How to crack RCA Questions?

Root cause Analysis is one of the most asked questions for product interviews.

Not only in Product management, but I’ve personally witnessed being asked RCA questions in Product Analytics and Product Ops roles too.

Today, let’s take a deep dive into solving Root-cause Analysis questions. But before that, let’s set our intent by knowing the Whats and Whys of it.

What is RCA?

RCA or Root-cause analysis basically deals with finding the cause of some sort of problem within the product.

Think of it as turning a really ambiguous situation into a solvable and crystal clear issue.

While solving RCA, the interviewer puts forward a problem.

It could be related to User Journey, Drop-offs, Payments, etc.

The interviewee’s goal is to come up with a structured thought process backed by data and reasoning to find the probable cause of the problem.

Have a look at the following Problem statements -

• Netflix has seen a 50% drop-off in monthly subscription rates
• The number of daily transactions on Paytm has decreased by 50% compared to the previous stable value
• Monthly viewers on Youtube have decreased by 25% month over month for 3 months.

Sometimes the RCA questions come disguised as general statements too.

For example, Tell us how your thought process will be framed to tackle a decrease in transactions at Paytm.

In the above statement, you’ll see that due to the lack of numbers, many times it happens that candidates miss out and think of it as a simple question and answer it very briefly instead of diving into details.

We'll see how to solve RCA soon ahead in the article, but before that let’s have a brief look at “Why” interviewers put RCA questions in front of you and what’s their motivation.

This will help you to answer it in the way that they want.

Why RCA?

Every product interview is judged by 4 major factors or skills in a candidate.

• Product Sense
• Problem Solving
• Structural Thinking & Communication
• Domain Knowledge
• Background Knowledge & Tools

Leaving Tools, RCA questions are something that helps the interviewer check all the other skills.

Product sense is judged by how well you are able to examine the product from a very 50,000 feet level to a deep down 10,000 level.

Problem-solving is judged by how well you are able to find the root cause.

Structural thinking by how well you can structure and communicate your thoughts on a priority basis.

For example, a candidate with structured thinking would first think of validating the problem itself rather than jumping on to solve it.

Hence as a candidate always remember what skills you are trying to portray to the interviewer and what they really want. You might feel that the answer to the problem is in the tech or system design, but it might happen that the interviewer wants you to think about design and UI-UX.

So make sure you give them what they want, and not what you want. And for that, you need to ask lots of questions.

How RCA?

Now that we know how important RCA is and what our intent towards it is, let’s dive in and learn how we can solve such questions.

Root-cause analysis generally starts with a problem statement as we saw.

Our job is to break that statement and ask clarification questions.

So a very basic framework to solve any RCA question would be:

- Validating the problem itself

These questions are asked to see if the problem itself is valid, for 100% percent of the cases during interviews, the interviewer will make sure that the problem is valid. Still, this question makes you show your structured thought process.

Example: Is the Analytics app working?

- Clarification Questions

Clarification questions are basically the core part of RCA interviews, here you get the most insights out of the problem.

You can start by breaking the problem itself into keywords and knowing what those key points mean.

If the rides for Uber have decreased, then this would mean you ask what a “Ride” means, and what “Decreased” means.

Then going further you ask for clarification for the metric. So what does the metric that we are talking about mean?

Next, We talk about the drop. Is it sudden, gradual, seasonal, or recurrent?

What is the time duration for the decline?

We also talk about the segmentation of customers here. Are customers in a certain locality suffering from the drop or customers on a platform (Android) facing drop more.

- Factors that can be a cause Internally

Here we think of all the factors that could be a cause of the problem — Internally.

This includes customer journey, and UX UI changes, any changes in policy.

Here you can also check for bugs or technical glitches or any pricing changes if the product is a paid product.

- Factors that can be a cause Externally

Here we ask all things about external factors.

This mainly entails:

• 1. Governmental Regulatory Changes
• 2. Any social Media outrages
• 3. Any special campaigns run by competitors
• 4. Any specific event that occurred.

After covering these 4 pointers, you can see where the direction of the interview goes and can pinpoint the root cause. Make sure you take a minute and summarise your thoughts to the interviewer.

One another point that I took from Prashanth Bhaskaran, PM at CRED is to question the User Intent itself. For the Uber example, think of Covid. The covid pandemic changed the whole narrative around using Uber and the users no longer had the intent to travel, causing the drop in rides.

Let’s take an example now,

Problem Statement: Transactions on PayTm have dropped to 50% of the previous stable value.

Let’s list down the structured list of questions for this problem statement.

1. Validation

• 1. What analytics app have we used? Is it working properly?
• 2. Was there any specific set of users the drop was observed with?
• 3. What kind of transactions have dropped, is it specific like Bill Payments, Recharges, FastTag etc?

2. Clarification Questions

• 1. What does a transaction mean? Are we talking Peer to peer, or To businesses?
• 2. Who are the users?
• 3. Is the drop-off found in a specific demographic of users?
• 4. Is it found in a specific mode of payment? UPI or Net-banking etc.
• 5. Time Details: Was it a sudden drop? Was it a gradual drop?
• 6. Seasonality: Have we seen similar trends in the past? Is it recurring?
• 7. Is there a break in the user journey at specific instants?
• 8. Was it more evident on IOS users or Android users?

And many more…

3. Internal Factors

• 1. Have there been any internal policy changes? Ex. Extra charges on transactions?
• 2. Has there been any customer acquisition boosts in the past? (This helps to know if the wrong target audience was acquired)
• 3. Are there any updates in the version?
• 4. Have there been any updates in the UI/UX of the app?

4. External Factors

• 1. Are there any Government regulatory changes?
• 2. Have our competitors like GPay or Amazon Pay launched any new campaigns?
• 3. Has the competitor offered monetary benefits to our user?
• 4. Is there a new competitor in the market?
• 5. Is there any backlash on the Press or social media?

5. Change of Intent

Finally, has any event occurred that made people change their use case around the product? For example, there is a political lockdown, so there are no purchases or shopping in the physical market all around India.

So this is just a small set of questions that you could think of to find the root cause.

What should an RCA interview look like?

One thing we always need to remember is that Product interviews are never to-and-fro.

There are no right answers and no fixed answers to any questions. They always depend on how you think of the problem.

You have to make sure that you make the interview more conversational rather than in a question-answer format.

• 1. Ask lots of clarification questions
• 2. Ask for more data
• 3. Ask for more insights and let the interviewer direct the interview as per it
• 4. Always pick up hints from what the interviewer is trying to say and never fixate on solutions.

I hope you are now able to solve RCA questions with much better ease.

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