Product design question
How would you improve patient retention by improving the counseling side of a tele-counseling platform?
- One Medical
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product improvement thinking for a service where human quality of interaction, not just app usability, drives retention.
How to approach it
- Clarify what drives retention here: patients likely churn due to counselor mismatch, inconsistent quality across sessions, or lack of perceived progress, more than app friction.
- Segment patients: new patients still finding the right counselor fit versus returning patients evaluating whether continued sessions are helping.
- Prioritize counselor matching quality first, since a poor first match is a common reason patients disengage from tele counseling entirely.
- Propose an improved matching algorithm based on stated concerns and preferences, plus a low friction way to switch counselors without feeling like starting over.
- Add a lightweight progress tracking feature, like simple mood or goal check ins between sessions, so patients and counselors can both see tangible progress.
- Define success as patient retention through at least 6 sessions and self reported perceived progress, not just app open rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Correctly identifies that retention here depends on counseling quality and fit, not typical app engagement levers.
- Proposes a concrete matching and switching mechanism, addressing a known, real pain point in tele counseling.
- Gives an illustrative number, for example assuming improved matching raises 6 session retention from 40 percent to 55 percent.
- Adds a progress visibility feature, addressing the real reason patients disengage, feeling like therapy isn't working.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic app engagement tactics like push notifications instead of addressing counseling quality and fit.
- Ignoring how sensitive and personal this service is, treating it like a typical consumer retention problem.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure counselor quality without relying only on patient ratings, which can be biased?
- How would you handle a patient who wants to switch counselors without feeling like a failure?
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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