Product Manager Interview — Case Study + Solution

9 min readMar 16, 2024

As you may already know, interest in Product Management as a career has been increasing tremendously. With every passing day more & more professionals, be they Engineers or MBAs, want to become Product Managers.
I too had been a PM aspirant early in my career and wanted to get in. However, I recall I couldn’t find enough resources to refer to as a part of my preparation.
So, I thought I’d share the case studies I’ve solved that got me selected & through to the interview rounds as part of the hiring process.

Problem Statement

It is May 2021, and India is reeling under the impact of COVID-19, with hundreds of thousands of people catching the virus every day and thousands losing their lives. Medical infrastructure is under immense pressure with hospital beds, oxygen, medicines, doctors and nursing staff — all in short supply.

You have a team of 5 developers, 1 designer and 20 volunteers to build any product that you think can create the maximum positive impact for fellow citizens.

1. What would you choose to build and why?
2. What would be the MVP that you would want to launch? What would you add as the next set
of features?
3. Key primary and secondary metrics that you would like to measure
4. Rough wireframes for any 1–2 ideas above
5. What would be your launch strategy, and how would you make sure the product finds enough
user adoption?

Context

As we know, our medical infrastructure is under immense pressure and hospital beds, oxygen, medicines, doctors and nursing staff are all in short supply.

This is due to the gap between supply and demand. The resources available at present, be it medicines, hospitals or medical staff, are not even close to what is required to manage and treat the number of COVID-19 patients despite several efforts taken either by the government or any other organisation to ramp up the supply. Most of these efforts have been focused on urban areas as they have been the worst hit. However, Covid is now rapidly spreading to rural areas, and unfortunately, the rural areas are not even as equipped as the urban areas are to fight Covid.

In my opinion, reducing the demand would greatly help relieve the pressure on the medical infrastructure while ramping up the supply in parallel. The following issues should be addressed for the same -

Helping people who had already been infected find necessary care so that they recover quickly.
Preventing other people from Covid infection — the best way for this is getting people vaccinated ASAP.

Identified Pain Points

Along the lines of the issues mentioned earlier, the following are the few pain points that I have identified -

1. Finding resources & leads

Description

Medicines, oximeters, oxygen cylinders, concentrators, hospital beds, plasma, and ambulances are running in short supply, and it has become quite difficult for people to find them.

Possible Solution

Create a platform for users to quickly provide & find leads for the above resources around a particular location.

Challenges

Leads would primarily be crowdsourced and dependent heavily on users, so efforts would have to be put in to drive users to provide leads. It could be done by volunteers initially for building traction.
Users might not trust the platform if the leads listed on the forum aren’t verified. Verification of leads would be an operations-heavy task requiring a team of volunteers to call & verify each & every lead being provided by the users within a short TAT before it gets published.
Since these resources are in high demand, their stocks available with even the verified leads could run out rapidly, so in that case, their status would have to be updated, or that lead would have to be removed altogether from the platform. Again, this is a heavy task requiring an ops team to check the stock with the leads at short regular intervals.

Impact

This solution could help a few lacs of COVID patients in urban areas with moderate to high severity, given the poor adoption of digital products in rural areas.

2. Do I need hospitalisation or start taking any medicines prescribed for COVID? -

Description

Not every Covid-positive person requires hospitalisation or even the medicines running in short supply prescribed, especially for COVID. But due to the state of fear and panic, hospitals are overcrowded, and many hospital beds, resources & medical care are being consumed by people with only low or mild symptoms who could recover under home isolation. This deprives patients with moderate to high severity symptoms who need hospitalisation and medical care.

https://www.icmr.gov.in/pdf/covid/techdoc/COVID_Management_Algorithm_17052021.pdf

This problem is corroborated by accounts of many doctors, saying that they keep getting enquiries through calls, messages, etc., from people asking whether they should get hospitalised or start taking drugs based on the symptoms. I spoke to 2 Doctors in the neighbourhood who mentioned that they and their colleagues are facing the same problem.

There’s no user-friendly tool available out there currently through which people can find answers to these questions.

Possible Solution

Build a Covid Self-Help Tool through which people could know

if they should get hospitalised & seek professional medical attention according to the guidelines released by ICMR based on typical symptoms which one could monitor at home such as age, body temperature, oxygen saturation, comorbidities, etc.
Dos & Don’ts at home

Challenges

Users would have to be educated to make them understand what these symptoms are and how they could measure/monitor those themselves.
It would likely have poor adoption in rural areas but could be helpful for the urban population.
The tool should not be run without regular supervision of some medical practitioners, keeping a check on the accuracy of the answers that the tool provides to users because inaccurate answers provided by the tool could potentially cost someone their life.

Impact

This solution could potentially help tens of lacs of COVID patients with only low or mild severity, people at risk of infection & people taking care of them in urban areas.

3. Getting Registered for Vaccination & Booking/Scheduling an appointment

Description

Currently, the vaccination process is digital. One has to get registered on the CoWin and book an appointment through it to get vaccinated. Walk-in vaccinations were briefly allowed, but that has also been stopped due to overcrowding at vaccination sites & the short supply of vaccine doses.

This approach fundamentally excludes the rural population that isn’t tech-savvy due to a lack of internet/smartphone access or knowledge of how the CoWin functions and its inherent design & user experience issues. And, of course, CoWin is in English only.

“According to the Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report for October-December, 2020, released on April 27, 2021, the percentage of the rural population that subscribes to the internet is 34.60 per cent. It even conflicts with the early-stage learnings from CoWin’s own dashboard. On April 28, the dashboard showed that for the 45-plus age group, out of a total 14,42,10,652 vaccination registrations, only 2,52,96,511 were through CoWin.”

Possible Solution

Build a more inclusive, easy-to-use tool using the Open APIs CoWin has made available based on telephone (IVR) or Whatsapp Chat, given its significantly higher penetration in rural areas and making it available in vernacular.

“Internet and mobile usage in India is all set to cross the 900-million mark by 2023, with nearly two-thirds of the population estimated to have internet access and a mobile device.”

Challenges

Spreading the word about the tool seems to be the only minor challenge here, but that could be taken care of in the GTM plan with the help of volunteers.

Impact

This solution could help millions of people not only in rural but urban areas too.

In addition to that, the data collected from increased registrations could be fruitful for the authorities. They could use the data from increased registrations to better assess the demand and plan the vaccination drive better when the vaccine supply comes. They could use it to decide where more vaccination centres are needed, allocate vaccines to these centres, and minimise the wastage of doses due to low turnout.

Selected Problem & its Solution

I would choose to solve the third problem mentioned earlier, i.e. getting registered for vaccination & booking/scheduling an appointment, by building a solution that is more inclusive, accessible and easy to use for people.

The deciding factor is the higher number of people it could help and fewer challenges. It doesn’t require any operational tasks and doesn’t require people to be trained or educated as they are already familiar with the telephone (IVR) process and WhatsApp.

Scope for MVP

Register beneficiary for vaccination through WhatsApp
Language Support — English & Hindi (~ 530 million native speakers)

Solution

A “Whatsapp for business” account would be created on which the users could message. A chatbot would be created that would take inputs from the user through a conversation. The user would be provided with predefined options to choose from based on what they want to do, and actions would be executed accordingly.

Following is the happy flow along with wireframes for registering a beneficiary for vaccination -

The user sends a message to our account.
Our bot would send a greeting message to the user. The message sent would be in the same language as the set app language for the user (Hindi or English for now).
If it is not possible to detect the set language, then the message would be sent in Hindi. And another message would be sent asking the user to choose their preferred language Hindi or English.
The greeting message would also ask the user to choose an action such as “Register beneficiary” or “Book appointment”
The user inputs the value for the “Register Beneficiary” option.
Based on the user’s input, the next steps would be sent. In this case, the user is supposed to enter the mobile number & verify it through the OTP.
Since we already have the number of the user, we trigger the OTP using the CoWin authentication API.
Send the message to the user asking the user to input the OTP sent on their phone number as shown in the mocks.
When the user inputs the OTP, we verify the same using the CoWin authentication API.
On successful verification, we start collecting the mandatory information from the user needed as per the process through a series of messages.
Once the information is collected, we show the same to the user, asking them to confirm whether the information they have provided is recorded correctly and if they wish to proceed and submit the details or start over.
Once the user provides the input confirming that the info captured is correct, we call the APIs and send a confirmation message saying registration is done to the user.

Detailed rules that specify the exact message that would be sent to the user based on inputs, corner cases & error scenarios would be taken care of when we write the detailed product requirements & use cases.

CoWin APIs & Documentation

https://apisetu.gov.in/public/marketplace/api/cowin/cowin-protected-v2#/

Current Process for Registration as per CoWin

Login/Register using mobile number
Enter OTP to verify
Resend OTP option is also available
Choose Photo ID Card Type (that you would show at the time of vaccination) — Aadhaar Card, Driving License, PAN Card, Passport, Pension passbook, NPR Smart Card, Voter ID
Enter Photo ID Number
Enter Beneficiary name as per Photo ID
Choose Gender
Enter Year of birth (YYYY)
Submit details
Confirmation SMS comes from the National Health portal of India.

Success Metrics

Number of users contacting on WhatsApp for registration
Number of registrations done successfully
Track the registration step funnel — #times registration was not completed, dropped at which step of the process & due to what reason (API error, user non-responsive, etc)

GTM

Designing some creatives that would be used to spread awareness about the tool with the help of a designer
Volunteers to spread awareness about the tool in various locations through channels such as Social media platforms, News channels, Radio, Local public figures, NGOs & Local authorities

Next Set of features

Support for more regional languages such as Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, etc. based on the number of native speakers
Schedule Appointment
Reschedule/Cancel Appointment
Get vaccine certificate

References

Hope you readers find this helpful. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments.

If you'd like to read more such case studies, you can follow me here!

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

Product Manager Interview — Case Study + Solution

Problem Statement

Context

Identified Pain Points

1. Finding resources & leads

2. Do I need hospitalisation or start taking any medicines prescribed for COVID? -

3. Getting Registered for Vaccination & Booking/Scheduling an appointment

Selected Problem & its Solution

Scope for MVP

Solution

Success Metrics

GTM

Next Set of features

References

Written by Sankalp Gupta

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