Product Team Case Study #1

Clipboard’s Product Team conquers interesting challenges daily. The below case study was selected to give you a feel for the degree of difficulty – and fun– of the types of projects the team tackles.

Clipboard’s marketplace users “book a transaction in the future,” as is true for other apps with which you may be familiar. So we use the analogy below to leverage that familiarity.

Pretend you’re the pricing product manager for Lyft’s ride-scheduling feature, and you’re launching a new city like Toledo, Ohio.

The prevailing rate that people are used to paying for rides from the airport to downtown (either direction, one way) is $25. The prevailing wage that drivers are used to earning for this trip is $19.

You launch with exactly this price: $25 per ride charged to the rider, $19 per ride paid to the driver. It turns out only 60 or so of every 100 rides requested are finding a driver at this price.

(While there is more than one route to think about in Toledo, for the sake of this exercise you can focus on this one route.)

Here’s your current unit economics for each side:

• Drivers: 

  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC) of a new driver is between $400 - $600. CAC is sensitive to the rate of acquisition since channels are only so deep.

  • At the prevailing wage, drivers have a 5% monthly churn rate and complete 100 rides / month

• Riders: 

  • CAC of a new rider is $10 to $20 (similar to driver CAC it’s sensitive to the rate of acquisition, since existing marketing channels are only so deep) 

  • Each rider requests 1 ride / month on average

  • Churn is interesting: riders who don’t experience a “failed to find driver” event churn at 10% monthly, but riders who experience one or more “failed to find driver” events churn at 33% monthly

You’ve run one pricing experiment so far: when you reduced Lyft’s take from $6/ride to $3/ride across the board for a few weeks, match rates rose nearly instantly from 60% to roughly 93%.

Your task is to maximize the company’s net revenue (the difference between the amount riders pay and the amount Lyft pays out to drivers) for this route in Toledo for the next 12 months. Let’s assume that you cannot charge riders more than the prevailing rate.

The core question is: how much more or less do you pay drivers per trip (by changing Lyft’s take)? Your goal is to maximize net revenue for the next 12 months on this route.

As you tackle this case study, keep in mind that Clipboard’s Product Team dives deep into the numbers and has a bias toward action. And we have real fun doing it!

Output for the Case Study

The ideal output from this exercise is a written document backed by analysis, which is the type of output our team members produce regularly. As mentioned in our blog, we do not think longer cases are “better” and value clarity far more than length.

The Clipboard Health Product Team Interview Process

First of all, thank you for applying to Clipboard Health. We’re very excited at the prospect of you joining our team and want to provide visibility into our process. To give you a view into how we think about recruiting we produced this post. We also recommend that you poke around the blog here to get an idea of how the Product Team works and our Team Standards.

Steps:

1. Case Study 1: Lyft Toledo Case (above prompt)

2. Case Study 1 interview with a member of the Product Team

   1. We will always give you the chance to ask questions during this stage as well, and if time allows we may go into your background

3. Case Study 2: Working Backwards Document Case

4. Case Study 2 Interview

5. Meet with President / COO (Bo Lu)

We recognize that this is a time intensive process. We have found this as the best way to assess whether there is a mutual fit. If you're looking for room to grow problem-solving skills in a feedback-rich environment where your thinking will be challenged, we think you'll have fun in both our interview process as well as if you join full-time.

Note that we don’t always follow this process exactly and sometimes we’ll move stages around depending on the candidate and what we think is best, but in all scenarios you should expect 2 written case studies (starting with the above) and 3-4 conversations with members of our team. We have found that cases are the strongest indicators of performance within our team and weigh them heavily during the process. We do not use the case studies outside of our recruiting process.

As a general rule, we do not give rejection reasons or feedback for case studies that do not progress to the interview stage. We unfortunately have limits to how many candidates we can interview and get to know, and the members of our team who evaluate case study submissions are unable to provide individualized feedback on every case. Of course, we’re continuously evolving our process to improve the candidate experience and welcome your feedback.

All prospective members of the Product Team will speak with George Markoulakis (Head of Product) and Bo Lu (President and COO) prior to an offer.

Members of the Strategy and Operations Team (which sits within the Product Team) will always speak with Wyatt Amaral.

We’re excited for you to get started!

Edit: Some clarifications & a correction, July 2021. v2 published Oct 2021. v3 published Aug 2022. v4 published October 2022. v5 published November 2022. v6 published January 2023. v7 published June 2023.