Strategy question
You work for a company that deploys solar technologies, including solar panels. The company installs them and provides maintenance services. While the business is currently performing well, you've been tasked with achieving a 10x growth within the next two years. What would you do?
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether the candidate can propose a credible growth strategy for a physical, install-and-maintain business, not just a software growth playbook.
How to approach it
- Clarify the current state: installed base, average deal size, sales cycle length, and whether growth today comes mostly from new installs or from maintenance contracts.
- Identify growth levers specific to this business: new customer acquisition, geographic expansion, and recurring revenue from maintenance and monitoring services.
- Weigh a build versus partner tradeoff, since 10x likely requires scaling installation capacity faster than hiring alone allows, for example a certified installer partner network.
- Propose a recurring revenue angle, such as energy monitoring and optimization subscriptions layered on top of installed panels, to grow revenue per customer, not just new installs.
- Recommend a combination: partner network for install capacity plus a subscription monitoring product, and name the key risk, quality control across third-party installers.
What a strong answer includes
- Distinguishes new-install growth from recurring-revenue growth, since 10x in two years likely needs both, not just more sales reps.
- Proposes a partner installer network as a concrete way to scale physical capacity faster than direct hiring.
- Names quality control risk explicitly, since a hardware and installation business lives or dies on reliability and safety.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a pure software growth playbook (viral loops, paid acquisition) without addressing physical installation capacity constraints.
- Ignoring recurring revenue potential and focusing only on one-time install sales.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you maintain installation quality while scaling through partners?
- What would be your first 90-day milestone toward this 10x goal?
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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