Design Your First 90 Days Plan

Company Context

You’ve just joined Pulse, a Series C B2B SaaS company that sells a customer support platform (ticketing + chat + knowledge base) to mid-market e-commerce brands. Pulse has 2,400 paying customers, ~38,000 weekly active support agents, and processes ~55M support events/month (tickets, chats, macros, KB searches). Revenue is subscription-based: $79/agent/month plus add-ons.

Pulse competes with Zendesk, Intercom, and Gorgias. Pulse’s differentiation has historically been “fast setup + modern UI,” but churn has ticked up as competitors added AI features.

You are interviewing for a PM role owning Agent Experience (tools used by support agents). The hiring manager wants to understand how you translate your background into product judgment: how you learn a domain, identify user needs, set a product vision, and prioritize.

User / Market Scenario

Pulse’s customers are typically e-commerce brands doing $10M–$200M in annual GMV. Their support teams range from 5 to 200 agents, with heavy seasonal spikes (e.g., Black Friday).

Pulse’s research team recently ran 18 customer interviews and a survey (n=620 agents). Key themes:

• Agents feel overwhelmed by context switching (order system, CRM, shipping tools, Pulse).
• Managers care about time-to-first-response and cost per ticket, but don’t want “black box AI.”
• New agents ramp slowly; internal knowledge is scattered.

Personas (from research)

Problem / Opportunity

Pulse’s CEO has set a 2-quarter goal: reduce logo churn from 1.8% to 1.4% monthly without cutting prices. Data suggests churn correlates strongly with agent inefficiency:

• Accounts in the worst quartile of median handle time (MHT) have 2.3× higher churn than the best quartile.
• Pulse’s current macro/knowledge base tooling is underused: only 34% of tickets use a macro; only 19% of agent sessions include a KB search.
• Qualitative feedback indicates the KB is hard to trust (outdated articles) and hard to find (poor search relevance).

Leadership believes improving Agent Experience can move churn by improving support outcomes, but you have to choose the right wedge.

Your Task (what you must deliver in the interview)

Assume you’re starting on Day 1 as the PM for Agent Experience. Walk the interviewer through:

1. Your “background + experience” narrative tailored to this role: what patterns from your past work are most relevant, and what gaps you’d explicitly plan to close.
2. Your product vision for Agent Experience at Pulse over the next 12 months (1–2 sentences + supporting rationale).
3. The top user needs / Jobs-to-be-Done you would prioritize first, and which persona(s) you’d focus on initially.
4. A prioritized 90-day plan (discovery + delivery): what you’d do in weeks 1–2, 3–6, 7–12, including what you’d ship (if anything) and why.
5. Trade-offs and risks: what you will not do in the first 90 days, and what could go wrong.

Constraints

• Team capacity: 6 engineers (4 FE, 2 BE), 1 designer, 0 dedicated data scientist (you can borrow 10% of an ML engineer shared across teams).
• Timeline: leadership expects a customer-visible improvement within 10 weeks.
• Technical reality: KB search is powered by a legacy vendor; replacing it takes 6+ months.
• Compliance: some customers are in regulated categories (health supplements). You must support SOC 2 commitments; no training on customer data without explicit opt-in.
• Commercial: Sales is pushing an “AI add-on” to compete, but Support is worried about reliability and hallucinations.

What the interviewer is looking for

This is not a trivia question about your resume. Treat it like a real PM situation: show how you’d use your experience to quickly understand users, align stakeholders, define a crisp direction, and make prioritization decisions with imperfect information.