Orders fell 8% on a Tuesday

A root cause drill question from a product manager interview, set at Bazaario, a fictional value e-commerce company.

The question

What you're told upfront

• Daily orders down 8% week-on-week, sudden, starting Tuesday; stayed down since.
• Not a sale period or holiday; no outage reported; data pipeline checked; all India; app only (web 3% of orders, flat).

Skills this case tests

A starting metric tree

Orders = DAU × sessions per user × conversion per session (product view → cart → checkout → order placed)

How to approach this case

The basics are given upfront, so don't spend time re-asking about sales, outages or data quality. State the tree in the first minute and start at the top: fewer people, fewer sessions, or the same traffic converting worse? A sudden step on one day with no outside trigger usually means something changed on the platform. Once you find the broken funnel step, keep cutting that step alone, choosing from region, platform and OS, app version, payment method, order value and new versus repeat buyers, and say why you picked each cut. After every number, say out loud what it rules out. A strong close distinguishes orders placed from orders actually delivered, sizes both, and proposes a fix that doesn't throw away whatever the change was meant to achieve.

The full method for quick structuring drills · A worked example answer

After the mock interview you get scores on five skills, what to fix with quotes from your answers, and the ideal path for this case.