Product design question
Auto drivers in India experience regular cash flow problems and resort to taking informal credit to resolve this issue. Consequently, they find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of debt. How can technology be used to solve this?
- Stripe
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product design for a real financial inclusion problem: can you propose a credible technology solution to informal debt cycles among gig workers.
How to approach it
- State the root cause precisely: irregular daily income makes fixed expenses hard to cover, pushing drivers to high interest informal lenders when cash is short.
- Identify what technology can actually change: income predictability and access to fair, small, fast credit tied to real earnings data.
- Propose the core solution: an earned wage access feature letting drivers draw a portion of already earned but unpaid fares instantly, reducing reliance on informal loans.
- Add a second layer: a small, transparent credit line underwritten using the driver's ride and earnings history from the platform itself, which informal lenders cannot access.
- Address trust and adoption, since drivers may distrust new financial products, so partnering with a known ride hailing or payments brand matters.
- Define success as reduction in informal borrowing reported by drivers and repayment completion rate on the platform's own credit product.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses the platform's own earnings data as the underwriting advantage, a genuinely differentiated idea over generic microloans.
- Separates the immediate fix, earned wage access, from the longer term fix, structured credit, rather than one vague solution.
- Picks a metric tied to the actual harm, reliance on informal debt, not just product usage.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a generic loan app with no connection to the platform's unique earnings data advantage.
- Ignoring trust and adoption barriers among a population wary of formal financial products.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you underwrite drivers with very inconsistent earnings?
- How would you prevent this credit line from creating a new debt trap?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop