Strategy question
You are the CMO of Make my Trip . I have asked you to increase booking by 10 % via coupons. Is it doable? and how does it impact the bottomline?
- Microsoft
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Quantitative strategic reasoning about promotion-driven growth and its real bottom-line and margin impact.
How to approach it
- Clarify the ask: whether 'doable' means feasible to execute and whether it's worth doing given margin impact.
- Assess feasibility: coupon-driven booking increases are a well-proven lever in price-sensitive travel e-commerce, so a 10% lift is plausible with enough discount depth.
- Model the trade-off: estimate incremental bookings from price elasticity against the margin given up per discounted booking, since not all growth is incremental.
- Segment the offer: target price-sensitive or lapsed users rather than blanket discounting to loyal customers who'd book anyway, protecting margin.
- Estimate the bottom-line impact illustratively: if coupons average an 8% discount, margin could still take a real hit unless incremental volume and repeat bookings offset it.
- Recommend it as doable short-term but flag the margin risk, proposing a holdout test to measure true incrementality before scaling spend.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly separates incremental bookings from cannibalized or pull-forward bookings, the key quantitative insight this question tests.
- Proposes targeted, not blanket, couponing to protect margin, showing real pricing-strategy judgment.
- Recommends a holdout-based measurement approach to validate true incrementality before scaling spend.
Common mistakes
- Assuming all booking growth from coupons is new revenue with no cannibalization consideration.
- Giving no quantitative reasoning about the actual bottom-line or margin trade-off.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you design a holdout test to measure true incrementality?
- What would make you recommend against this coupon push?
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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 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop