You are the growth Product Manager for a social carpooling app. Due to COVID-19 and the enforcement of lockdowns, you see your key KPIs like DAU, rides and revenue drop to almost zero. What would be your strategy to revive the momentum and bring back users as lockdown measures are lifted?

Before beginning to strategise, we need to know a little more about the social carpooling app. What is the geographical presence of the carpooling app - does it have its presence nationwide, is it more local and concentrated to certain regions only , or does it have a semi-nationwide presence. This would be required to devise different strategies depending on the geographical presence. I am assuming the carpooling app has a nationwide presence. Next I would come to demography i.e. who were the most frequent users of this app - were they professionals travelling to work, college goers ? I assume most of the users were professionals travelling to work. I assume the users carpooled to work to save on fuel. Also the peak hours of consumption considering that most of them were office goers were during the morning 7-10am and eveving 6-8pm. These are some of the preliminary assumptions.

Next we come to our KPIs. This is straightforward - due to decrease in DAU , rides and revenue dropped to zero. So our goal is to revive the DAU which would automatically start bringing in revenues.

Finally we come to the strategies to left lockdown measures. Since the app has a nationwide presence, it would only make sense to devise strategies according to unlocking measures taken across regions by the goverment. I will divide these regions into Red,Yellow,Green - Green regions are those regions where covid cases have decreased and there will a staggered but sure removal of lockdown by the government, yellow being those regions where the curve is being flattened but lockdown will be lifted in certain areas only and red are those regions which have high cases and lockdown is unlikely to be removed. Our focus will be on the Green and yellow regions.

Strategies for both green & yellow regions - first and foremost we would look for any other app which shows and tracks covid statuses of persons. India has such an app called Arogya Setu. Installation of the app would be made mandatory and we could also integrate with the app to retrieve and show covid status per person. Other details like foreign travel, covid history etc would also be saved. This would be required from the safety point of view. The carpooling app would be enabled for only those users with the following criteria - no past covid history, not in any containment zone. For other users which fall in either of the two categories , the app will be disabled. Similarly users will have to mandatorily wear a mask and carry sanitisers. There should a section in the app where users can report if anyone was not following these instructions. Relevant messaging need to shown to the user that rides are protected and hygiene is being maintained along with the steps taken to maintain safety standards. These strategies focussed on allaying fears of hygiene.

Now we come to increasing user motivation to use the app. There will be 3 types of users - one who are open to travelling to office, others who prefer working from home and the third who are neutral. The root cause of this motivation will be reopening of office spaces. There should be past data of which office addresses customers used to carpool to. Targetted push notifications should be sent to customers depending ipon which office addresses are opening up. This should be public knowledge and would not be hard to get ; only issue here is that we have properly recorded a customer's travel history. Push notifications should feature messages which remind users of the safety standards and that offices are opening up. If I may dig more into this, we can keep separate forked flows for each type of customer mentioned : asking a question first whether user is open to travel with 3 options - yes,no,undecided. All 3 should feature 3 different messages.