Your defective product was responsible for life-threatening illness in kids. How would you go about handling this situation?

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Your defective product was responsible for life-threatening illness in kids. How would you go about handling this situation?

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Abhijeet Das · Answer 1 · 2025-06-29T08:24:21+0000

What was the product? Hardware/ Software? Software

What was the purpose of the product? Suggest right medicines based on children's symptoms

What is the type of illness? Fatal if not treated immediately

Is it specific to any geography? India

Is it specific to people having some special conditions? Not aware

When was this reported? One week back

Metrics -

# users
% new users
- % who have logged in the last week
  - % who have used the feature
    - % who have complained about the issue
% old users
- % who have logged in the last week
  - % who have used the feature
    - % who have complained about the issue
% drop in users login
% drop in user engagement

Hypothesis -

Internal factors -

Was it specific to portal or app? Android or iOS? No, overall
Did we fix any bugs recently? No
Did we launch a new feature recently? Yes
Did we change the search results algorithm? No
Did we change the data repository from where results are fetched? No

External factors -

Was there any competitor campaign related to our product? No
Was there any negative PR about our company? No
Is this due to seasonal diseases or any ongoing pandemic? Possible
Is there any new disease already ongoing for which there is no information available right now? Yes

It seems that due to an ongoing new disease, we launched a new feature which is not working accurately.

To further confirm this,

I would want to test the data on user complaint rate for this feature v/s the user complaint rate for any other existing feature. If the latter value is still the same as before the launch of the new feature, we can zero down to this hypothesis being correct.

Short term solution -

Roll back the feature

Issue public apology for this feature

Provide compensation to the affected users and unsure their any further required treatment

Long term solution -

Redo the medical research and associated diagnosis, ased on which redesign the feature

Perform beta testing with interested users and share results publicly

Then do a staggered rolled out region by region and closely monitor the metrics