how to solve product management case study

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How to solve a product manager case study in 4 simple steps.

• August 12, 2020

Richard Chen

We cannot emphasize the importance of Product Manager case studies in interviews enough. Companies rely heavily on this step to assess your critical thinking and problem-solving skills as it closely mirrors the day-to-day activities. However, you don’t have to be a Product Manager with years of experience to come up with impressive case studies that will get you hired. Like the job itself, a Product Manager case study should be situational and contextual—getting it right is about tailoring your answer to the company you are interviewing for and the context behind the question. 

So, how do you make sure you hit the nail on the head? There are four steps to solving the Product Manager case study. Our case study instructors recommend the following: 

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

From startup case studies to whiteboarding questions, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about tackling the notorious product management case study using these simple steps. Practice this approach with the various examples we provide and you should be ready to ace your next Product Manager case study interview .

How to Approach the Product Manager Case Study 

Let’s say that an e-commerce furniture company wants to implement a feature: free returns. Take a minute to think about this case study question . How would you go about implementing this? What is your first step?

If there’s one thing we know from working with thousands of aspiring Product Managers, it’s that more than 90% of the candidates fail the product manager case study interview one way or another. And not because the candidates lacked the required skills! Like we mentioned above, a successful case study is tailored to the situation and context. 

Before we dive in, here are some pointers you should remember to get you into the right frame of mind as you tackle the case study assignment you are given. 

Ask Questions 

This is where to start: Always approach a case study assignment with the assumption that you know nothing. Never dive into solving the problem with little to no information on it. Don’t be afraid to ask your interviewer everything you need to: 

• Determine the user of the product 
• Narrow down and identify which problem to solve 
• Find out the specifics of the question to establish your edge cases 

Making assumptions could lead you down the wrong path, but on the other hand, remember that being a Product Manager involves solving ambiguous real-life issues. Keep calm and creatively and strategically acquire more information for clarity of the situation. You’ll be one step ahead of fellow candidates.

Prepare for Anything 

Many novice candidates believe that the case study round always involves a take-home assignment, which would allow them to do extensive research on the question at hand. But while take-home assignments do come up often enough, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Prepare for your case study interview to involve on-the-go questions. You should also expect to whiteboard and solve problems on the fly during the interview. When that’s the case you’ll have only seconds — or minutes if you’re lucky — instead of days to tackle the problem.

There Is More Than One Correct Answer

The Product Manager case study interview is a way for companies to evaluate your problem-solving skills. They want to see how you identify product users, measure product performance, navigate technical aspects, and so on. You can demonstrate these competencies with a variety of answers.

Don’t Spend More Time Than You Need To

The take-home Product Manager case study can be especially time-consuming and you might spend all your time working on these assignments if you don’t have support . Remember that job hunting is a numbers game and allocate your time and effort accordingly.

Need more time to prepare for your next case study interview? Take your prep to the next level with this video by Product Gym co-founder Cody Chang:

How to Solve Any Product Manager Case Study in 4 Simple Steps

Without further ado, here are the four steps you need to follow to solve your Product Manager case study:

Step 1: Evaluate the Need

To understand the need in the Product Manager case study, you need to ask a series of questions. Here are a few of them to get you started:

• How did the company come up with this feature?
• Was it suggested by executives, or by customers?
• Is the goal of this feature to drive revenue or increase loyalty?
• Are we assuming that leadership has already signed on board to this feature?
• Or are we assuming that this is just a small product that we have been given to test?

Essentially, you need to figure out the bounds and constraints of this question.

You may not be an industry expert on the business that your interviewer is in, or you may lack that domain knowledge. So in order to create an informed answer, you have to know what your answer is not .

Step 2: Validate the Need

You have to start on the pre-question. Let’s take the example of a furniture e-commerce company.

Some of the questions you would ask yourself are: 

• What are your assumptions, knowns and unknowns, and where is the data? 
• Do we have data on this, and is the data right? 
• On free returns, do we know how many people already trying to return?
• Are there specific types of products that we know customers return? 
• Are there some parts of the world where customers expect free returns? Do we have data on that? (The company isn’t going to necessarily know that from the data because customers might not provide that feedback.)
• What do we not know? 

When you focus on these unknowns, what you’re really focusing on is time and resources. This gets into the business side of asking questions. If you are not a domain expert in furniture e-commerce or are not familiar with their business model to give a nuanced response, what are these Product Managers looking for in your answer?

The company you are interviewing with is likely operating in another domain that you are not familiar with. That’s okay. As long as you can lay out the roadmap for your product with sound reasoning, you’ll be good to go.

Step 3: Set a Goal for the Feature

In this specific example, you want to focus on time and resources, which is money. This means explicitly profitability . What are all the areas that might factor into profitability? Here are some questions to consider:

• How much is it going to cost, and how do you evaluate that cost?
• Will priorities in regards to other features change?
• Would we have to focus on other resources?
• Would we have to deal with interstate laws based on shipping?
• How about shipping internationally or shipping interstate? Will it be taxed?

Check out these guides to help you determine the essential metrics for your company’s business and the product you are developing:

• 16 Startup Metrics by Adresseen Horowitz
• Startup Metrics You Need to Monitor
• Facebook Metrics: Key Benchmarks for PM Interviews

Step 4: Decision-Making

Based on the business requirements, how do you want to evaluate these unknowns? The rabbit hole of questions can go on and on. You may need to spend these resources and push back the engineering deadline. Is the company okay with that?

It also depends on how you communicate “Yes” or “No” answers. If you say, “Yes, I want to prioritize this feature,” then know your reasons:

• The manager has signed off on the strategy .
• I know who the customers are.
• I have the data to back it up.
• I have the stakeholder consensus to do it.
• I have a timeline that I feel confident executing on.

Or, if you say “No,” have your reasons why to address the same areas:

• No, I don’t have a clear strategy from management.
• No, the manager wants me to validate this before we spend extra resources on it.
• No, we don’t have enough engineers or resources for this.
• No, we have to use the sales cycle for another feature — if we try to implement this now, we will lose the seasonal sales cycle.

These are all moving parts that you want to evaluate and then communicate to the PM interviewing you in the Product Manager case study. The best thing to do when you ask these questions is to get specific. Use examples of times when you had to make these decisions yourself based on these factors.

Remember to communicate competency on how you evaluate whether or not you implement a feature. Ask questions to create constraints and boundaries to the case study, and control its scope. Once you have this information, you will know how to best approach the questions based on the Product Management knowledge you possess.

BONUS Step: Get Your Case Study Presentation Reviewed by a Professional

You’ve worked through the case study and put your solution into a slide deck to present to a panel of interviewers: congratulations! But if you want to go above and beyond to impress the hiring team, take some time to get your case study solution reviewed by a professional.

A fresh set of eyes may catch typos and grammar errors, but will also be able to point out the areas where you can improve the solution overall. A Product Manager who’s gone through multiple case study interview rounds is going to be able to assess your solution from the perspective of the interviewer and use their experience to help you polish it.

At Product Gym, our interview coaches routinely check over members’ case study presentations, offering insight, constructive criticism, and tips on how to make their technical interview round a success. Solving case studies isn’t just a good practice for acing your interview — it’s also an excellent way to develop applicable Product Manager skills. That’s why we include classes on case studies in our program. Our case study curriculum was developed and continues to be taught by Senior Product Manager for Atlassian, Roman Kolosovskiy .

Because we’ve been working with Product Manager job hunters for the past five years, we’ve had ample opportunity to test and perfect the case study strategy we teach our members. We’ve even compiled a bank of case study prompts that aspiring Product Managers have received in their interviews so that members can exclusively access to hone their problem-solving and storytelling skills.

What to Expect from a Product Manager Case Study at a Startup 

The type of company you are interviewing for is a key consideration when determining the context for your case study. It’s highly likely that you will interview for a Product Manager position at a startup—there were 30.7 million startups in the US in 2019, and the numbers will only keep growing.

No doubt, the expectations, and responsibilities differ immensely in a startup role as compared to being an enterprise PM.

Here’s what you should keep in mind when interviewing for a PM position with a startup: 

• Product Managers are expected to wear multiple hats : Startups, especially early-stage ones, don’t have all the resources they need. Because of this, your responsibilities may include roles away from the standard PM job description. It’s also likely that you will be responsible for more than one product.
• Be ready for some confusion : Many of these companies don’t have a recruiting team or a full-fledged HR strategy, and therefore chances are they are also exploring interviewing as they go. 
• Prepare for niche markets : If the startup operates in a niche market, you might have little to no knowledge and resources for understanding the competitive landscape and creating a useful product. Our case study prep guide can help you sound like a seasoned expert no matter your background in such cases. 

So how do you show your interviewer that you are ready to take on the challenge?

1. Demonstrate Fast Execution

First and foremost, you should show that you are quick when making decisions and taking action. Unlike established companies, you will not have many tools or practices to help you make decisions and organize your and your team’s tasks. You should be comfortable with communicating decisions and last-minute action items with the rest of your team.

2. Be Ready to Take Risks

Executing decisions takes a sense of responsibility and ownership, which brings us to our second point. As a Product Manager, you should be a leader who isn’t afraid of taking risks. When needed, you should be ready to take the driver’s seat. There is no doubt that your responsibility will exceed a single product, and you will soon be expected to come up with ideas that will impact the whole company.

3. Prove You Can Multitask

Limited resources mean you may find yourself wearing different hats. For example, you might not have a UX designer and end up designing the wireframes yourself. Regardless of the situation, get ready to prove to them that you can multitask. How do you show this skill in your Product Manager case study? 

• By thinking about how this company can make money — or in Product Gym terms, by becoming a wartime Product Manager. Think about how the product in question will contribute to the company’s short-term and long-term goals. 
• Many startups are still in the funding stage, so any work you design should generate revenue with minimal costs. 
• Think about all the ways you can create a product that the market currently needs and lacks. 
• Include wireframes in your case study presentation to show them that you already thought about how the product should look. 
• In your documentation and presentation, describe the resources you will need and how you budget this product.

4. Learn About the Company

A case study assignment is a simulation of the real job, especially in startup interviews. Leverage it to learn as much about the company as possible. Assess how they treat you and try to figure out how the company culture is.

Are they ignoring your emails and acting like you don’t exist? Or are they making a genuine effort to make the interview work for you despite the lack of resources? Are you expected to solve a complex case study on the go during an interview?

Answering these questions can give you a good feel of your possible future employer.

5. Prioritize, Prioritize, and Prioritize

As we mentioned, startup companies operate with minimal resources and are under a lot of stress. So, remember to focus on the essential features needed to create a fully functional MVP ready for the market in the least amount of time.

Make some realistic estimations and come up with numbers to help your interviewers with the budget, resources, and time you need to create this product. Roadmap the steps required to get to the MVP and clearly define everybody’s responsibilities to build it.

How to Solve Whiteboarding Case Study Questions in 4 Steps

Along with the commonly assigned take-home assignment and the presentation that follows, the product management case study is notorious for its technical and whiteboarding interview questions. Here are four simple steps our instructors developed to help you master the dreaded whiteboarding interview questions in your case study round.

Step 1: Keep Calm and Embrace the Fact that You Know Nothing

Most aspiring PMs fail the Product Manager case study not because they do not have experience, but because they panic over a lack of information. 

In practice, Product Managers rarely have enough information about the problem they were asked to solve. Having seen many candidates interview, we can confirm that interviewees often disqualify themselves by showing the interviewer that they are not ready to tackle ambiguous real-life issues.

So, remember to keep calm and accept the fact that you have insufficient information about the problem that’s thrown at you.

Step 2: Try to Understand What the Question Wants You to Achieve

Companies ask whiteboarding interview questions to see if you can create or improve a product that can accomplish a specific goal. When you take on any product management case study question, start by taking a step back. Think about what the question wants you to accomplish.

In most cases, you should be able to divine the purpose of the question from how the interviewer forms it. Our case study instructors have identified four specific purposes: 

• Prioritization
• Product Design
• Target Market Identification
• Product Launch 

Determining the purpose behind vague questions and finding the right approach to address them requires a lot of focused practice with real case study questions.

Step 3: Nar row Down the Question as Much as Possible

You need to narrow down the case study questions as much as possible to come up with some real and data-driven conclusions. Given that you have little to no resources available to you, you have to make some realistic estimations. Accurate estimations are only possible if you get to the heart of the question.

Think it through and ask as many questions as you need.

Step 4: Keep the Conversation Alive

Communication is an essential part of the case study interview: you should keep your interviewer informed about every aspect of your thought process. After you identify the whiteboarding question’s purpose, clearly inform your interviewer what direction you want to take and your reasoning.

Check your reasoning with your interviewer by asking them if this is something on their mind or if this is something they would consider. In most cases, they would either have an answer key or a direction on their mind and would be able to help you.

Once you agree on the direction you take, ask more specific questions to extract as much information as possible and get a confidence vote from the interviewer that you are on the right track.

Last but not least, make your interviewer’s life easier by suggesting options and giving details while asking questions. See how we used these four steps to work through a Facebook Product Manager Case Study question: Should Facebook enter the dating market?

Product Manager Case Study Presentation Best Practices

You have worked hard and finally finished your Product Manager case study assignment, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax—your case study presentation is as vital as solving the question.

Not only is it the time to demonstrate your excellent communication skills, but a good presentation shows your interviewers how you collaborate. Here’s a breakdown of how to give a winning presentation:

• Design and Brand Your Presentation Materials: The best way to prove that you are a big fan of the company and have the spirit to join the team is to use company colors, logos, and any media related to them. A good design always draws attention, and you want to grab as much attention as you can.
• Have the Right Amount of Content: Have just enough content to ensure that people know enough about your product to be convinced that it has potential. Include all the relevant details about the fundamental aspects of the product. But, leave them curious about the finer details. This will keep them engaged throughout the presentation.
• Include Visuals and Media to Spark Feedback from the Audience: Activating the brain’s visual cortex will keep your interviewers engaged throughout your presentation. The best way to ensure that everybody understands your product is to include wireframes and preliminary designs in your presentation.
• Make Sure Everyone Has a Positive Experience With Your Presentation: A good rule of thumb is to make sure you can explain your product to a five-year-old and a Ph.D. simultaneously. Start simple and allow the audience to ask questions as you progress. Allocate a considerable amount of time to go over your designs and ask the interviewer for feedback: Ask them questions, see what they think, and learn about the things they would have done differently. 
• Paint a Clear Picture of the Product With Your Wireframes: When you are sketching wireframes for your product management case study, be sure to include anything you can explain in terms of functionality. Given that many of the products are digital, it’s crucial to explain the transitions between one screen to another. For example, you should explain what happens when a user clicks on something and which screen comes next. If the next screen is an integral part of the feature, you should include it in your case study deliverables.

List of Product Manager Case Study Question Examples

Before we dive into the most common examples of Product Manager case study interview questions , let’s solve one together. Check out how our Case Study Instructor, Roman Kolosovski, tackles the popular FAANG case study question “How would you build a product for pet owners?”:

1. Product Design Case Study Questions

These are the most common types of questions. They range from designing a product from scratch to improving an existing product. Some questions will explicitly tell you to focus on a specific OKR, while others will leave everything ambiguous to challenge you to think more.

Product Design Question Examples

• Design a product to help users find doctors on Facebook . 
• How would you improve Google Maps? 
• You’re a part of the Google Search webspam team: How would you detect duplicate websites? 
• Name any product you love and any product you despise and explain your reasoning for both cases. ( Amazon )
• You’re the Product Manager of a team that focuses on financial products for our Uber drivers. You’re tasked with designing a financial product (or suite of products) that addresses our drivers’ needs in Brazil.

2. Product Strategy Questions 

Unlike product design questions, strategy questions require you to think about the bigger picture. You’ll either be asked to find ways to make a product better—and hence define success for the product, or to complete the overall organization more successfully. 

To solve these questions, you need to be well informed about the company and its products or services. Consider the company’s business model, competitors, and the recent developments in that industry. The essential skill you need to demonstrate here is analytical thinking.

Product Strategy Question Examples

• If you were Google’s CEO, would you be concerned about Microsoft? 
• How would you improve Google Maps? (Google)
• How would you set goals and measure success for Facebook notifications? 
• How would you monetize Facebook messenger? 
• How would you determine the right price and method to promote product XYZ, and why? (Amazon)

3. Estimation and Analysis Questions 

These are used by interviewers to measure how comfortable you are making decisions with limited data, so show them how you use data to derive the KPIs you need for your product. These questions are mostly asked during the interview. To solve them without internet access is only possible by learning the fundamental values of the company beforehand. This includes the revenue it makes or the approximate number of users it has. You should also be able to calculate their critical KPIs.

Estimation and Analysis Case Study Question Examples

• How many queries per second does Gmail get? 
• As the Product Manager for Google Glass ‘Enterprise Edition’, which metrics would you track? How do you know if the product is successful? 
• How much revenue does YouTube make per day?
• How would you go about estimating the number of gas stations in the USA? 
• How would you track user engagement in an app, and what KPIs would you use to improve it?

4. Scheduling/Operational Questions 

These types of case study interview questions are few and far between. Interviewers ask these questions to assess the candidates’ ability to turn ideas into deliverable tasks. Note that for most operational Product Manager case study questions, the interviewer will require you to write a detailed delivery schedule and write user stories and tasks.

Scheduling/Operational Case Study Question Examples

• Write the Jira ticket(s) for engineering for the idea you want to execute. (Upwork)
• Outline a brief (1-2 page) launch plan that would cover the activities and tasks needed to launch the feature successfully. Be sure to touch on both internal and external stakeholders, and include potential launch goals. (Stitch Data)

Product Manager Case Study FAQs

The short answer is yes. You should always have a couple of screen designs ready for your case study interview. Why? It’s probably the best way to spark any reaction from the interviewing committee. Plus, it’s also way more comfortable for your audience to understand what your product looks like with a solid prototype. 

Given that it’s not your job to develop the actual design, low fidelity seems more appropriate. That being said, the bar for low fidelity designs has been relatively high over the past couple of years. So, low fidelity designs are more than pen and paper sketches: they are expected to be digital.

Detail the solution you came up with a presentation that states:  Here is what the solution is. Here is what the solution looks like. Here is how a user would go through the process within this solution.

There are four common types of Product Manager case study questions:  Product design questions  Product strategy questions  Estimation and analysis questions Scheduling/operational questions

Unlike larger companies, startups do not have as many tools and resources at their disposal. This means that not many will have a recruiting team or a full-fledged HR strategy and are interviewing as they go. Many Product Gym members that have taken the startup route have noted how disorganized the Product Manager interview process can get at a startup, so prepare for some confusion. No matter the size of the company, be sure to assess how they treat you and try to figure out how the company culture is in the process.

Put Your Product Manager Case Study Skills to the Test

Put your case study skills to the test with our free online training course. Access to instructor-led whiteboarding sessions with real FAANG interview qu estions to take your prep to the next level.

Don’t forget to call us for free career coaching to learn more about how Product Gym can help you land the Product Manager job of your dreams!

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Mastering Case Study Questions: A Product Management Guide

Cracking a product management interview often hinges on how effectively candidates can solve case study questions. These scenarios test a gamut of skills from problem-solving and critical thinking to communication. The real challenge lies in understanding problem statements, identifying stakeholders, devising go-to-market strategies, and mapping user journeys—all within a tight interview timeline. Here’s your guide on navigating these case studies with finesse.

Understanding Problem Statements

At the heart of any product management case study is the problem statement. It sets the stage for the entire exercise. To succeed in interviews, candidates must exhibit a clear grasp of the issue at hand. Focusing on the problem statement prepares you to address the right concerns and avoid veering off track.

Identifying Stakeholders

Stakeholders are pivotal to product development. Pinpointing these entities during a case study question demonstrates your ability to consider multiple perspectives, from gig workers to banks and regulatory bodies. Recognizing stakeholders shapes your approach and ensures consideration of all critical viewpoints during product conceptualization.

Devising Go-To-Market Strategies

Getting your product to market requires a strategic plan. A well-thought-out go-to-market strategy can mean the difference between a product’s success or failure. Candidates should discuss potential channels, user acquisition, and retention tactics, reflecting their market awareness and understanding of the customer base.

Creating User Personas

One cannot devise solutions without knowing for whom they’re meant. User personas help in visualizing the target audience—identifying their needs, behavior, and pain points. Displaying this understanding in an interview speaks to your empathetic design consideration and user-centric focus in product management.

Mapping the User Journey

The user’s interaction with a product isn’t linear—it’s a journey with multiple potential pathways. Mapping out these scenarios can reveal insights into user experiences, pinpointing where enhancements may be needed. This process showcases a comprehensive understanding of the user experience.

Developing Monetization and Pricing Strategies

A product isn’t just a solution—it’s also a business opportunity. Developing monetization strategies, such as charging per lead or implementing processing fees, reflects a candidate’s knowledge of how to turn a product into a profitable venture, a crucial skill for any aspiring product manager.

Mastering Communication Skills

Clear communication can’t be overstated. Whether it’s explaining complex concepts or strategies, being articulate is as important as the content itself. Showcasing excellent communication skills can immensely improve your chances of being viewed favorably by interviewers.

Developing Problem-Solving Skills

Critical thinking and problem-solving are key to addressing case studies. By deconstructing issues and presenting innovative solutions, you convey a readiness for the challenges that product management roles entail.

To ace product management interview case study questions, focus on the core aspects: problem statements, stakeholders, go-to-market strategies, user personas, user journey mapping, and monetization strategies. And, importantly, refine your problem-solving and communication skills. With this holistic approach, you’re well on your way to demonstrating your potential as an exceptional product manager.

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What Are Product Management Case Study Interviews?

Author: 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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PM Case Solving 101 – Product Management Interview Questions

With this piece, we understand an approach to solving Product Management Interview Questions/Cases. The idea behind this piece is to give you a broad overview of the approach using the example of Big Basket, which, the author had submitted for a PM case competition. Let’s dive right into the piece!

A Product Management case study involves various steps from developing a Product to eventually managing it. Today, we’ll work together to derive a few actionable tips by going through an example to help you understand and eventually solve a case study, doing research to get some background information, and finally, identifying key metrics. Let’s start with the Problem statement!

Problem Statement (by PM School)

Understanding the problem and goals.

The very first step to approach a Problem such as this is to study the Firm and its Product followed by Laying down the company’s “Mission Statement”.

For example, Mission for BigBasket is to walk you away from the drudgery of grocery shopping and allows an easy relaxed way of browsing and shopping for groceries. 

The next step is to Identify the Problem and goals.

For this case,

Problem: there is a boom of Video Apps becoming E-commerce Apps. As short videos start to look more and more like commercials.

Goal: to introduce a Video E-commerce and thereby increase the growth in terms on engagement and monetization.

Users and their Pain Points

The next step now is to Understand the Users . For this activity, we Identify and use user personas. What are user personas? Well, they’re the representation of a customer segment of a company. Every Product released by the company passes the user persona test before the Product is launched to folks out there.

What factors account for in these personas?

Demographic factors : Age, Education, Location and Mentality.

Professional background : Job Title, Skills, Responsibilities, and Experience.

For this case study we are considering age, education, location, Job title and mentality for defining person’s background.

For example the user persona could be,

Seema Sinha

Age – 19 years

Education- Student

Location- Mumbai

Mentality- Very much cautious about her looks and career.

Understand their Pain points

Financial, Productivity, Support, Time etc.

For this case the main issue faced by the customer’s during this pandemic was hygiene. Therefore, whether proper hygiene is maintained or not is pain point for the customer.

Solutions and Features

After you deep dive and figure out the problem for the consumers, it is now time to Identify the Solutions . This could be a building a new App/Product/Website, or adding various features to the existing ones. For this focus of this case, we will look at features.

What? What feature do you want to add?

Who? Who are the targeting audience?

Why? What’s the benefit to your company?

Some ideas for new features:

Feature 1- Video Related to Product will be visible on the Product description page.

Feature 2- User can record and upload review Videos of a particular Product.

Feature 3- Adding a “challenges” page where users can see the various video challenges and can upload their videos

(If possible) Add Mock-ups

Use tools like Balsamiq for making wireframes.

Mock-up gives us an idea how our final product will look. So, while designing mock-ups keep in mind of the targeting audience, try to keep it easier for them.

Identify the Metrics for success

Finally, Add Metrics . This would mean Identifying the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) based on your Product or category and knowing if the Product is doing well.

While choosing the right key performance indicators or KPIs, we must be clear on the business goals our product serves.

For this case, the KPIs should be Number of Active users, Number of videos uploaded and seen, Number of Key User Actions Per Session.

• Identify the success metrics to analyze the performance.

For this case we need to know how many people are actually seeing are video and for that we need to analyse the success of this feature by adding several metrics

For example,

% of Videos Viewed =

(Sum of no. of views on the videos) /

(No. of users visited our msite/website)

The GTM (Go-To-Market) Strategy:

This is where your focus is on Recognizing the Gaps – filling them and then coming up with a launch plan.

In the product launch plan, we document the summary of ideas, activities, and processes we will use to release product in the market.

The basic roadmap contains ideation, concept, testing and release.

You could approach this question in similar way in an interview. Be sure to take your pauses, think through before you answer. Mockups are not mandatory and even not possible in an interview – but you can definitely give it a shot by describing how the Product may possibly look by talking about the User Journey.

The Author:

The author of this piece is Priya Sinha . Priya is a student at IIT Kharagpur and is a Product Management Enthusiast. The slides you’ve seen above is all her work. We appreciate her energy to help aspiring Product Managers out there! If you liked her work too, go ahead and drop a thank you and share this piece with your best friend on WhatsApp.

Join our community .

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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.

a year 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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6 Product Management Case Studies You Can't Miss

Associate Product Marketer at Zeda.io.

Mahima Arora

Created on:

March 18, 2024

Updated on:

8 mins read

Transform Insights into Impact

Build Products That Drive Revenue and Delight Customers!

Product management case studies are detailed analyses of how a product was conceptualized, developed, and marketed. A typical product management case study contains the following:

• The pain points and expectations of the user
• Competing products in the market
• Development , delivery, and iteration methods
• Marketing strategies implemented to relay the product’s value proposition
• How the product was received
• Lessons for the product team

So, why should you learn about the development of a product in so much detail? The answer lies in the sixth bullet.

Let’s look at how reading case studies related to product management can help you.

How product management case studies help you

Here’s why reading product management case studies is a worthwhile investment of your time. A well-written case study:

• Gives you an in-depth understanding of real product problems : Meeting or exceeding the expectations of the customers is always challenging. Whether it is technical complexities, budget limitations, or organizational miscommunication, a case study helps you recognize the source of the problem which led to the development of a less-desirable product.
• Contains practical insights outside of the theory : Even a layman can learn the steps of SaaS product management . However, seasoned product managers know that developing a successful product takes more than learning the development steps. These case studies contain tons of real-life scenarios and the lessons that come with them.
• Educates you and makes you a better product manager: Product management case study examples take you through the journey of developing a product, which helps you improve your existing approach toward product development. You will also learn better ways to manage your team and resources.

In simple terms, a product management case study helps teams learn lessons that they can emulate to develop a more profitable product.

In this article, let’s look at six product management case studies that are a must-read for every product manager.

1. Slack: Initial product launch strategy

Stewart Butterfield started a gaming company called Tiny Speck to change the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). Him and his team created Glitch which was quite different from other games in that genre such as World of Warcraft.

Glitch was a 2D game that did not have the violent aspects that typical MMORPG games had at the time. It allowed extensive character personalization and Butterfield described it as “Monty Python crossed with Dr. Seuss on acid”.

While building Glitch, Butterfield and his team used the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), an online chat tool popular in the 80s and 90s. However, it fell short as the team found it difficult to keep track of past conversations, which motivated them to build their own communication tool.

As they developed Glitch, their internal chat tool gained more features based on their needs.

Despite lots of support from investors, Glitch was unable to attract enough players to keep running profitably and Butterfield eventually shut it down in 2012 .

After six months, in early 2013, Butterfield renamed their internal communication tool Slack - acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge and requested his friends and colleagues to try it out and give feedback — they all loved it.

By May 2013, Slack was ready for the big reveal which posed a new challenge — executing the perfect launch strategy to drive demand.

Slack’s Challenge: Nailing the initial product launch

While launching an app that can have such an impact on how organizations work, it is crucial to get it right. At the time, there weren’t many team messaging apps and most teams had conversations via email.

Slack needed a significant number of early adopters to validate their hypotheses about team collaboration and collect data that will help them improve its services further. Consequently, this increased the stakes for the first launch.

How did Slack do it

CEO Stewart Butterfield revealed that on the first day of the launch, Slack welcomed 8000 new users which rose to 15000 at the end of the second week. The credit for this initial success, he explains, went primarily to social media.

Social media helped Slack deliver its PR pieces through its genuine users. This led to a snowballing effect because people interacted with people.

Slack recorded over 18 million active users in 2020.

Although the impact of social media-based word-of-mouth marketing will have different levels of success as it depends on factors such as the type of product and its use cases, you should have a social media marketing strategy to spread the word.

Suggested Read: Leveraging VoC-driven AI Insights to Build Revenue-generating Products

2. Superhuman: Finding product-market fit

‍ Superhuman is a premium email service for busy teams and professionals who need more of everything; speed, usability, and personalization. Apart from superb design, Superhuman processes and executes any request within 100ms.

Rahul Vohra built Rapportive in 2010 — a plugin that adds social profiles to Gmail which was later acquired by LinkedIn . This gave Vohra an intimate view of email and quickly realized that things will progressively get worse.

In his words, “I could see Gmail getting worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine, and still not working properly offline.” 

He also brought attention to the number of plugins people used, “And on top of that, people were installing plugins like ours, Rapportive, but also Boomerang, Mixmax, Clearbit, you name it, they had it. And each plugin took those problems of clutter, memory, CPU, performance offline, and made all of them dramatically worse.”

Vohra had one question in his mind — how different would the email experience be if it was designed today instead of 12 years ago?

‍ Superhuman was born to give professionals the email experience that they have been long waiting for. Smooth, easy on the eyes, and most importantly, blazingly fast.

But, there was one elephant in the room.

The idea of building a better email service than the existing players sounded great. However, going against some of the biggest brands of Silicon Valley required more than a bad personal experience with Gmail. 

The Superhuman team needed evidence that such a product is actually desirable.

Superhuman’s Challenge: Establishing product-market fit

The team at Superhuman was competing against the email services of Apple, Google, and Microsoft which made the product-market fit quite crucial.

But how do you know whether you have achieved product-market fit?

How did Superhuman do it

Vohra and his team came up with an innovative idea to measure product-market fit by testing crucial hypotheses and focusing on the right target audience.

Superhuman had two hypotheses :

• People are dissatisfied with Gmail and how slow it is.
• People are also dissatisfied with third-party email clients and how buggy they were.

In a product management case study , Vohra explained how to find the right audience — the users who would be ‘very disappointed’ if they could no longer use your product. After identifying them, all you have to do is build the product as they want it.

3. Medium: “Highlights” feature

Evan Williams co-founded Blogger and Twitter which has helped millions of people share their thoughts with the world. Although both platforms became quite popular, they still couldn’t deliver the best reading experience to their users. Blogger allowed readers to browse topics by authors only and Twitter made it difficult for authors to aptly describe themselves.

He quickly recognized the need for a publishing platform that delivers a diverse experience for the readers and allows the authors to speak their hearts.

That’s how Medium was born. It enabled readers to browse articles by topics and authors, helping them to gain different perspectives on any particular subject. It also allowed everyone from professional programmers to amateur chefs to share their insights with the world as they wanted it.

The developers slowly added more features to Medium such as tags, linked images, social cards, and sharing drafts as it evolved through the years.

One of the many notable features of the platform is the “Highlight” feature — where you can select any particular post section and treat it as a mini-post. You can comment on the Highlight or tweet it, which is handy for both personal revision and sharing interesting snippets with others.

Suggested Read: Want to become a Product Coach?

Medium’s Challenge: Determining whether “Highlights” added value

Medium faced a challenge while determining a metric that can give them an accurate assessment of the desirability of this feature. In other words, they needed a metric that would tell them whether the “Highlights” feature made user interactions better and more rewarding.

How did Medium do it

The team at Medium solved the challenge by shifting their focus to one crucial metric rather than multiple vanity metrics such as organic visits and retention time which signifies how much value your users are getting out of your product based on retention rate. 

For Medium, it was Total Time Reading (TTR) . It is calculated by estimating the average read time which is the number of words divided by the average reading speed (about 265 WPM) and adding the time spent by the reader lingering over good paragraphs by tracking scrolling speed.

4. Ipsy: Managing distribution 

Michelle Phan started her journey as a YouTuber who recognized the importance of makeup in someone’s self-expression. She has been sharing beauty tips and makeup tutorials with her audience since 2007. 

While on a trip to Thailand, she observed how little girls scrambled to pay for makeup samples in front of vending machines. Five years later, she launched a subscription-based Glam Bag program — where the customers will receive 4-5 deluxe-sized samples of makeup products.

MyGlam, as it was known back then, quickly gained over half-a-million monthly subscribers which created one of the biggest online beauty communities.

Phan quickly realized what she wanted to do — to build a brand for women who wanted to share their perspectives on beauty and meet like-minded people with similar interests and styles.

Ipsy , which comes from the Latin root “ipse” meaning “self”, was created by Phan, Marcelo Camberos, Jennifer Goldfarb, and Richard Frias to expand the user experience.

Although Phan knew how to convert viewers into paying customers, executing a marketing strategy by scaling it up was challenging.

Ipsy’s Challenge: Managing a content distribution strategy

The first makeup tutorial by Michelle Phan has now over 12 million views. Videos like that helped Phan get her first subscribers on her MyGlam program.

This shows the importance and impact of influencer-led content on revenue for businesses in the beauty industry.

However, running an influencer content distribution strategy involves collaborating with multiple passionate influencers. It was challenging to find like-minded influencers who will promote only one brand. Moreover, when working with influencers, it's important to implement effective content moderation to make sure the posted content aligns with your goals.

Phan and her team had a simple solution for this.

How did Ipsy do it

Phan and Spencer McClung, EVP of Media and Partnerships at Ipsy, partnered with beauty influencers like Bethany Mota, Promise Phan, Jessica Harlow, and Andrea Brooks who were already subscribed to MyGlam to create content exclusively for Ipsy.

In a case study analysis, McClung revealed that it put Ipsy on a content-based growth loop where the content was created by both the influencers and customers for the beauty community.

Sponsored content for products by influencers helped them increase their reach and helped Ipsy get more loyal customers. This growth loop gained Ipsy over 3 million monthly subscribers .

Suggested Read: Pivoting equals failure?🤯

5. Stitch Fix: Mastering personalization

Katrina Lake, the founder of Stitch Fix , realized back in 2011 that apparel shopping needed an upgrade. eCommerce failed to meet the expectations of the shoppers and retail shops were falling short in terms of options.

In an interview with The Cut , she revealed "Searching online for jeans is a ridiculously bad experience. And I realized that if I imagined a different future, I could create it."

After realizing that no one has merged data and fashion shopping, she set out to make a difference. She started a personal styling service out of her apartment in 2011 when she was pursuing her MBA from Harvard.

Lake relied on SurveyMonkey to keep track of her customer’s preferences and charged $20 as a styling fee. In late 2012 Eric Colson, then the VP of data science and engineering at Netflix, joined Lake on her journey of crafting the future of retail.

Lake and Colson wanted to give their customers much more than just personalized recommendations.

Stitch Fix’s Challenge: Building a personalized store

Stitch Fix wanted to give their customers more than just personalized recommendations — they wanted to build a personalized store for them where everything they look at, from clothes to accessories, matches their flavor.

But everyone’s body dimensions, preferences, budgets, and past choices are unique which can make building a personalized store difficult.

The team at Stitch Fix found a simple yet effective solution for this challenge.

How did Stitch Fix do it

Katrina Lake, CEO of Stitch Fix, revealed in a case study that personalization is crucial for the onboarding, retention, and monetization of customers.

When signing up, Stitch Fix asks you a few questions about your fashion choices and picks clothes that look the best on you. Furthermore, the collections in your personal store will keep improving as it continuously learns more about your personal preferences.

Also, there is no subscription fee which makes Stitch Fix a great option for occasional shoppers. Suggested Read: Canva’s Success Tale in the World of Design

6. Pinterest: User retention

Ben Silbermann started his tech career at Google’s customer support department. Although he loved the company and believed in its vision, he quickly became frustrated as he wasn’t allowed to build products.

With support from his girlfriend (now wife) Divya and a college friend Paul Sciarra (co-founder), Ben created an app called “Tote” in 2009 which was described as a “catalog for the phone”. Tote allowed users to catalog their favorite items and will be alerted whenever they were on sale so they can make a purchase.

However, the users used it to share their collections with each other instead. Ben recalled how he collected insects as a kid and loved sharing his collection with others. He recognized how people, in general, love to do that.

And, just like that, Pinterest was born where users can “pin” whatever they are interested in and add it to their personal collections.

Pinterest quickly became a hit and entered the global market.

Despite huge success within the US, Pinterest struggled to retain users globally. The team realized that the primary reason users churned is that something stopped them from getting the product’s core value — building personal collections.

Pinterest’s Challenge: Helping customers quickly realize the core value

There are many things that can prevent a user from accessing a product’s core value and one of them is internal friction within the product.

Pinterest’s product folks zeroed in on the one feature that was the gateway to the product’s core value — the “Pin It” feature.

Users outside the US simply couldn’t relate to the term, even though all it did was save the item they like to their personal collection.

How did Pinterest do it

The “Pin It” feature of Pinterest is linked directly to its brand identity. Casey Winters, former growth product lead at Pinterest, suggested changing it to “Save”, particularly in areas outside of the US.

As of the third quarter of 2022, it has over 445 million monthly users all over the world exploring various “ideas” to build collections for sharing with their friends.

Casey concludes in the product management case study that checking whether the users are getting your product’s core value is pivotal in solving most of your growth challenges.

Key Takeaways

Case studies for product management contain in-depth insights that help product teams improve their approach toward their product’s ideation, analysis , development, and commercialization.

The six product management case study examples we reviewed above give these crucial insights:

• Slack : Don’t forget to use social media for marketing your product before its launch.
• Superhuman : Focus on the users that will be “very disappointed” if they can’t use your product anymore to achieve product-market fit.
• Medium : Track the one metric that tells you whether your users are getting value from your product rather than vanity metrics such as organic traffic.
• Ipsy : Partner with influencers to educate your target audience on how to get the most out of your product.
• Stitch Fix : Learn about what your users want and recommend them just that.
• Pinterest : Continuously experiment by changing multiple variables to uncover new growth opportunities.

To put these lessons into practice, you need to provide your team with the right tools that help them interact with your users, learn about their preferences, monitor their usage data, plan the next steps, and manage product development effectively.

Zeda.io is a product management super-app that allows you to do just that. You can run your entire product management process , from ideation to delivery, in one place. Zeda.io comes with over 5000 integrations with Zapier, enabling you to hit the ground running in no time.

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• What is a product management case study?

Answer: A product management case study is a detailed analysis of how a product was developed and iterated over time for maximum success. These studies help product managers learn from others and improve their own approach toward product management.

• How do you prepare a product management case?

Answer: You can prepare a product management case study in four steps — understand customer needs, monitor the stages of development, identify the factors that affected the course of product development, and extract takeaways.

• What are the 3 major areas of product management?

Answer: Discovery — recognizing the need for a product, planning — creating a roadmap to plan the product’s development, and development — the various sprints through which a product is developed are three major areas of product management.

• What are the 7 steps of product planning?

Answer: Concept development, competitive analysis, market research, MVP development, introduction, product lifecycle, and sunset are the seven steps of product planning.

• What are the 5 dimensions of product management?

Answer: Reliability, usability, functionality, maintainability, and efficiency are the five dimensions of product management.

• What are the 4 P's of product management?

Answer: Product, price, place, and promotion are the 4Ps of product management which represent four crucial aspects product teams should simultaneously focus on while developing a product. 

• What are the 5 phases of the product management process?

Answer: Idea generation, screening, concept development, product development, and commercialization are the five phases of the product management process .

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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.

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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?

Then check out our 30-60-90 day guide today.

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The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager

• Apoorva Mishra

Aspiring PMs must be cautious about what advice they take as gospel.

Product management has become an aspirational career. A group of popular social media influencers regularly offers advice on what it takes to attain a job and succeed in this field. But their content tends to glamorize the profession, gloss over the day-to-day-realities, and dispense wisdom that isn’t always on point.

Product management has become the dream job for many people working in tech. Who wouldn’t want a role that promises high earnings (according to Glassdoor , PMs are among the highest-paid professionals in tech) and the opportunity to shape products that positively impact millions of customers? That’s why the path to becoming a PM attracts a lot of attention, especially from fresh graduates and those seeking career transitions.

• AM Apoorva Mishra is a senior product manager at Amazon in San Francisco.

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