Strategy question
Should paytm introduce a Search option on its app?
- Paytm
- Strategy
- Medium
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
Strategic decision-making: weighing whether a new feature is worth building given user need and business priorities.
How to approach it
- Clarify what users currently do without search: browse categories or use external search engines to find Paytm services.
- Identify likely use cases for in-app search, like finding a specific bill payer, merchant, or transaction quickly.
- Weigh the cost: engineering effort to build good search versus the size of the problem it solves.
- Consider alternatives, like improving existing navigation or categorization before building full search.
- Make a recommendation, such as launching a scoped search (bills and merchants only) as an MVP, with a metric to validate it.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the recommendation in a plausible user behavior, like users abandoning the app to find a specific biller.
- Proposes an MVP scope (search only for merchants and bills) instead of an unbounded universal search.
- Names a concrete success metric, e.g. search usage rate and reduced navigation clicks to complete a task.
- Considers the opportunity cost of engineering time against other roadmap priorities.
Common mistakes
- Answering yes or no with no reasoning about user behavior or cost.
- Proposing a full universal search with no scoped MVP.
- Ignoring how success would be measured after launch.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test whether users actually want search before building it?
- What would you scope for a first version of search?
- How would you measure whether search improved the user experience?
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More questions from Paytm
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