC technician, electrician, or plumber, who has the CRM tool installed on their phone or computer. However, though customer leads are pinging them, calling, or providing their information on a form, the service professionals are not getting back to them. 

Like with everything in product management, always start with the user when solving Product Manager case study interview questions. You should have a clear idea of the user persona, their needs, and their pain points. 

In this case, there are three different parties involved: 

1. The person that needs help

In this case, the customer making the call needs help. We can further group them in terms of urgency: 

• Immediate and needs their problem fixed as soon as possible (“ The toilet pipe in my bathroom just burst!” )
• Mid-level and can be solved within the week ( “My refrigerator is leaking some water but I can probably put a towel over it.” )
• Important but not urgent ( “My dishwasher’s door handle is loose and may fall off soon.” )

2. The service professional 

• This group would like to be matched with quality jobs such as those that pay well and don’t take too much of their time. 

3. The company/third party technician

• The CRM company is responsible for ensuring the service professionals receives qualified leads, i.e., you as the Product Manager or the company representative. 

Assumptions

Exploring the user personas above brings to light some assumptions we are making as a Product Manager. This is a stated requirement in this question, but make sure to include them early on in your Product Manager case study presentation, whether outlined or not. 

In this case, some early assumptions we are making are: 

• All leads are received by the service person but they are choosing to ignore them — it is not a technical problem such as the CRM’s servers being down. The company likely has already troubleshot for this. 
• The end-user, or the person in need, is going through a process to request help — could be a form or email routed through the CRM. 
• A qualified lead is a customer that has an actual need that requires a professional. 
• Calls are equal to an service professional request and not just general inquiries or exploratory calls. 

There are a lot of assumptions you could add to the list above. Many come to you as you solve your case study questions, so keep an open-ended list as you unpack your solution. 

Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 2

Next, we need to validate the need . Here is where the data and metrics come in. If we think about the problem as a funnel, these questions come up in our analytics:

• What is the follow-up % that has been made already to missed calls? 
• How many follow-ups per missed call are there? 
• How many missed calls per service professional or per request? 
• Of the missed calls/callbacks, how many resulted in business/closes? 

It is possible to confirm that there is an actual problem from the above analytics. In this case, the data shows that the service professionals are following up on requests, but they are doing it too late. So, we want to unpack why the service professional is not responding to the requests on time.

Could it be that the leads come in when they are too busy to answer? Or maybe they are not quality leads? This is where the next step comes in. 

Product Management Case Study Solution: Step 3

Now that the need is validated, we can now work through the possible solutions to the problems outlined. Remember to keep the user in mind to ensure you are solving their pain points. 

In this section, you should list down all possible solutions or Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). 

Solve to Qualify the Leads

• What is their location radius? 
• What budget are they willing to work with?
• What is their area of expertise? 

This filter solves the need for the qualification of leads. 

If a service professional receives a qualified lead but still does not respond to it, it’s time to think about the next problem that the leads come in when they are too busy to answer. This brings us to our second solution:

Reminder for a Service Professional to Follow up 

This involves an auto dialler or auto-reminder. It could be through an email, text, or dashboard notification on the CRM’s desktop or mobile app. This needs to be done in a timely way and should prompt them to take action. This could be a CRM tool on its own where the information from the request form is sent to a ticketing system where the service professional can see it listed. 

Redirect Requests

Another solution would be for the service professionals to bid on requests, or have the option to redirect the request to another person. 

A service professional can choose to take the request or forward it to another person if they are unavailable. Also, a lead is automatically redirected to another service professional if the request is not responded to within a certain period. This could also incentivize the service professionals to respond quickly otherwise they lose business. 

Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 4

Now you need to make the key decisions that will inform your presentation. Here’s what you should nail down: 

Designs/ Wireframes/ Areas of Improvement 

If your case study requires designs, consider where you would make the above changes in the CRM interface. What or how would you change the interaction model to achieve success? 

Pictures do speak louder than words, and as a Product Manager, your designs should do the same. The best way to ensure that everybody understands your product is to include wireframes and preliminary designs in your presentation. 

In this case, being an isolated design, we would draw out the forms that the end-users and service professionals would use. For the latter, a mobile-phone wireframe is probably best, given that the users are constantly out in the field. 

Case Study Presentation Pro Tip

If you are working on a product that already exists for your PM case study question, embed your solution within the product’s actual design to earn extra points. Google the product to find images of its interface and consider how you would change the interactions with the user to meet the requirements of the case study or achieve greater success. 

Engineering/User Stories 

Your Product Manager case study presentation will also include the user stories that the engineer would need to build the product. Here is an example of the stories for this product: 

As an end-user, I want to send my request to a service professional about my “problem” so that they can call me back. 

Acceptance criteria: 

Show header text: Request for service professional 

• Subtext: Describe your problem
• Show text field for the user, limit it to 500 characters 
• Toilet leak 
• Show scrubber tool of budget min and max 

Data/Analytics

The next part is all about the numbers: 

• Form completion rate (open/start vs. submit) 
• Form completion time 
• Click through on the form from service professionals 
• Accept vs. reject rate of calls and forms 
• Number of completed forms 
• Number of returned or answered calls 
• Number of closed leads 
• Number of reviews/ net promoter score (NPS) 
• Number of form rejections by service professionals 
• Qualified vs. unqualified leads 
• Number of unanswered qualified leads 

Future Iterations 

If you were successful in your MVP release, what later iterations would you have to further improve this product? Write them down in the form of a user story. 

Just like we did in the step above, try creating your own user stories for this section. Make sure that your stories are based on a marketplace. 

Potential Challenges 

To come up with potential challenges, think about the product lifecycle and its release: 

• Where do you feel that there would be a difficulty? 
• How would you solve it? 

This is the slide of your Product Manager case study solution to showcase your prior Product Manager experience and expertise. This part of your answer allows you to showcase to your interviewer that you are a retrospective Product Manager who reviews the data of your past launches and applies the learnings in the future. 

For example, a Product Manager with a business operations background would have a unique point of view on the questions above: 

• Challenge 1: Service professionals may not be properly trained to handle missed calls or access the information on the forms.
• Challenge 2: End-users may have a problem communicating the depth or scope of the problem because they are not professionals. 

There are many more potential challenges that may come up. Be sure to add all the ones that are relevant to your product. 

Executive Summary 

This is the last section of the Product Manager Case study presentation. Here is where you outline all the parts of your case study. Not everyone is going to pay attention as you go through your presentation, so the executive summary gives them a chance to “catch up” on your process and solution. 

Briefly outline: 

• What you know/don’t know
• Assumptions 
• Validation of the problem 
• The solution 
• How to measure success or how you would pivot 

In this question’s case: 

• No technical issues 
• (all other assumptions you generated) 
• MVP = Create a form to validate lead quality. 
• Number of completed forms, calls answered or followed up, closed business. 

Remember to incorporate the questions asked in the prompt in your summary. Be careful not to leave out any information that is important to solving the question. 

Ace Your Product Manager Case Study Solution and Presentation

There you have it, a step-by-step breakdown of how to solve your next Product Manager case study. Need more practice solving case studies for product management? Here’s our ultimate guide on case study questions , complete with case study question examples by topic.

If you still need help solving your case study, ​​ schedule a free call with us. We will walk you through possible first impressions, solutions, and presentations that may come in handy in your next Product Manager interview. 

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So, today we are bringing you a product management practice case study of LinkedIn with a Problem Statement, Skills Evaluated, Approach, and Sample Answer.  

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Problem Statement: Enhance the LinkedIn platform to mitigate user churn resulting from suboptimal content quality

Skills Evaluated: Problem-solving, Analytical, Communication, User Empathy, Technical Knowledge

Read: 10 Trickiest Product Management Interview Questions Asked

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Long COVID or Post-COVID Conditions

Some people who have been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can experience long-term effects from their infection, known as Long COVID or Post-COVID Conditions (PCC). Long COVID is broadly defined as signs, symptoms, and conditions that continue or develop after acute COVID-19 infection. This definition  of Long COVID was developed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in collaboration with CDC and other partners.

People call Long COVID by many names, including Post-COVID Conditions, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, long-term effects of COVID, and chronic COVID. The term post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC) is also used to refer to a subset of Long COVID.

What You Need to Know

• Long COVID is a real illness and can result in chronic conditions that require comprehensive care. There are resources available .
• Long COVID can include a wide range of ongoing health problems; these conditions can last weeks, months, or years.
• Long COVID occurs more often in people who had severe COVID-19 illness, but anyone who has been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can experience it.
• People who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 and become infected may have a higher risk of developing Long COVID compared to people who have been vaccinated.
• People can be reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, multiple times. Each time a person is infected or reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, they have a risk of developing Long COVID.
• While most people with Long COVID have evidence of infection or COVID-19 illness, in some cases, a person with Long COVID may not have tested positive for the virus or known they were infected.
• CDC and partners are working to understand more about who experiences Long COVID and why, including whether groups disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 are at higher risk.

In July 2021, Long COVID was added as a recognized condition that could result in a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Learn more: Guidance on “Long COVID” as a Disability Under the ADA .

About Long COVID

Long COVID is a wide range of new, returning, or ongoing health problems that people experience after being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. Most people with COVID-19 get better within a few days to a few weeks after infection, so at least 4 weeks after infection is the start of when Long COVID could first be identified. Anyone who was infected can experience Long COVID. Most people with Long COVID experienced symptoms days after first learning they had COVID-19, but some people who later experienced Long COVID did not know when they got infected.

There is no test that determines if your symptoms or condition is due to COVID-19. Long COVID is not one illness. Your healthcare provider considers a diagnosis of Long COVID based on your health history, including if you had a diagnosis of COVID-19 either by a positive test or by symptoms or exposure, as well as based on a health examination.

Science behind Long COVID

RECOVER: Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery

People with Long COVID may experience many symptoms.

People with Long COVID can have a wide range of symptoms that can last weeks, months, or even years after infection. Sometimes the symptoms can even go away and come back again. For some people, Long COVID can last weeks, months, or years after COVID-19 illness and can sometimes result in disability.

Long COVID may not affect everyone the same way. People with Long COVID may experience health problems from different types and combinations of symptoms that may emerge, persist, resolve, and reemerge over different lengths of time. Though most patients’ symptoms slowly improve with time, speaking with your healthcare provider about the symptoms you are experiencing after having COVID-19 could help determine if you might have Long COVID.

People who experience Long COVID most commonly report:

General symptoms ( Not a Comprehensive List)

• Tiredness or fatigue that interferes with daily life
• Symptoms that get worse after physical or mental effort (also known as “ post-exertional malaise ”)

Respiratory and heart symptoms

• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)

Neurological symptoms

• Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
• Sleep problems
• Dizziness when you stand up (lightheadedness)
• Pins-and-needles feelings
• Change in smell or taste
• Depression or anxiety

Digestive symptoms

• Stomach pain

Other symptoms

• Joint or muscle pain
• Changes in menstrual cycles

Symptoms that are hard to explain and manage

Some people with Long COVID have symptoms that are not explained by tests or easy to manage.

People with Long COVID may develop or continue to have symptoms that are hard to explain and manage. Clinical evaluations and results of routine blood tests, chest X-rays, and electrocardiograms may be normal. The symptoms are similar to those reported by people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and other poorly understood chronic illnesses that may occur after other infections. People with these unexplained symptoms may be misunderstood by their healthcare providers, which can result in a delay in diagnosis and receiving the appropriate care or treatment.

Review these tips to help prepare for a healthcare provider appointment for Long COVID.

Health conditions

Some people experience new health conditions after COVID-19 illness.

Some people, especially those who had severe COVID-19, experience multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions with symptoms lasting weeks, months, or even years after COVID-19 illness. Multi-organ effects can involve many body systems, including the heart, lung, kidney, skin, and brain. As a result of these effects, people who have had COVID-19 may be more likely to develop new health conditions such as diabetes, heart conditions, blood clots, or neurological conditions compared with people who have not had COVID-19.

People experiencing any severe illness may develop health problems

People experiencing any severe illness, hospitalization, or treatment may develop problems such as post-intensive care syndrome (PICS).

PICS refers to the health effects that may begin when a person is in an intensive care unit (ICU), and which may persist after a person returns home. These effects can include muscle weakness, problems with thinking and judgment, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder  (PTSD), a long-term reaction to a very stressful event. While PICS is not specific to infection with SARS-CoV-2, it may occur and contribute to the person’s experience of Long COVID. For people who experience PICS following a COVID-19 diagnosis, it is difficult to determine whether these health problems are caused by a severe illness, the virus itself, or a combination of both.

People More Likely to Develop Long COVID

Some people may be more at risk for developing Long COVID.

Researchers are working to understand which people or groups of people are more likely to have Long COVID, and why. Studies have shown that some groups of people may be affected more by Long COVID. These are examples and not a comprehensive list of people or groups who might be more at risk than other groups for developing Long COVID:

• People who have experienced more severe COVID-19 illness, especially those who were hospitalized or needed intensive care.
• People who had underlying health conditions prior to COVID-19.
• People who did not get a COVID-19 vaccine.

Health Inequities May Affect Populations at Risk for Long COVID

Some people are at increased risk of getting sick from COVID-19 because of where they live or work, or because they can’t get health care. Health inequities may put some people from racial or ethnic minority groups and some people with disabilities at greater risk for developing Long COVID. Scientists are researching some of those factors that may place these communities at higher risk of getting infected or developing Long COVID.

Preventing Long COVID

The best way to prevent Long COVID is to protect yourself and others from becoming infected. For people who are eligible, CDC recommends staying up to date on COVID-19 vaccination , along with improving ventilation, getting tested for COVID-19 if needed, and seeking treatment for COVID-19 if eligible. Additional preventative measures include avoiding close contact with people who have a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 illness and washing hands  or using alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Research suggests that people who get a COVID-19 infection after vaccination are less likely to report Long COVID, compared to people who are unvaccinated.

CDC, other federal agencies, and non-federal partners are working to identify further measures to lessen a person’s risk of developing Long COVID. Learn more about protecting yourself and others from COVID-19 .

Living with Long COVID

Living with Long COVID can be hard, especially when there are no immediate answers or solutions.

People experiencing Long COVID can seek care from a healthcare provider to come up with a personal medical management plan that can help improve their symptoms and quality of life. Review these tips  to help prepare for a healthcare provider appointment for Long COVID. In addition, there are many support groups being organized that can help patients and their caregivers.

Although Long COVID appears to be less common in children and adolescents than in adults, long-term effects after COVID-19 do occur in children and adolescents .

Talk to your doctor if you think you or your child has Long COVID. Learn more: Tips for Talking to Your Healthcare Provider about Post-COVID Conditions

Data for Long COVID

Studies are in progress to better understand Long COVID and how many people experience them.

CDC is using multiple approaches to estimate how many people experience Long COVID. Each approach can provide a piece of the puzzle to give us a better picture of who is experiencing Long COVID. For example, some studies look for the presence of Long COVID based on self-reported symptoms, while others collect symptoms and conditions recorded in medical records. Some studies focus only on people who have been hospitalized, while others include people who were not hospitalized. The estimates for how many people experience Long COVID can be quite different depending on who was included in the study, as well as how and when the study collected information.  Estimates of the proportion of people who had COVID-19 that go on to experience Long COVID can vary.

CDC posts data on Long COVID and provides analyses, the most recent of which can be found on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey .

CDC and other federal agencies, as well as academic institutions and research organizations, are working to learn more about the short- and long-term health effects associated with COVID-19 , who gets them and why.

Scientists are also learning more about how new variants could potentially affect Long COVID. We are still learning to what extent certain groups are at higher risk, and if different groups of people tend to experience different types of Long COVID. CDC has several studies that will help us better understand Long COVID and how healthcare providers can treat or support patients with these long-term effects. CDC will continue to share information with healthcare providers to help them evaluate and manage these conditions.

CDC is working to:

• Better identify the most frequent symptoms and diagnoses experienced by patients with Long COVID.
• Better understand how many people are affected by Long COVID, and how often people who are infected with COVID-19 develop Long COVID
• Better understand risk factors and protective factors, including which groups might be more at risk, and if different groups experience different symptoms.
• Help understand how Long COVID limit or restrict people’s daily activity.
• Help identify groups that have been more affected by Long COVID, lack access to care and treatment for Long COVID, or experience stigma.
• Better understand the role vaccination plays in preventing Long COVID.
• Collaborate with professional medical groups to develop and offer clinical guidance and other educational materials for healthcare providers, patients, and the public.

Related Pages

• Caring for People with Post-COVID Conditions
• Preparing for Appointments for Post-COVID Conditions
• Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery
• Guidance on “Long COVID” as a Disability Under the ADA

For Healthcare Professionals

• Post-COVID Conditions: Healthcare Providers

Search for and find historical COVID-19 pages and files. Please note the content on these pages and files is no longer being updated and may be out of date.

• Visit archive.cdc.gov for a historical snapshot of the COVID-19 website, capturing the end of the Federal Public Health Emergency on June 28, 2023.
• Visit the dynamic COVID-19 collection  to search the COVID-19 website as far back as July 30, 2021.

To receive email updates about COVID-19, enter your email address:

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• Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
• You will be subject to the destination website's privacy policy when you follow the link.
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