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Context: Product assignment for the Associate Product Manager (APM) role at Ola Electric, September–October 2026. Individual work.
Brief: Imagine it is 2035. Ola wants to build a mobility product that 100 million Indians use for their daily commute. It cannot be a scooter or motorcycle. What do you build?
Deliverable: A 4-page product case study (PDF).
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TL;DR
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💡
Ola Parivaar is door-to-door, step-free, tracked shared electric transport for the Indians who can't or shouldn't drive themselves (children, teenagers, older people, women on late shifts and people with disabilities), booked and paid for by their family and run on purpose-built Ola Pods.
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- Insight: in India, the person with the transport problem is often not the person travelling. It's the family member who has to drive them.
- Target: 100M daily riders by 2035, with school commutes providing most of the scale.
- North Star Metric: daily riders who travelled without a family member having to drive them.
- Why Ola: a managed fleet of purpose-built vehicles running 18 hours a day plays to a company that makes vehicles, cells and energy storage, not to a ride-hailing app.
How I approached the problem
The brief was deliberately open-ended, so I worked through it in four stages rather than jumping to a solution.
- Diverge. I listed 15+ ideas across urban, rural, specific-user and infrastructure plays, from metro feeder pods and e-rickshaw upgrades to electric buses-as-a-service and a commute pass.
- Apply a scale filter. An owned vehicle can't reach 100M daily users by 2035, so I focused on shared products where one vehicle serves many people a day.
- Check the competition. My first favourite was Ola Link, a guaranteed ride + metro + ride journey. Research showed Uber, Rapido, Namma Yatri and Tummoc already integrate metro ticketing and multimodal planning. The idea was good but crowded, and it served independent adults, who are already the best-served group.
- Look for an unusual user. Asking "who is nobody building for?" led to people who can't drive themselves, and the insight that the rider and the buyer are different people. That became Ola Parivaar.
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🧭
The biggest decision was to stop polishing a crowded idea and reframe the user. Uniqueness came from the user and the insight, not from a new vehicle.
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The story: 7:05 am, a Tuesday in 2035
Meera, 38, works full time in Pune. Before her 9:30 meeting she must arrange three trips, and none of them are hers: her 11-year-old son to school, her 15-year-old daughter to coaching, and her father-in-law, 74, to a heart check-up across town. He can walk, but he can't climb into an auto.