Hello! Thank you for your interest in Cloudflare’s Product Management Internship. This exercise (2-3 hours) will help us learn how you approach product decisions.
It’s intern season and you’re chatting with some friends about Cloudflare. One friend exclaims:
“I love Cloudflare! But every few days, I see one of their CAPTCHAs online. I wish I didn’t have to click on all of those pictures of trains. I’m not a robot — I swear!”
You decide to make a promise to your friend. If hired at Cloudflare, you will launch an effort to get rid of CAPTCHAs for good. And you start to wonder: What value do CAPTCHAs provide today? What could they be replaced with? Who relies on CAPTCHAs and how might these people be affected by a change?
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Learn how CAPTCHAs work; it might be a good idea to try some out. Useful resources include Google, our learning center, and Stack Overflow.
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Research the business side of CAPTCHAs. Learn why CAPTCHAs are used, understand the pros/cons for stakeholders, and find out who is incentivized to evade CAPTCHAs. You may find that some companies (including Cloudflare) have already proposed alternatives — so we want you to think big. Tell us where the industry is going in 5+ years.
Submit your plan to get rid of CAPTCHAs. Include anything you feel is relevant: potential risks, goals (short or long term), and product ideas. Your response should be a maximum of two pages.
- Be creative. If you come up with a fun alternative to CAPTCHAs, we want to hear about it.
- Everything is an experiment and a hypothesis. Describe your vision even if it might not end up being correct, but don’t hold it with too much conviction.
- Be specific! It’s easy to say that the product should be “easier to use,” but if you’ve done your research you should have specific suggestions and theories.
Please submit your response to Greenhouse. The preferred method for doing this is to create a PDF file that includes the entire plan.