Metrics question
You are the PM for a COVID-19 information portal. What are the goals that you will set for the team?
- Meta
- Metrics
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests goal-setting under a public-health, mission-driven context: balancing reach, accuracy, and trust rather than pure engagement.
How to approach it
- Clarify the portal's core job: giving people accurate, timely COVID-19 information (case data, guidance, vaccine access) they can act on.
- Set a primary goal: reach, such as percentage of the target population accessing the portal during a local outbreak spike.
- Set an accuracy and trust goal: information freshness (data updated within a set number of hours) and source citation, since misinformation is the biggest risk.
- Set an action goal: percentage of visitors who complete a relevant action, such as finding a testing or vaccination site.
- Set an equity guardrail: ensuring access across low-bandwidth connections and multiple languages, since public-health tools must not exclude vulnerable groups.
- Explicitly avoid engagement metrics like session length as a primary goal, since more time on a health portal is not inherently good.
What a strong answer includes
- Rejects engagement-style metrics (time on site, session count) as primary goals, since for a public-health tool that would be the wrong incentive.
- Names data freshness and accuracy as an explicit goal, not an implicit assumption, given how much harm stale COVID data could cause.
- Adds an equity guardrail (language and low-bandwidth access) reflecting that this is a public service product, not a typical consumer app.
- Defines a concrete action metric, such as percent of visitors reaching a testing or vaccine site link, tying the portal to real-world outcomes.
Common mistakes
- Setting generic engagement metrics as the primary goal for a public-health information product.
- Ignoring equity and accessibility, which are core requirements for this kind of tool.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a situation where accurate data conflicts with what is politically convenient to publish?
- How would you measure the portal's effect on actual vaccination or testing rates?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop