Where's my bus?

A product design question from a product manager interview, set at Raahgo, a fictional intercity bus booking company.

The question

Skills this case tests

A starting structure

Goal → booking-to-seat journey → travellers by experience and boarding point → pain points → ideas that work without operator control → v1 → metric

How to approach this case

First ask who controls what. Raahgo sells the ticket, but someone else runs the bus, employs the crew and decides what data to share, so every idea has to survive that. Clarify the goal too: fewer support calls, fewer missed buses, better ratings or more repeat bookings. Then walk the journey hour by hour, from confirmation to the evening of travel, the walk to the stop, the wait and the moment of boarding. Segment travellers by how familiar they are with the route and the boarding point, and by how they booked, not by age. Look for moments where the passenger is anxious and has no information. Prioritise ideas that help on most trips, including buses whose operators share little. A strong close names one north-star metric, a guardrail that protects the operator relationship and a cheap first test.

The full method for product design (product sense) questions · 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.