Strategy question
How would you determine if the customer care team at a Shopify app is effectively contributing to business growth, and what steps would you take if it's not?
- Shopify
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether the candidate can define a clear success measure for a support function's business impact and propose a corrective plan if it's underperforming.
How to approach it
- Define what 'contributing to business growth' means concretely: reduced churn among merchants who contact support, and positive word of mouth or app store reviews.
- Identify a small set of leading and lagging metrics: first response time, resolution time, and satisfaction score as leading indicators, churn rate among ticket-filers as the lagging business indicator.
- Compare churn rate for merchants who contacted support against those who didn't, controlling for issue severity, to isolate the team's actual impact.
- If underperforming, diagnose root causes: slow response times, unresolved recurring issues, or support not being empowered to fix the underlying product problem.
- Propose fixes tied to the diagnosis, such as adding a feedback loop from support to product teams for recurring issues, and re-measure after a defined period.
What a strong answer includes
- Distinguishes support-team leading indicators (response time) from the real business lagging indicator (churn among ticket-filers).
- Proposes a controlled comparison, support contacters versus non-contacters, to isolate the team's actual causal impact.
- Names a specific root cause and fix, a feedback loop to product for recurring issues, rather than a vague 'improve support'.
Common mistakes
- Using only satisfaction scores as the success measure without tying to business outcomes like churn.
- Proposing generic fixes without diagnosing why the team is underperforming first.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you isolate the support team's impact from other factors affecting merchant churn?
- What would you do if support quality is high but churn still hasn't improved?
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More questions from Shopify
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 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop