Company Context

You’re the PM for MercuryMiles, a Series D fintech app that helps consumers manage subscriptions, track spending, and negotiate bills. The product has 12M MAUs, 2.4M DAUs, and monetizes via $9.99/month premium (18% of MAUs) plus interchange revenue from a debit card. MercuryMiles competes with Rocket Money, Monarch Money, and Chime (adjacent). The company is preparing for an IPO in ~18 months, and leadership is pushing for “enterprise-grade execution” and predictable delivery.

Over the last two quarters, the org scaled from 6 to 18 product squads. As a result, the roadmap has become crowded with stakeholder-driven initiatives (partnerships, compliance, growth experiments), and teams are shipping more—but user satisfaction is flat.

User & Market Scenario

MercuryMiles serves three primary user segments:

Competitive notes:

• Rocket Money is winning on subscription cancellation reliability (higher success rate via concierge).
• Monarch is winning on power-user budgeting workflows and customization.
• Chime is winning on trust and primary banking relationship, pulling users into its ecosystem.

The Problem

Despite increased shipping velocity, MercuryMiles is seeing signs that the roadmap is drifting away from core user needs:

• NPS has been flat at 31 for 6 months (goal: 40).
• 90-day retention is 38%, down from 41% two quarters ago.
• Support tickets are up 22% QoQ, with top themes:
  1. “Alerts don’t help me decide what to do”
  2. “Subscription cancellation didn’t work / unclear status”
  3. “Budgets don’t match how I actually spend”
• Meanwhile, internal roadmap allocation last quarter was:
  • 40%: partner-driven features (bank integrations, merchant offers)
  • 25%: compliance/security work
  • 20%: growth experiments (referrals, paywalls)
  • 15%: user-reported pain points

Leadership wants you to propose a repeatable approach to ensure user needs drive product development, without ignoring compliance and revenue goals.

Your Task (Deliverables)

In this interview, walk through how you would:

1. Define “user needs driving development” for MercuryMiles (what does “good” look like in practice?) and articulate a product vision that aligns user value with business outcomes.
2. Create a system for capturing and synthesizing user needs at scale (qual + quant), including how you’d avoid over-indexing on loud minorities.
3. Propose a prioritization method for the next 2 quarters that balances:
   • user pain points
   • compliance/security obligations
   • revenue growth initiatives
   • partner commitments
4. Provide an example: choose one of the top support themes above and outline how you’d translate it into:
   • problem statement
   • hypotheses
   • MVP scope
   • success metrics
5. Explain how you’d operationalize this approach across 18 squads (cadence, artifacts, decision rights), and how you’d handle conflict when stakeholders disagree.

Constraints

• Timeline: You have 8 weeks to implement the new operating model and show early impact.
• Resourcing: No net-new headcount this quarter; you can reallocate up to 10% of squad capacity.
• Regulatory: Must maintain SOC2 controls; any data-sharing or personalization changes require privacy review.
• Technical: Event instrumentation coverage is only ~70% across key flows; cancellation status is fragmented across 40+ merchants.
• Business: The CFO requires that the roadmap preserves at least one material revenue initiative per quarter.

Your answer should be structured, explicit about trade-offs, and grounded in how you’d make decisions with imperfect information.