Research for Gaming Product Decisions | Dataford Interview Questions

Company Context

Arcadia Games is a mid-sized mobile and cross-platform game publisher with 25M monthly active players across casual and mid-core titles. The company has strong acquisition performance, but several recent feature launches underperformed because teams relied on analytics and competitor benchmarking more than direct player research.

Problem

You are interviewing for a PM role supporting Arcadia's live gaming portfolio. The hiring manager wants to understand what research experience you have that is most relevant to gaming products and how you would apply it to real product decisions. One of Arcadia's flagship multiplayer games has healthy top-of-funnel growth, but Day 30 retention has declined from 18% to 14% over two quarters. Qualitative feedback is mixed: some players say progression feels repetitive, while others say social features are hard to discover. Leadership needs a PM who can translate research into clear product priorities.

Your task is to describe the research approaches you would use, what you would learn from them, and how that research would influence roadmap decisions for a gaming product.

Deliverables

Identify the most relevant types of research for this gaming problem and explain why they fit.
Define the target player segments you would study first and the key hypotheses you would test.
Show how you would synthesize qualitative and quantitative insights into product opportunities.
Recommend 1-2 product changes you would prioritize based on likely research findings.
Define how you would measure whether your research-informed decisions improved the product.

Constraints

You have 6 weeks to produce actionable recommendations for the next quarterly roadmap.
Research budget is limited to one external vendor study plus internal analytics support.
Engineering can only support one medium-sized feature and one lightweight UX improvement this quarter.
The live game cannot risk major disruption to monetization or matchmaking stability.

Company Context

Problem

Your task is to describe the research approaches you would use, what you would learn from them, and how that research would influence roadmap decisions for a gaming product.

Deliverables

Identify the most relevant types of research for this gaming problem and explain why they fit.

Define the target player segments you would study first and the key hypotheses you would test.

Show how you would synthesize qualitative and quantitative insights into product opportunities.

Recommend 1-2 product changes you would prioritize based on likely research findings.

Define how you would measure whether your research-informed decisions improved the product.

Constraints

You have 6 weeks to produce actionable recommendations for the next quarterly roadmap.

Research budget is limited to one external vendor study plus internal analytics support.

Engineering can only support one medium-sized feature and one lightweight UX improvement this quarter.

The live game cannot risk major disruption to monetization or matchmaking stability.