Tele-Counseling Product Improvement: Use the Counselor App to Reduce Patient Drop-Off
Company: One Medical
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for a tele-counseling platform. It is two-sided: patients use one app to receive counseling, and counselors use a separate app to provide it. The company's overarching goal is patient retention. Limiting yourself to the counseling side of the platform, meaning the counselor-facing app and the counselors who use it, what would you change to keep more patients?
```hint Follow a patient who leaves
Picture a patient from their first session to the point where they stop coming. At each step, ask what their counselor could have noticed or done differently if the counselor app supported it.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What kind of counseling does the platform offer: mental health therapy, medical or nutrition guidance, or a mix?
- How should retention be defined: returning for a second session, staying in active care for a set number of weeks, or completing a care plan? Does a patient who stops because they have recovered count as lost?
- Are counselors employees of the platform or independent professionals who decide how much to use it, and how are they paid?
- Do sessions happen by video, phone, messaging or a combination?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A definition of retention that separates healthy exits, such as finishing treatment, from patients dropping out.
- The main reasons patients drop out of counseling, mapped to the ones a counselor can influence.
- Counselors as users: their workflow and pain points, and why a change has to fit their workload to be adopted.
- A prioritized set of counselor-side changes with trade-offs, including clinical, ethical and privacy limits.
- Success metrics with guardrails, and a plan for testing the changes.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your changes lift retention, but counselors say they now spend more time on administration. What do you do?
- How would you show that the retention gain reflects better care rather than patients being kept longer than they need?
- The changes ship to counselors, while retention is measured on patients over many weeks. How would you design the experiment?
Overview: A product improvement question about a two-sided tele-counseling platform: what should change on the counselor side to keep more patients in care? It tests defining retention carefully, understanding why patients drop out of counseling, designing features counselors will adopt, and measuring impact with clinical and privacy guardrails.