10 Market Research Project Ideas for Product Managers in India 2026

Every product manager interview eventually comes to the same moment: the interviewer asks how you would know whether people actually want something, and "I would do market research" is where most answers stop. The candidates who stand out can say, "Here is a project where I did exactly that, here is what I found, and here is what I recommended." That is the gap this guide fills. Below are ten market research projects you can finish alongside a job or a course, using free tools and Indian products you already know. Each one tells you the question to ask, how to run it, and what to put in your portfolio at the end.

Dreaming of a Product Management Career? Start with the Product Management Program with Jobaaj Learnings.

What Makes a Market Research Project Worth Showing

A project works in a portfolio when it ends in a decision, not a pile of data. Hiring managers are not impressed that you ran a survey. They want to see that the survey changed what you would build, price or prioritise.

So before you pick a project, fix four things:

1. One sharp question. "What do Indian users hate about food delivery apps?" is a topic. "Why do first-time users in tier-2 cities abandon the checkout on a grocery app?" is a question.
2. A named segment. College students in Pune, kirana owners in Jaipur, working women in Bengaluru who use fitness apps. "Everyone" is not a segment.
3. Two sources of evidence. One from people (interviews or a survey) and one from the market (reviews, search data, public statistics). Two sources that agree are far more convincing than one.
4. A recommendation with a number or a trade-off in it. "Build the saved-address feature before the loyalty programme, because 7 of 10 people I interviewed named it first" beats "users want more features."

A note on honesty: every project below uses real tools and public data, but the findings are yours to generate. Do not copy numbers from articles into your case study. If you only ran 12 interviews, say 12. Interviewers can tell, and a small, honest sample reads better than an inflated one.

10 Projects, From a Free Weekend to a Month-Long Study

Start here: projects you can finish in a weekend

1. Mine app reviews to find what a market is missing

Pick a crowded category such as quick commerce, where Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart all compete. Read 300 to 500 recent Play Store reviews of two or three apps, tag each review with a theme (delivery delay, wrong item, refund trouble, pricing), and count. You will usually find that the loudest complaint is not the one the apps advertise against. The deliverable is a one-page theme ranking with three or four quotes and one product opportunity it points to. This is the fastest way to prove you can turn messy opinions into evidence.

2. Map demand with Google Trends

Google Trends lets you compare search interest over time and by state within India, which makes it a surprisingly good first look at demand. Try comparing terms like "electric scooter", "EV charger" and "second hand EV" across states, or check how searches for a product category spike around Diwali. Always compare against a stable baseline term, and treat the chart as a hint rather than proof. The deliverable is a short note on where interest is growing, where it is seasonal, and which city or state you would launch in first.

3. Size a market from the bottom up

Choose a niche, such as pet care subscriptions in metros, and estimate the market yourself: how many households, what share could plausibly buy, how often, and at what price. Build it in a spreadsheet with every assumption written in its own cell so a reader can change one and watch the total move. Top-down figures from reports are easy to copy. A bottom-up model with honest assumptions shows you can think like a product owner. Show your total as a range, not a single number.

Build depth: projects that need real conversations

4. Run ten customer discovery interviews

Choose a segment you can reach, such as final-year students looking for internships, and hold ten 20-minute conversations. Ask about the last time they faced the problem, what they did, and what it cost them, not whether they would "use an app that does X". Record notes, then group them on a sticky-note style board into patterns. The deliverable is your interview guide, a one-page synthesis and the single insight that surprised you. Our guide to building a product manager portfolio with real projects shows how to present research like this alongside your other work.

5. Use jobs-to-be-done to understand a local behaviour

Many Indian businesses run on WhatsApp: orders, payments, reminders. Interview ten small shop owners about how they take orders today and what they would pay to stop doing it by hand. Frame everything as the job they are trying to get done, such as "keep track of who owes me money without a notebook". The deliverable is a jobs map and two product ideas, one obvious and one that came from something a shop owner said that you did not expect.

6. Survey 100 people on a habit that is changing

Subscription fatigue among OTT users is a good example: how many services do people pay for, which would they drop first, what would make them stay? Build the form in Google Forms, share it in college groups, WhatsApp communities and LinkedIn, and aim for at least 100 responses. Clean the data, build a pivot table, and look for one segment that behaves differently from the rest. Mention your sample size and who it over-represents (usually young, urban, online people).

Show range: projects that use proper research methods

7. Test pricing with a Van Westendorp study

The Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter asks four simple questions about a product: at what price is it too cheap to trust, a bargain, getting expensive, and too expensive? Invent a plausible product, such as a ₹149 to ₹399 monthly fitness-app subscription, and survey 60 to 100 people. Plot the four curves and read off an acceptable price range. This project shows you understand that pricing is research, not guesswork. Be clear that stated willingness to pay is not the same as real behaviour, and say what you would test next.

8. Rank features with a Kano survey

For any app you know well, list eight to ten possible features and ask each respondent two questions per feature: how would you feel if it were there, and how would you feel if it were not? The Kano method sorts features into must-haves, performance features and delighters. Applied to a food delivery app, for example, order tracking is a must-have and a surprise free dessert is a delighter. The deliverable is a simple matrix and a recommended build order, which is exactly the kind of prioritisation interviewers ask about.

9. Benchmark the sign-up experience across five fintech apps

Download five payments or investing apps and time yourself from install to first successful transaction. Note the number of screens, the KYC steps, where you were asked for permissions, and where you got stuck. Do it with two friends who are not tech-savvy and watch them silently. Present a comparison table and the one change that would most improve the weakest app. Because the work is observational, it covers a method most candidates never touch.

10. Study how a public dataset explains a market

NPCI publishes monthly UPI statistics, including volumes by app, which makes the payments market one of the best-documented in the country. Pull twelve months of data, chart how each app's share has moved, and write a short note on what the trend means for a new entrant. Then add one layer of your own, such as five interviews with people about why they picked their main payments app. Public data tells you what happened. Your interviews tell you why.

Which Project Should You Pick?

If you can only do one, do the interviews. They are harder to fake than any other project here, and they give you the stories you will actually tell in a product manager interview. If you have two, add one project that uses numbers, such as the survey or the sizing model, so that you show both sides of research.

How to Turn Any of These Into a Portfolio Piece

Whichever project you choose, present it in the same order a hiring manager thinks:

• The question and why it matters, in two sentences.
• How you ran it, including your sample size and who is missing from it.
• What you found, with one chart or table at most and the three or four quotes that bring the numbers to life.
• What you would do about it, as a clear recommendation with a trade-off.
• What you would do next, such as a prototype test, a larger survey or a pilot.

AI tools can speed up the dull parts, such as clustering review text or cleaning survey data, but treat them as an assistant. Read a sample of the raw responses yourself, because a theme you discover by reading is the one you will be able to defend in an interview.

Free Tools You Need

You do not need paid research software for any project on this list.

Pick One This Week

Choose the project that matches your next step, write the one-sentence question at the top of a blank page, and name the segment you will study. Then book the first interview or download the first set of reviews before the weekend. The first project is always the slowest. By the second, you will have a method, and by the third, you will have a portfolio.

Dreaming of a Product Management Career? Start with the Product Management Program with Jobaaj Learnings.