Product Manager Take Home Assignment Examples
5 March 2023 ‧ 4 min read
I have been asked quite a few times for examples for product manager take home assignment / homework assignment questions, so I decided to put together a list of some that I have given candidates or been given as a candidate. Some of these have been slightly anonymized.
RevenueCat: benchmarking
RevenueCat is my current employer and provides a SaaS solution for mobile app developers to manage their in-app subscriptions.
One vague feature request we’ve had from developers over the last couple of years is the desire for “benchmarking.” Developers are trying to make informed decisions about their businesses, and the ability to compare with other companies would be very informative. We have a lot of that data with thousands of apps using RevenueCat in production.
Pretend we are considering to provide benchmarking in some form. Spend some time thinking through the problem, what might actually be useful to our customers, if we could address that opportunity, and how we could integrate it into the RevenueCat experience in a reasonable short time frame (1 quarter).
Put your thoughts into a ~1 page memo that we can use to have a productive conversation, led by you, about how we might address this problem. Talk about the tradeoffs, consider open questions, future steps etc. Emphasis will be put on productivity of the conversation, and not necessarily the viability of a specific proposal.
8fit: customers with injuries
8fit is my previous employer, a fitness and nutrition mobile app.
We get a lot of feedback from our users that the workout offering of our app isn’t working well if the user has an injury. Some have injuries that prevent them from doing some of our exercises. Some of them would like to use 8fit to recover from their injuries.
Please further define this problem and propose a solution, following the product discovery and design process you would normally follow. There is no set structure for this task, but please try to cover the following:
- Define the problem, ideate potential solutions, and prioritize an idea that you think is promising
- Outline the solution you are proposing, including user flows and rough wireframes if applicable
- Evaluate any trade-offs you made in the design of the solution
- Define criteria and process to validate that the solution you are proposing is solving the problem
- Describe how your proposed solution may impact product KPIs, and how you might measure that
Of course, in a normal product development process you would work with a team and have access to additional data, research etc. that you won’t have for the purpose of this case study. Therefore, feel free to make assumptions and call them out.
Stock photo provider: conversion funnel
This is an assignment for a provider of downloadable stock photos.
We differentiate between the customer segments of enterprise (big companies with large volume, supported by the sales team) and self-serve (with low volumes).
We have 3 different types of licenses at different price points, with different qualities and allowed usages. We also have two categories of images: regular and premium.
For self-serve customers, we would like to optimize the checkout flow to increase conversion.
- Iteration: Please take a look at the current checkout process, and come up with 3-5 ideas to improve conversion. The discussion here will focus around your proposal and how you present and defend your concepts. Wireframes would be a plus.
- New Feature: We would like to offer customers the ability to pre-purchase packs of licenses at a reduced rate. How would you approach this task? What steps would you take to define the content of the packs, who would you involve in the process? Where would you offer the buyers a chance to purchase packs? What kinds of packs would you offer? etc... A checklist of steps to follow and user-flows would be the best way to describe this.
Real estate portal: VR
This is an assignment for a web/mobile based real estate portal.
Virtual Reality is gaining momentum as a technology in the digital world. Our real estate agent customers are already experimenting with a range of suppliers of ‘virtual walk-throughs’ which allows property seekers to navigate a floor plan and explore a property in 3D. The real estate portals have not yet taken advantage of VR by integrating it into their sites and apps.
- As the responsible Product Manager, how would you approach the VR opportunity?
- How should we respond and why?
- How could we benefit from this opportunity?
- Does VR pose a risk to our business model? How does it affect real estate agents?
Bonus: Medium changes
I am including this mostly for nostalgia’s sake: this is the assignment I completed back in 2015 for my first PM job at Microsoft. Microsoft had a policy to not have take-home assignments about Microsoft product, so the assignment was about Medium.
In February 2015 Medium made some changes to how their product works and feels. The three main changes were an Inline Editor, The Stream, and Tags. Choose one (1) of these features and answer the following questions:
- What do you think Medium’s hypothesis was for the feature and how do you think they measured results? How do you think they defined success before they shipped the feature?
- Design an additional change to Medium that builds on the successful outcome of the feature you chose (include rough mocks if possible). Why build this change?
- Based on your hypothesis and metrics from the first question, let’s assume the feature had failed. What would that tell you? What would you do next?
Medium announces changes: https://medium.com/the-story/a-less-long-more-connected-medium-c345db2d6a56
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