Root Cause Analysis Framework for Technology PM interview

What is a Root cause?

It is about finding the situation that led to change of any KPI/metric for a product or feature. Here, in this article, I will be explaining the framework to identify Root Cause for any given metric change, especially from a technology product perspective.

A framework is only as good as the person who is implementing it according to the situation.

Always try to understand the situation you are dealing with better. Ask logical questions that would help you get better picture about the situation. Remember, an elephant drinking water from stream has completely different problems than the one drinking from a spoon.

Preliminary Questions:

1. Business: Understand the business the company is in.
2. Timeframe: Over what time period is this change?
3. Variance: Is the change Cyclical/Seasonal/One-off?
4. Data Check: Check if there was any variation in the way data is being collected and the way KPIs are being prepared.
5. Mode: Is the phenomenon seen only on mobile/ web application?
6. Demographics: Is any particular geography/ Age/ Gender or any other particular segment that is being affected. You may think of more segments based on the question at hand. Tie this back to Business the company is in, to dive deeper about the segments you are asking about.
7. Target Customers: What is the primary target customer persona?

Among the above 5, first 4 are the questions to check if it is even worth your time to solve it. While the 5th and 6th are about understanding the situation better.

Stakeholders:

Understanding and listing all the stakeholders involved will help to deep dive into situation further.

For Platform models: Buy side, Sell side and Platform itself

For Merchant models: Customers/users and the Seller.

Equation Breakdown:

What is the equation leading up to the result will help to breakdown the important levers.

Examples:

Revenue =#Sales * Average Sale Value

#Conversations = #Users * Avg Sessions/User * Avg Conversations/Session

Lever Check: Now prompt for data of each lever to understand what is the granular level lever, for which the root cause can be analyzed.

External Factors:

1. Competitors: Is there any new competitor in the market?
2. Indirect Competitors: How are indirect competitors performing?
3. Market Landscape: Is the phenomenon across market/ other competitors also? or is it only specific to this company?
4. Offers: Are there any new offers that are being offered by Competitors?
5. Socio-Economic Factors: Are there any social or economic changes that happened in the timeframe we are analyzing?
6. Political Factors: Is there any change in political landscape?
7. Policy changes: Is there any change in company policy or change in market regulations?
8. Anything in news related to company: Did we do any sentiment analysis to check the mood of people in social media about the company? Is there any news related to company?

Internal Factors:

1. Promotions: Are any new offers given by company?
2. Product/Algorithm Update: When was the last time product was updated and what are the changes made in that update? This can be tied back to the mode asked in preliminary questions.

User flow:

Going through user flow from Awareness to Retention will help to understand the flow of the application with different stakeholders. Identifying the step can be thought of as any human touch point interaction (ex: touch in mobile and click on web). Verifying the data at each step with probing questions will help to pin point any step that is causing the change.

Delving a bit deeper about the step will help to identify the cause of the change.