Diagnosing Why New Lime Scooter Sign-Ups Never Take a First Ride
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for Lime's shared scooters. Plenty of people are creating accounts, but they are not going on to use the scooters. How would you approach this?
```hint Find the step
Lay out every step between creating an account and finishing a first ride, and find where people stop before you guess at why they stop.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "not using" mean new accounts that never take a first ride, or people who ride once and then stop?
- Is this a recent change in the share of sign-ups who ride, or has it always been low, and is it worse in particular cities, platforms or acquisition channels?
- What does sign-up require today: is a payment method or identity check needed before the first ride, and were people offered an incentive to sign up?
- What is the goal for the next quarter: more first rides, more repeat riders, or a lower acquisition cost per active rider?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear definition of the problem metric and a check that the data is right before diagnosing.
- A funnel from sign-up to completed first ride, segmented by city, channel, platform and time to localize the drop.
- Hypotheses across internal causes (onboarding, pricing, app changes, acquisition quality) and external ones (scooter availability, weather, regulation, competition, safety concerns), each with the evidence that would confirm it.
- Fixes prioritized by impact and effort, with an experiment plan and guardrail metrics.
### Follow-up Questions
- The data shows most new users open the map but find no scooter within a few minutes' walk. What do you do, and what is the cost trade-off?
- A sign-up promotion doubled sign-ups but halved the share who ride. Was it a success?
- How would you design an experiment to check whether a free first ride creates lasting riders rather than one-time users?
Overview: A product diagnosis prompt about Lime shared scooters, where people create accounts but do not go on to ride. It tests validating the metric, building a sign-up to first-ride funnel, segmenting to localize the drop, forming hypotheses about supply, onboarding and acquisition quality, and prioritizing fixes with experiments.