Our NRR is 95% and leadership wants it above 110% in a year. What would your plan look like?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Break NRR into churn, contraction and expansion by segment
- Fix the biggest churn drivers first (onboarding, adoption)
- Build structured expansion motions
- Improve health scoring and early warning
- Align with sales, product and pricing
- Set leading indicators and review regularly
Model answer
I would first break the 95% into its parts: churn, contraction and expansion, by segment, plan and cohort. That shows whether the problem is losing customers, downgrades or weak expansion. If early churn is high, I would fix onboarding and time to value first, because that has the biggest effect. For mid-life customers, I would improve health scoring and run playbooks when risk appears. For expansion, I would identify accounts with high usage near plan limits and build a joint motion with sales, and review whether pricing and packaging make it easy to grow. I would also share top churn reasons with product. I would track leading indicators such as activation rate and adoption monthly, and be realistic that a 15-point jump in one year is ambitious.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.
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