Case Questions

PMs will be expected to reply more on their instincts when solving a problem
Interviewers are looking for candidates who will:
 Structure a problem
 Show strong instincts
 Drive, not ride

Customer purchase decision-making process

Understand the buying process and gives us an entry point for boosting sales
1. AIDA
a. Attention - email heading, snazzy ad, word of mouth
b. Interest - what are the advantages of your product
c. Desire - convince customers that they want the product
d. Action - customers take action to purchase
2. REAN
a. Reach - awareness
b. Engage - considering your product
c. Activate - take action
d. Nurture - continue improving the relationship with the customer

Marketing mix - 4 Ps
Describes the different aspects of a company’s marketing plan
1. Product
2. Price
3. Promotion
4. Place

SWOT analysis
Framework for analyzing a strategic decision
Good Bad
Internal Strengths Weaknesses
External Opportunities Threats

The 5 Cs
Overview of the environment around a product or company
1. Company - products, culture, strategy, brand, strengths, weaknesses, infrastructure
2. Competitors - direct, potential, substitute products, market share, tradeoffs, positioning
3. Customers - demographics, purchase behavior, market size, distribution channels
4. Collaborators - suppliers, distributors, partnerships
5. Climate - regulations, technology changes, economy, cultural trends
Porter’s 5 Forces
Describes what an industry as a whole looks like
1. Rivalry among existing competitors
2. Buyer power
3. Supplier power
4. Threat of substitutes
5. Threat of new entrants

Types of metrics
 Any product will excel in some metrics and struggle at others
 Can divide them based on the customer life cycle:
Acquisition -> Activation -> Retention -> Referral -> Revenue
1. User acquisition
a. How many users do we have?
b. How and why has the user base grown overtime?
c. How many active users are there? How do we define what an active user is?
d. Where are users coming from? Are they referring their friends?
e. Which channels are the most effective in getting users?
2. Activity
a. How many users are using feature X?
b. What percent have completed a particular workflow?
c. What are people saying about the product? Do they love it? Can you measure that?
3. Conversion and retention
a. What is the conversion rate? Free to paid, visiting to signing up, etc.
b. What is the churn rate?
4. Money
a. What is the customer acquisition cost?
b. How much does supporting a customer cost?
c. How much money does each user bring in?
d. What is the lifetime value of a customer?
e. What is our revenue growth rate?

Measuring
Measure the change in a metric rather than the total volume
1. Usability testing
2. Customer feedback - social networks, surveys
3. Traffic analysis - Google Analytics
4. Internal logs
5. A/B Testing - understand the impact of a particular change by comparing the behavior of
users who have a feature to those who don’t

**Strategy questions
Asking about a company’s strategy or how to design a strategy
SWOT or the 5 Forces
Think about a product’s strategy at 2 levels:
 Micro - what is the business model? What steps is the company pursuing?
 Macro - how does the product fit into the greater vision? Will it open opportunities?
Potential strategies could include:
 Diversifying revenue sources
 Building barriers to entry
 Being the one-stop shop
 Being the low-cost leader
 Reducing reliance on a key buyer or supplier
 Testing a new market

Sample questions
1. Describe the strategy behind Google entering the cell phone market
2. Amazon has a number of independent websites that duplicate the functionality of Amazon:
Zappos.com, Diapers.com, Soap.com, etc. What do you think their strategy is in maintaining
so many different websites with such similar functionality? Do you agree or disagree?
3. If you were Amazon, would you launch service in India? Why or why not? How would you
do this?
4. Amazon has ads on its websites for products you can buy on other websites. What do you
think is the strategy there? Is it a good idea?
5. Do you think Apple should sell non-Apple products in its stores? Why or why not?
6. If you were responsible for Microsoft phones, what would you do?
7. Which Google products or services don’t make sense to you? Why?
8. If you were CEO of Yahoo, what would your strategy be?
9. What would your strategy be if you were starting up a new social networking service?
10. If you were launching 2 services that have similar revenues and costs, how would you
decide which one to pursue?

**Marketing Questions
Understand product positioning, customers, and handling competition
Marketing Mix (4 Ps), SWOT, 5 Cs, Customer Purchase Decision Making Process
1. Company - goals, mission, strengths, weaknesses, threats
2. Competition - break it down into segments
3. Customers - what desire or need is the product fulfilling, purchase/usage behavior?
4. Landscape - legal issues, regions, external forces
5. Market your product - how to position, discuss pricing and distribution

Sample questions
1. What is a product you think is marketed well? How would you improve it?
2. How would you market Gmail in China?
3. How would you market the Android tablet?
4. What do you think of Google’s marketing for its social products? How would you improve?
5. How would you market the next version of Windows?
6. How would you choose a market for expansion for Amazon Web Services?
7. Discuss how you think Whole Foods is currently marketed. What works well/improve?
8. How would you market a mobile app to track weight, calorie consumption, and exercise?
9. How would you market Google Docs to schools?
10. How would you market a magazine subscription service for kindle?

**Launching questions
1. Product - discuss the vision, strengths, weaknesses, risks
a. What does the product ultimately hope to achieve?
b. What is its target market?
c. What are things that would worry you?
d. Who is competing against and how is it positioned against those?
2. Launch goals
a. As many users as possible?
b. Ensure profitability upfront?
c. Do you want to validate the product meets the market’s needs?
d. Do you want to ensure a positive reaction at the expense of slower growth?
3. Launch design - how will you achieve these goals
a. What market would be a good test bed?
b. Will you control growth through an invitation system?
c. Will you roll out just a limited version of the product so you can launch earlier?
d. Will you try to make the biggest possible splash?
4. Launch implementation - pre + during + post
a. Target market
b. User types/components
c. MVP vs. full product
d. Distribution
e. Rollout
f. Buzz
g. Partnerships
h. Risks
Sample questions
1. Describe a product you think had a successful launch. Why?
2. Describe a product you think launched poorly, despite being a good product. What would
you have done differently?
3. How would you launch the Google self-driving car?
4. Suppose Yahoo were to build a phone. How would you launch this?
5. How would you launch an electronics store for Amazon.com?
6. Google is considering a version of Google Docs designed for large enterprises. How would
you manage this launch?
7. You’re working for a company that helps people create better online ads. How do you
launch this product?
8. You have built a superior water bottle: it keeps drinks hot and cool, it’s sturdy, and it never
spills. How would you launch this product?
9. You have developed a car that takes a different type of fuel. This new fuel source is very
cheap, but works as well as standard fuel. How would you launch this car?
10. How would you launch a grocery delivery service in India?

**Brainstorming
It’s all about creativity!
1. Suspend disbelief - it’s okay to name a few stupid ideas
2. Think about strengths and key assets
3. Think about one vs. many
4. Think about as-is vs. with modifications

Sample questions
1. What can you do with a vending machine?
2. Suppose you’re a manufacturer of paper clips and have realized people no longer need
paper clips. How else could you market your paper clips?
3. Name as many uses as you can for a wine glass.
4. Imagine you had access to an enormous database that transcribed all speech everywhere in
the world. As soon as someone says something, it is automatically transcribed and put into
the database. It is also trivially fast to query anything. What products or services could you
build with this database?
5. How could you integrate Internet into a gym? What product or services could you create?
6. If you were the CEO of Nike, what new product line would you come up with?
7. You are working at Apple and instructed to launch a product that is not technical. What
ideas can you come up with?
8. You are suddenly given a very large (1000+) number of old desktop computers with old
monitors. What could you do with them?
9. Name as many uses as you can for chopsticks.
10. How would you improve the experience of shopping in a supermarket?

**Pricing and profitability

Aimed to get you to maximize profit (revenue - cost)
 Cost-plus pricing - examine the cost of your product and set your price a little higher
 Value pricing - value how much money/time you are saving the customer
 Competitive pricing - look at competitors’ prices
 Experimental pricing - to correlate price with sales volume; could anger customers

Pricing models to consider:

 Free, ad-supported - Facebook
 Freemium - Spotify
 Tiered - multiple levels of pricing, segmented by volume, customer type, or features
 A la carte - price each feature or service separately
 Subscriptions
 Free trial
 Razor blade model - make money on add-ons, basic service is free

Online advertising is priced in two ways:

 Pay-per-click - advertiser pays only if user clicks on the ad
 Pay-per-impression - advertiser pays every time the ad is shown
 Pay-per-action - advertiser pays only when an action is taken (user buys a product)
Price of advertising is determined via an auction
Also care about the click-through-rate - % of times your ad is clicked
The most and advertiser would be willing to pay for an ad:
 Expected profit per click = conversion rate * profit per conversion

Sample questions
1. How would you price a personalized notebook?
2. Describe a product or service you think takes an interesting approach to pricing
3. You are launching a new music service where you pay per time you play a song. After a
certain number of plays, it automatically purchases the song. How would you price this?
4. Imagine united airlines has decided to launch a new “standby membership pass”, which
allows members to take unlimited free flights on standby. How would you price this?
5. A textbook publishing company has decided to sell subscriptions to electronic versions of
any of its books. How would you determine the price?
6. How would you price a file backup service targeted at enterprise customers?
7. Two stores are located just a mile away from each other. They sell the same product, but
one sells the product for 25% more than the other. What factors could explain why?
8. How would you price a cell phone service for the elderly?
9. You are launching a photo printing service that automatically prints and mails someone’s
favorite pictures to them. How you price this service?
10. Imagine you are launching a to-do list manager for smartphones. How would you price this?
11. What analysis would you go through to determine if/when Amazon should change the price
of Amazon Prime?
**Problem solving
Open questions:
Isolate the precise source of the problem -> diagnose the cause -> solve
Common problems and their causes:
 Falling profit - decline in revenue or increase in costs
 Falling revenue - decrease in sales volume or price; shift in purchasing behavior
 Falling sales volume - decline in new customers or lower retention from existing ones
 Declining new customers - decline in traffic or conversion rate
 Increase in costs - increase in fixed or marginal costs; caused by suppliers increasing prices,
distributor changing their profit structure, a spike in the number of returns
 Decline in traffic - decline in the number of new visitors or returning visitors
 Decline in new visitors - decline in search traffic, referral traffic, or direct traffic

Sample questions
1. You notice the advertising revenue on your website has dropped considerably. How would
you go about figuring out why that has happened?
2. You compare traffic from this month to last month and discover that this month’s traffic is
10% lower. What would you do?
3. A magazine company comes to you for help. They understand publishing is a troubled
industry. However, their sales have declined 10% while those of their closest competitor
have declined just over 5%. How would you handle this issue?
4. A particular page on Facebook results in an error 10% of the time. What could cause this?
5. Your VP demands that you double revenue within 4 years. How would you go about
creating a plan to do this?
6. You own a small ecommerce website that specializes in selling sporting goods. Last year you
made almost $200K in profit. This year it would just $80K. What could have happened, and
how would you go figure out the cause?
7. You own a website with 3 tiers of pricing: free, standard, and premium. What would you do
if you see that the sales of the premium product have fallen but those of the standard
product have increased?
8. 2 children are running lemonade stands, just a few blocks away from each other. What
might cause one child to do much better than the other?
9. You are about to launch a major change to the user interface of your company’s website.
What sort of metrics would you want to monitor to notify you if there’s a problem?
10. You notice that the Google AdWords revenue for a particular word has dropped in Spain for
the last 30 days. Google wants to know what happened.