Step-By-Step Guide to Product Management Case Competitions

Product case competitions can be tricky mainly because of how vague their prompts are, especially in relation to marketing or consulting case comps. Essentially, you’ll be given a case study where you’re asked to “design a new feature” or to “improve a product”, and most people are stuck on where to start.

But why would you want to do these case comps anyway? Well, for a few reasons:

• They help with product understanding & learning, which is crucial for Product Managers
• The process to tackle case comps is very similar to the interviewing structure for Product interviews
• Case comps released by companies are used as a way to shortlist candidates for interviews (for example, Microsoft uses its case comp?PM Engage?to shortlist students)
• There’s a monetary price for winning (most of the time)

Let’s navigate through solving these case studies by taking a real-life example; Facebook’s case comp in 2021 was “Improve WhatsApp.” Before reading the rest of this, I would urge you to try coming up with some ideas on improving WhatsApp on your own, as that will accelerate the learning process.

Research, Research, Research

Most people skip this step thinking it’s irrelevant, but actually this is the most important part of the case study. Many times people suggest ideas or strategies which would make sense, but do not realise that the company has already tried that, or is already looking to implement their suggestions, in which case you have just wasted valuable slide real-estate. Essentially, you will want to understand fully the following aspects of your product:

• Revenue model
• Competitors
• User growth & demographics
• New products/features launching

Just something as simple as looking at Google News for that particular idea and company is enough in this case. This importance of research will be more relevant once we go to the next step.

Understand the Goal

In most case studies, the goal will be left vague & for you to figure out. In case the competition has given you a goal to focus on, then congrats, you can skip this step!

Depending on the stage of the life cycle the product is in, the main goal for the case comp can be different. For start-ups or newly launched products, the main goal will often be user acquisition and number of sign-ups. For a more mature product, the goal can be increased revenue, or increased retention, stickiness, etc. It’s important to always compare the product to its competitors here as well.

Consider WhatsApp. Since WhatsApp is a pretty late-stage product, we can rule out acquisition as a main goal. This is good because later when we come up with solutions for improvement, we can discard all solutions related to user acquisition. What about increasing revenue? That is a valid goal to choose. WhatsApp mainly earns revenue via B2B transactions, and there is a huge host of ways to expand that. However, revenue is?never WhatsApp’s main objective. We can choose revenue, but it misses the core value proposition WhatsApp provides to Meta, which is user engagement & marketshare. So how about improving user engagement? This is fair, as it fits with the product life cycle stage of WhatsApp along with the main goal of WhatsApp in Meta, so we can go ahead with this.

Note: Choosing revenue over engagement is also OK, as it is a legitimate goal. In many of these case studies, the prompt will be left open.

Segment the User Base

The key here is to only target a feature for a particular audience. Segment the users of that product; you can do it based on activity, age, or whatever other demographics as long as they do not overlap. Then, choose one segment to focus on. This can be based on market-sizing, revenue-potential (Pareto Principle), or whatever your chosen main goal is.

Looking at WhatsApp again, we can divide our user segments as follows:

We can choose any of these segments. Since we are choosing engagement, let’s look at what WhatsApp’s major competitors are. One major app is Telegram. Why would someone choose to use Telegram over WhatsApp? Who even uses these apps over WhatsApp? One segment we can choose here is college students, as they are a pretty large demographic with legitimate grievances with WhatsApp to use Telegram over it. Note that you can choose any demographic here as long as you can justify your decision.

Our goal was usage, but if we had chosen revenue, we would have picked another segment other than college students (who are relatively price-sensitive).

Determine Pain-Points

OK, you have your user base chosen. Now, determine their pain-points. What are the issues they face with the product? Do they use any alternatives or competitors’ products more? If so, why? What do those products offer to them that our product does not offer?

Let’s look at our user segment of college students & WhatsApp again. Some grievances they have are:

• WhatsApp groups are limited in size (can only go up to 256 members). Since many students want to have huge groups for their entire cohort, WhatsApp group messages are not viable.
• Too many group chats with no way to organize them. Many students have multiple group chats for school, family, friends, etc.
• Too much spam. How often do you look at WhatsApp to just see “+1” messages or spam of some other kind?
• Too many messages; it’s easy to lose important messages. In groups, there can be 300+ messages per hour easily, so how does someone navigate those many messages and find the relevant ones?

You’ll notice here we have focused on group chats on WhatsApp. It is OK to focus on a particular feature or subset of a product if you think it is most relevant for that particular demographic & goal.

Create Features Addressing Pain-Points

This is the real bread-and-butter of the case comp, but don’t worry. At this point, you’re pretty much done. You just need to find ideas that you can implement to address the pain-points you discussed earlier. Just think of things you’d wish that product had, and mention those as particular solutions!

Looking at our pain-points above, we can come up with the following solutions:

• Limited Group Sizes:?Increase group size. Pretty simple solution here.
• Too Many Group Chats:?we can solve this by adding a feature that allows users to organize their chats. Allowing users to categorize their chats or put them in folders, like Gmail or Telegram, will be a good solution for this.
• Spam:?There are a few ways to reduce spam. One is to use a ML model to automatically catch spam messages and mark them as such, so users don’t get notified for them. Another solution would be to create an in-built “Like message” feature, so users can just click Like on these messages instead of typing a new message just to say “+1”, reducing this spam.
• Too Many Messages:?Again, there are many ways to solve the problem of too many messages. You can again allow a bot for each individual user to star messages based on specific keywords so that even if there are 300+ messages, users know that the relevant messages have been starred for them.

Keep in mind that you should also sneak in some?moonshot?ideas. Companies like Google & Amazon really emphasise creativity so these ideas will always be appreciated. Moonshot ideas do not need to be very practical for now, so you can be as creative as you want. For example, here, we could use natural-language processing (NLP) to create automatic summaries of a group of messages to reduce on message overload.

Prioritize

Now that we have chosen our solutions, it’s time to prioritize. Many times, you only have the resources to create one new solution at a time, so how do we decide which ones we should implement first?

Essentially, you will want to prioritize on three aspects:

• Main goal chosen
• Product vision for the company
• Time-to-market

You can also use something like the RICE framework, which gives you a more numerical score for prioritization. RICE here stands for?Reach,?Impact,?Confidence, and?Effort. Give a score for Reach, Impact, and Effort between 1–5, and Confidence a score of 0% to 100%. Finally, the overall RICE formula is:

Score = Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort

Metrics

Now that we know which solutions we are prioritizing, it is important to know how to track the success of these solutions. This success is tracked by viewing metrics related to the features we implement.

Metrics can be divided into the following categories:

• North-Star Metrics:?these are the metrics that are directly tied to our main goal and so these are our main concern. In the example we chose, since we want to improve user engagement, some north-star metrics we can look at are # messages sent, time-on-app, etc.
• Guardrail Metrics:?these are metrics that you do not want to see decrease, no matter what. Sometimes, an implementation of one feature can increase one metric and can also potentially decrease another metric. We need to make sure the decreased metric is not crucial for the product. For example, one of WhatsApp’s competitive advantages is that it is very fast to load. If one of our solutions (like one of the ML solutions we proposed) increases the load-time of WhatsApp, we may choose to not go forward with it.
• Health Metrics:?these are standard metrics that do not change much, and only give a high-level indication of the product’s performance. These include something like Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU).

You can also use A/B testing to determine if your features are in fact affecting your metrics. A/B testing is the process of running two concurrent & separate test groups, one with your feature and one without. This way, you can see the impact of your feature first-hand.

Create a Well-Balanced Team

Finally, case comps are not individual efforts (unlike interviews). You’ll want to choose a well-balanced team, ideally team members that compliment each others’ backgrounds and strengths.

A good team normally consists of someone with an engineering background, someone with a financial background, and someone with a general product background. But this is very general, and in most cases, the “ideal” team can change with the case study and the market of the product chosen.

Keep Slides Clean

Most times, candidates overload slides with a lot of infographics and content. While this is good if you’re presenting your solution to actual judges, in the preliminary round, this will just make your deck look unruly and the coordinators will not be able to make out which content is most relevant to the case study and which is not. As such, it is recommended to not content-dump just for the sake of putting forward information. No content is better than irrelevant content.

Also, learn to create wireframes using Figma. It’s an underrated skill.

_____________________________________

Well, that’s it! One bonus tip: make sure you’re actually learning from the case competition. This format is very similar to the one needed for product interviews, and you will learn a lot about?something?while doing these competitions. It can be either about the industry, the user demographic, specific technologies, or whatever else. So take the learning part of the competitions very seriously, especially if you’re doing a company-specified case comp, in which case your interview will be almost the same as the case competition itself.