The objective of this exercise is for you to showcase your product management style, product thinking, discovery approach, analysis and problem solving, and it gives us some visibility into how you might deliver your work. We will explore how you approach a complex product challenge.
Understand the business challenge. Below, we provide an overview of a hypothetical challenge faced by a hypothetical consumer facing software company that we’ll call “Forward Fintech”. This is not a challenge M-KOPA is facing. You should review this document and put some initial thought into the problem. This part should take 30 minutes.
Complete and submit the exercise: Please send your completed exercise to our recruiter within 7 calendar days of receiving it.
We expect you to spend a maximum of 5-6 hours on this exercise. Ultimately, you will be evaluated on:
Schedule your interview. We will evaluate your exercise before scheduling an interview. We will only conduct the interview if based on your exercise we are sufficiently confident that you will be successful in the interview. Our recruiter will coordinate scheduling with you and the M-KOPA team. The interview will last 1.5 hours.
Present and discuss. On the video conference call where you will present, you can expect product management, engineering, and relevant business stakeholders to review and discuss your product concept and analysis workings in a very interactive session. We’ll ask questions that will require you to defend and extend your thinking. Your presentation portion should only take 30 minutes. The rest of the time will be filled with discussion and exploration. You can show your content in a format of your choice. The important thing is that you can show us your thoughts well enough for the team to understand how you think.
Forward Fintech is a midsize financial technology company headquartered in Nairobi, with members in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. They already have built a product called “Save Forward” that allows their members to schedule automatic recurring payments from either mobile money wallets or bank accounts into a private pension account (retirement savings account) that allows them to save for later in life when they want to stop working and have money available for living expenses. The company has a clear marketing website, a growing custom backend stack to support business logic and APIs, and the member facing software is an Android app. To date the company has focused on growing their membership base and providing pension account management tools. Over the past 3 years of rapid growth, they have found product/market fit for this core “Save Forward” product with a growing segment of salaried women and men aged 29 to 45.
The problem is that about 60% of the company’s present user base feels their pension account is not earning enough money, it’s not growing fast enough or earning enough of a return. After the product team evaluated options that balance the extra money their members could earn with positive impact in the communities they serve, the company is planning to allow certain members to provide loans directly to a range of borrowers: micro-business owners, university students, and farmers. By loaning out a portion of their savings, members can expect to be paid back more later and see their savings grow faster. The working title for the new product is “Loan Forward”.
Early user research has shown that before lending out their money, the existing members want to review eligible borrowers themselves and choose the amount to loan out. Thus, the company has been wrestling with the following additional product problems: