Metrics question
Case Study: Your customers are using a 10-year-old version of your software. What do you do?
- Slack
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests diagnosing why customers resist upgrading and building a plan that balances migration risk with product debt.
How to approach it
- Clarify the stakes: an old version likely means missed revenue from new features, high support cost, and security risk from unpatched software.
- Hypothesize why customers haven't upgraded: fear of breaking custom workflows or integrations, cost of migration, or simply not knowing new value exists.
- Segment affected customers by size and how deeply customized their old-version setup is, since enterprise customers face higher switching cost.
- Propose a migration path: a sandboxed test environment, dedicated migration support for large accounts, and clear communication of new-version value and a support sunset date.
- Define success as percent of legacy customers migrated within a set window and support ticket volume from the old version dropping.
What a strong answer includes
- Diagnoses the root cause, switching risk and cost, before proposing any migration plan.
- Segments customers by migration difficulty instead of treating all legacy users the same.
- Proposes a concrete incentive and deadline structure rather than an open-ended, unforced migration ask.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to force an upgrade immediately without understanding why customers stayed on the old version.
- Treating every legacy customer as equally easy to migrate.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a large customer who refuses to migrate at all?
- When would you set a hard end-of-life date for the old version?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop