Root-Causing a 3% Decline in Housing.com's Mobile Lead Conversion Rate
Company: Housing.com
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Housing.com is an online property platform in India where people search listings to buy or rent a home and contact the people who posted them. You are a product manager there, and the lead conversion rate on mobile has fallen by 3% over the past two weeks. Explain how you would analyze the decline: make sure it is real, find where in the user journey and in which segments it happens, identify the likely cause, and decide what to do about it.
```hint Localize before you explain
Pin down the exact formula for lead conversion first. Then lay out the steps between opening the app and a lead reaching a lister, and find which step's rate moved before proposing any cause.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- How is lead conversion defined: leads per visit, per unique visitor or per listing view, and what counts as a lead (tapping a contact button, or completing a verified contact request)?
- Does "mobile" mean the mobile website, the Android app, the iOS app, or all of them combined?
- Is the 3% a relative decline or a drop of three percentage points, and is it measured against the previous two weeks, the same period last year, or a forecast?
- Did the decline appear suddenly or gradually, and does it affect people renting and people buying alike?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Pinning down the metric definition, platforms and baseline, and comparing the 3% with normal fluctuation.
- Ruling out tracking, definition and seasonal explanations before looking for product causes.
- Breaking the lead journey into steps (search, results, listing, contact, phone verification) to find where the rate fell.
- Segmentation by platform, app version, city, buy versus rent, new versus returning users and traffic source, including a check for mix shift.
- Internal and external hypotheses checked in a sensible order, ending with a fix, an estimate of lost leads and attention to lead quality for listers.
### Follow-up Questions
- Suppose the step that fell is the share of visitors who start a search after opening the app, and nothing shipped on that screen. What would you examine next?
- The rate fell, but the absolute number of leads rose because a marketing campaign brought in many more visitors. Is that a problem, and how would you report it?
- How would you check that the leads still coming through are useful to the owners and agents who receive them?
Overview: A metric diagnosis question about a 3% fall in mobile lead conversion over two weeks at Housing.com, an Indian property-listing platform. It tests defining the metric, ruling out tracking and seasonal causes, breaking the lead funnel into steps, segmenting traffic to localize the drop, and choosing a fix.