The Indian Government has recently announced a nationwide lockdown. As the product manager at Ola, you have seen a huge hit to sales. What would you do to increase revenue at Ola? Is there a new business that you would venture into? Why or why not?

Question

The Indian Government has recently announced a nationwide lockdown. As the product manager at Ola, you have seen a huge hit to sales. What would you do to increase revenue at Ola? Is there a new business that you would venture into? Why or why not?

Asked at Indmoney over a year ago

377 views

Asked at

377 views

How to answer Product Strategy questions

Interview Guide

Answers (2)

To answer this question, Log in.

Top Indmoney interview questions

What is your favorite investing (stocks, crypto, MFs) app? How would you design a social angle for this app?0 answers | 280 views
See Indmoney PM Interview Questions

Top Product Strategy interview questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

Tarun Kumar · Answer 1 · 2023-10-20T08:15:38+0000

First few clarifying questions,

Any duration for the lockdown? If it's going to be for a few days then it doesn't make sense, if it is enforced for an indefinite amount of time then we need to think about getting revenue.
What are restrictions during this lockdown, for instance
- Is lockdown during particular hours?
- Will essential services such as food delivery, medicine delivery, and grocery delivery among other things be functional?
Is the lockdown for the entire India or just some parts of India?
What is the overall objective for the same?
Should I think about desktop or mobile apps here?

Assuming I get the following response from the interviewer:

This is an indefinite lockdown, the movement of people must be contained under any circumstance
Assume lockdown for 20 hours, however, shops remain open for the public between 4 pm to 8 pm
Essential services including food, medicine, groceries, and other emergency services will remain open
This is a lockdown situation due to Covid
The objective is to increase GMV (Gross merchandise value) or sales thereby improving revenue
Going ahead with the mobile app

Describing Ola is a ride-hailing platform where users can request a ride, that gets matched to a driver. If the driver accepts the ride, the driver and rider are matched. Ola has seen huge growth and is quite popular in India with tier 1 and tier 2 city residents. It offers convenience to the riders and has a big network of driver partners.

During covid lockdown, there were a lot of needs for the users:

Riders:
- Ensure necessities or basic supplies
- Ensure well well-being of self, family, and friends
- Ensure good mental health
- Ensure emergency services are accessible
Driver Needs:
- Ensure livelihood
- Ensure the safety of the family and friends
- Ensure necessities or basic supplies
- Ensure safety measures

Out of all the needs mentioned, I want to qualify a particular need that is urgent and has high frequency

Ensure necessities or basic supplies (Important and Frequent)
Ensure well being of family and friends (Important)
Ensure emergency services are accessible (Important)
Ensure livelihood (Important for drivers)
Ensure top-notch safety measures (Important for drivers)

Check with the interviewer if they align on this.

Based on the above needs I'd like to brainstorm some solutions.

On-demand delivery services for essentials
- Food
- Grocery
- Water
- Medicine
- Insurance (As there is still low penetration of insurance services in India)
On-demand emergency response service
- Ola can turn some of its cabs into Ambulance with paramedics team via video conference to help users in emergencies. The cab can have an oxygen cylinder along with other necessary items.
As some users are still not tech savvy, such as elders Ola can create an easy and user-friendly flow to deliver supplies to friends and families. Ordering for someone else, while ensuring safety standards.
Taxi drivers and 2-wheelers can operate as delivery personnel or shop on wheels that can provide items to people in need. But this situation would mean people physically buying this, making this slightly less desirable in containment zones or tier 1 cities which are highly populated.
In tier-1 cities, since Ola has aggregated location access of all the hospitals, the driver network within Ola can suggest which hospitals to go next in case the nearby hospital is unable to take in emergency cases

I'd like to prioritize some of the solutions keeping our objective in mind. Criteria (Impact, Effort)

InitiativesImpactEffort

On-demand delivery of basic supplies - Order for self - Order for others	High	High
Emergency response services	High	Medium
Aggregated hospital information	Medium	Medium
Taxi as a mini store	Medium	Medium
Insurance to people	High	Low

Based on the above criteria, I'd prioritize the following

1. On-demand delivery of basic supplies

2. Emergency response services with Ola

3. Sell Insurance to people

Check with the interviewer if they are aligned.

Metrics to measure:

1. Net GMV overall

2. Net GMV per day

3. GMV contribution per different services [Food, Grocery, Ambulance, Insurance, etc.,]

4. No. of orders for self vs. others

5. Reduce stockouts and return

Summarize this scenario, and make some recommendations on the use cases that are not prioritized. Aggregation of information could be a great use case and bring more users to the app, then we can use the app to upsell other goods and services.

Looking for feedback on this. Thanks!

Prateek Sachdeva · Answer 2 · 2023-10-16T07:01:00+0000

Clarifying questions:

Can you clarify more on the type of lockdown the Indian Government has announced/ (to tackle a an epidemic that has been spreading in the country)
What kind of a lockdown is it? (no travel within the city, businesses to operate remotely, only sale of essential products and extremely essential travel allowed)
Any exceptions to the above? (Yes essential travel allowed: schools/ offices to remain shut) (you can get a travel pass)
Is it a short term restriction or a long term restriction? (Long term, for the next 4 months)
Which cities have been impacted? (all tier 1 & tier 2 towns have been impacted)
I am assuming the hit to sales have been across the travel services that Ola offers? Yes
Assuming because of the hit in our sales we have a budget constraint? Yes

Goal:

Ola is a leading platform in India as a transport services provider. It has 2 major user bases: riders & sellers.

The current lockdown poses a restriction on travel (only essential travel allowed)

We need to combat the hit to our sales that has happened because of this. The goal is to achieve this in the most time optimised & cost optimised way.

How can a company tackle revenue losses basis a government restriction?

come around a workaround (not feasible, imposed by the govt.)
cater to the restricted offerings
expand its offerings in another sector which has not been impacted by this lockdown
Leverage their current assets / feasibilities in another sector
Acquire other companies that have not been impacted (not feasible, expensive)
Cut costs (within organisation)

We will be delving deeper in Points #2, #3, #4, #6

Before this lets do a quick SWOT analysis for OLA in the current scenario:

Strengths:

Good industry / brand name
Duopoly in the transport space in India
Robust technical architecture & human resource
Customer data (both rider & driver)
Robust partner integration capability

Weaknesses:

Operate only in the travel / transport sector.
Big organisation (so a lot of spend on office infra, human resource, not a lean team)

Opportunities:

Expand offerings in essential travel
Leverage driver data in logistics
Integrate with profitable partners
Leverage current technical capability in other sectors

Threat:

Might have to cut down costs like staff, infra
Public backlash
Restrictions might get stricter from the goverment end.

Exploring Opportunities:

What constitutes essential travel?

Hospital visits (Ambulance, patient visit, doctor visit)
logistics for grocery / ecommerce delivery
government staff duty (essential) (Indian government has their own fleet of vehicles)

# Feature 1 (Long term)

Launching ambulance services by partnering with local hospitals.

Expand our offerings by launching a new service (ambulances, private cars to take users to the hospital in case of an emergency)

We can onboard existing hospital ambulances or convert partner vans/ shuttles into makeshift ambulances.

Drivers can be offered incentive to transport patients who have the disease.

#Feature 2 (short term)

Partnering with local medical shops/ grocery/ last mile delivery apps/ hotels & restaurants (only essentials)

We can use our drivers (motorbike & auto-drivers) as a logistics partner, while integrating with F&B, grocery apps for the delivery of essential items.

This capability already exists on our platform, we will need to come to an agreement with these apps and do product integrations.

Let’s look at expanding in other sectors:

What would be the most profitable service sectors during a pandemic?

Healthcare (medicines, doctors etc.)
Government approvals (say for issuing a travel pass)
Online e-commerce (as physical stores are shut) (not prioritising this as it takes time to build and there are multiple players in the market.)

#Feature 3 (SOS: Doctor at your doorstep) (Short-term)

If a user is unable to travel to a hospital and there is a medical emergency then they can use an Emergency SOS (doctor at your doorstep) feature on the app.

We have this data (as to which hospitals / private clinics / emergency wings) are nearby.

This would send an alert to the nearest hospitals and clinics and we would match the patient with a nearby doctor who would then physically come to the user’s house.

The same can be implemented for health supplies like medicines, gloves etc. We can partner with medical apps like Tata1mg, Netmeds etc.

#Feature 4 (Take travel approvals on the app) (Long term)

Partnering with the Government agencies both India and abroad where we can build a functionality where users can take approvals / apply for passes on the app.

For eg:

Emergency inter city travel pass
Air Suvidha for travellers from high risk countries travelling to India
Covid declarations / approvals for other countries.

Other suggestions (might be controversial) (non-product suggestions)

Offering remote work to all employees to cut down on infra costs
Leaning down the staff