Product design question
Define roadmap, build, roll out and measure success of a product to manage Covid vaccination across India such that 80% of population is vaccinated in a price optimised manner.
- Salesforce
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests large-scale program and product thinking: building a roadmap for a national vaccination effort with cost, equity, and measurable success built in from the start.
How to approach it
- Define the goal precisely: vaccinate 80 percent of India's population at a price-optimized cost, balancing speed, equity, and budget.
- Segment the population: urban versus rural access, digital versus non-digital reach, and priority groups (elderly, frontline workers) first.
- Build the roadmap: phase 1 targets priority groups and urban centers with existing infrastructure; phase 2 expands to rural areas using mobile vaccination units and local health workers.
- Design for cost optimization: negotiate volume-based vaccine pricing, use existing public health infrastructure instead of building new facilities, and minimize wastage through better slot and cold-chain logistics.
- Design the rollout mechanism: a simple registration system (including offline options for low digital access) integrated with local government health centers.
- Define success metrics: percent of population vaccinated by phase and region, cost per dose delivered, and vaccine wastage rate as a guardrail.
What a strong answer includes
- Sequences the rollout by realistic constraints (existing infrastructure first, then harder-to-reach rural areas) instead of treating the country as one uniform rollout.
- Explicitly designs for equity, including an offline registration path, since digital-only access would exclude a large share of the target population in India.
- Names cost optimization levers concretely: volume pricing, reusing existing infrastructure, and minimizing cold-chain wastage, tying back to the 'price optimized' requirement in the prompt.
- Sets a measurable, phased target (percent vaccinated by region and by phase) rather than a single end-state number with no path.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a single nationwide rollout with no phasing or prioritization by access and risk.
- Ignoring the explicit cost-optimization requirement in the prompt and focusing only on speed.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle vaccine hesitancy in specific regions or communities?
- How would you re-prioritize if vaccine supply came in below the planned volume?
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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