Product Management Case Study with Solution: How to Solve the CRM Marketing Case Study

Here’s some good news: You don’t need years of experience to come up with an impressive Product Manager case study solution that will get you hired. If you’ve read our ultimate guide on how to solve a Product Manager case study, you know any that case study question can be solved in four simple steps:

1. Evaluate the need
2. Validate the need
3. Set a goal for the feature
4. Decision making

Keep in mind that your case study solution should be situational and contextual to the company your interviewing for. The above steps can help you get it right.

With that in mind, how do you solve CRM Marketing case studies? Read on for a product management case study with solution walkthrough by one of our Product Gym coaches, Cody Chang, to give you a practical idea.

We recommend you try solving the case study along with us: think about the questions first, then compare your own product manager case study solution with what we propose.

CRM Marketing Case Study Prompt

While conducting customer interviews, you discover that service professionals (pros) get a lot of inbound phone calls they aren’t always able to answer right away. For these customers, service pros not getting back to these calls quickly can result in lost business.

Determine whether you should bring a solution to market. If you do, what does this solution look like and what steps would you take to get it to market? In a 1–3 page document or several slides, outline the steps you’d take to go from zero to one on this idea and bring it to market.

Here are some things to consider (not exhaustive):

• How do you validate the problem exists?
• How do you validate the solution?
• What is your solution?
• How do you bring the solution to market?
• How do you know if it’s successful or not?
• Who are your key stakeholders?
• How do you monetize this solution?

You will need to make a variety of assumptions throughout this exercise, please state those assumptions in your document. Please plan to spend no more than two hours on this exercise and send it back to me at least three hours ahead of our scheduled time.

Want to follow along as you read the case study solution? Get more insight by watching the full presentation walk-through:

Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 1

To get started, let’s recap the information above in a simplified form:

• Company: A CRM marketing tool.
• What they do: Connect tradespeople with leads.
• Problem: The tool is getting leads to the tradespeople, but they are not answering leads.

In this scenario, we’re imagining a service professional, such as an HVAC technician, electrician, or plumber, who has the CRM tool installed on their phone or computer. However, though customer leads are pinging them, calling, or providing their information on a form, the service professionals are not getting back to them.

Like with everything in product management, always start with the user when solving Product Manager case study interview questions. You should have a clear idea of the user persona, their needs, and their pain points.

In this case, there are three different parties involved:

1. The person that needs help

In this case, the customer making the call needs help. We can further group them in terms of urgency:

• Immediate and needs their problem fixed as soon as possible (“The toilet pipe in my bathroom just burst!”)
• Mid-level and can be solved within the week (“My refrigerator is leaking some water but I can probably put a towel over it.”)
• Important but not urgent (“My dishwasher’s door handle is loose and may fall off soon.”)

2. The service professional

• This group would like to be matched with quality jobs such as those that pay well and don’t take too much of their time.

3. The company/third party technician

• The CRM company is responsible for ensuring the service professionals receives qualified leads, i.e., you as the Product Manager or the company representative.

Assumptions

Exploring the user personas above brings to light some assumptions we are making as a Product Manager. This is a stated requirement in this question, but make sure to include them early on in your Product Manager case study presentation, whether outlined or not.

In this case, some early assumptions we are making are:

• All leads are received by the service person but they are choosing to ignore them — it is not a technical problem such as the CRM’s servers being down. The company likely has already troubleshot for this.
• The end-user, or the person in need, is going through a process to request help — could be a form or email routed through the CRM.
• A qualified lead is a customer that has an actual need that requires a professional.
• Calls are equal to an service professional request and not just general inquiries or exploratory calls.

There are a lot of assumptions you could add to the list above. Many come to you as you solve your case study questions, so keep an open-ended list as you unpack your solution.

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Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 2

Next, we need to validate the need. Here is where the data and metrics come in. If we think about the problem as a funnel, these questions come up in our analytics:

• What is the follow-up % that has been made already to missed calls?
• How many follow-ups per missed call are there?
• How many missed calls per service professional or per request?
• Of the missed calls/callbacks, how many resulted in business/closes?

It is possible to confirm that there is an actual problem from the above analytics. In this case, the data shows that the service professionals are following up on requests, but they are doing it too late. So, we want to unpack why the service professional is not responding to the requests on time.

Could it be that the leads come in when they are too busy to answer? Or maybe they are not quality leads? This is where the next step comes in.

Product Management Case Study Solution: Step 3

Now that the need is validated, we can now work through the possible solutions to the problems outlined. Remember to keep the user in mind to ensure you are solving their pain points.

In this section, you should list down all possible solutions or Minimum Viable Products (MVPs).

Solve to Qualify the Leads

1. The end-user (“Need my toilet fixed!”) completes a form that filters for urgency, budget, location, the scope of the fix needed, and a video upload of the problem.

• Allow service professionals to define a qualified lead:
• What is their location radius?
• What budget are they willing to work with?
• What is their area of expertise?

This filter solves the need for the qualification of leads.

If a service professional receives a qualified lead but still does not respond to it, it’s time to think about the next problem that the leads come in when they are too busy to answer. This brings us to our second solution:

Reminder for a Service Professional to Follow up

This involves an auto dialler or auto-reminder. It could be through an email, text, or dashboard notification on the CRM’s desktop or mobile app. This needs to be done in a timely way and should prompt them to take action. This could be a CRM tool on its own where the information from the request form is sent to a ticketing system where the service professional can see it listed.

Redirect Requests

Another solution would be for the service professionals to bid on requests, or have the option to redirect the request to another person.

A service professional can choose to take the request or forward it to another person if they are unavailable. Also, a lead is automatically redirected to another service professional if the request is not responded to within a certain period. This could also incentivize the service professionals to respond quickly otherwise they lose business.

Product Manager Case Study Solution: Step 4

Now you need to make the key decisions that will inform your presentation. Here’s what you should nail down:

Designs/ Wireframes/ Areas of Improvement

If your case study requires designs, consider where you would make the above changes in the CRM interface. What or how would you change the interaction model to achieve success?

Pictures do speak louder than words, and as a Product Manager, your designs should do the same. The best way to ensure that everybody understands your product is to include wireframes and preliminary designs in your presentation.

In this case, being an isolated design, we would draw out the forms that the end-users and service professionals would use. For the latter, a mobile-phone wireframe is probably best, given that the users are constantly out in the field.

Case Study Presentation Pro Tip

If you are working on a product that already exists for your PM case study question, embed your solution within the product’s actual design to earn extra points. Google the product to find images of its interface and consider how you would change the interactions with the user to meet the requirements of the case study or achieve greater success.

Engineering/User Stories

Your Product Manager case study presentation will also include the user stories that the engineer would need to build the product. Here is an example of the stories for this product:

As an end-user, I want to send my request to a service professional about my “problem” so that they can call me back.

Acceptance criteria:

Show header text: Request for service professional

• Subtext: Describe your problem
• Show text field for the user, limit it to 500 characters
• Show dropdown of default problems
• Toilet leak
• HVAC
• Etc
• Subtext
• Budget
• Show scrubber tool of budget min and max

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Data/Analytics

The next part is all about the numbers:

• What are you tracking to ensure success?
• Form completion rate (open/start vs. submit)
• Form completion time
• Click through on the form from service professionals
• Accept vs. reject rate of calls and forms
• What does success look like?
• Number of completed forms
• Number of returned or answered calls
• Number of closed leads
• Number of reviews/ net promoter score (NPS)
• What data would you look at if you were to pivot?
• Number of form rejections by service professionals
• Qualified vs. unqualified leads
• Number of unanswered qualified leads

Future Iterations

If you were successful in your MVP release, what later iterations would you have to further improve this product? Write them down in the form of a user story.

Just like we did in the step above, try creating your own user stories for this section. Make sure that your stories are based on a marketplace.

Potential Challenges

To come up with potential challenges, think about the product lifecycle and its release:

• Where do you feel that there would be a difficulty?
• How would you solve it?

This is the slide of your Product Manager case study solution to showcase your prior Product Manager experience and expertise. This part of your answer allows you to showcase to your interviewer that you are a retrospective Product Manager who reviews the data of your past launches and applies the learnings in the future.

For example, a Product Manager with a business operations background would have a unique point of view on the questions above:

• Challenge 1: Service professionals may not be properly trained to handle missed calls or access the information on the forms.
• Challenge 2: End-users may have a problem communicating the depth or scope of the problem because they are not professionals.

There are many more potential challenges that may come up. Be sure to add all the ones that are relevant to your product.

Executive Summary

This is the last section of the Product Manager Case study presentation. Here is where you outline all the parts of your case study. Not everyone is going to pay attention as you go through your presentation, so the executive summary gives them a chance to “catch up” on your process and solution.

Briefly outline:

• What you know/don’t know
• Assumptions
• Validation of the problem
• The solution
• How to measure success or how you would pivot

In this question’s case:

1. Assumptions:
2. No technical issues
3. (all other assumptions you generated)
4. What is your solution?
5. MVP = Create a form to validate lead quality.
6. How do you know you are successful?
7. Number of completed forms, calls answered or followed up, closed business.

Remember to incorporate the questions asked in the prompt in your summary. Be careful not to leave out any information that is important to solving the question.

Ace Your Product Manager Case Study Solution and Presentation

There you have it, a step-by-step breakdown of how to solve your next Product Manager case study. Need more practice solving case studies for product management? Here’s our ultimate guide on case study questions, complete with case study question examples by topic.

If you still need help solving your case study, ​​schedule a free call with us. We will walk you through possible first impressions, solutions, and presentations that may come in handy in your next Product Manager interview.