Strategy question
How would you run a promotion to increase top-line, in-store revenue for Target? How would you decide what to promote? How would you run the experiment?
- DoorDash
- Strategy
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Promotion strategy design plus experiment design skill, especially isolating incremental revenue from pulled-forward sales.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal: incremental revenue versus purchases just shifted forward in time.
- Decide what to promote by looking at high-margin, high-elasticity categories, or slow-moving inventory.
- Decide the promotion type: category discount, buy-more-save-more, or a loyalty-tied offer.
- Design the experiment with store or geo-level randomization and comparable control stores.
- Measure incremental lift over baseline, net of the discount cost.
- Define success as net incremental revenue, not gross sales lift.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly separates incremental revenue from pulled-forward or cannibalized revenue, the key promotion risk.
- Picks store-level or geo-based randomization, realistic for in-store retail where per-user tests are hard.
- Names a concrete category choice, e.g. promoting slow-moving seasonal inventory to clear stock profitably.
- Defines success as net incremental revenue after discount cost, not gross sales lift.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring cannibalization and pull-forward effects when measuring promotion success.
- Proposing a user-level A/B test when in-store promotions are usually store or geo-level.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you choose control stores comparable to treatment stores?
- How long would you run the experiment to catch pull-forward effects?
More strategy questions
- You are a product manager in AirBNB and need to improve the post-booking customer experience. What would you do?DoorDash · Strategy · Medium
- Should DoorDash expand into grocery subscription services?DoorDash · Strategy · Hard
- How would you increase repeat orders for DoorDash?DoorDash · Strategy · Hard
- Google Keep is a free product to save, share notes etc. How would you make it a subscription product & monetize it?Google · Strategy · Hard
- How would you launch (roll out) Amazon Go?Amazon · Strategy · Hard
- With an unlimited network bandwidth what would you build?Google · Strategy · Hard
More questions from DoorDash
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