Interviewer-led case: Kodvik Dev Tools' ARR growth fell from 60% to 25% in a year. Ask for the data you need, find the driver, and say what you would ask next.

The slowdown is mostly existing customers expanding less, not a sales problem. Of the 35 points lost, expansion accounts for 23.5: net revenue retention fell from 128% to 105%. New-logo sales held at Rs 8 crore, which costs 12 points only because the base grew. The churn rate improved slightly. The next question goes to existing customers: which cohorts stopped adding seats or usage, and why.

Ask for the ARR bridgeA walk from opening to closing annual recurring revenue: plus new customers, plus expansion from existing customers, minus churn and downgrades., because growth is only the sum of its parts. A shop whose sales growth slows could be finding fewer new shoppers or selling less to regulars; the till total alone cannot tell you which. In an interviewer-led case, the first question you ask is scored as heavily as the answer, and a request for the bridge shows you know growth has components.

Rupees mislead here: churn rose by half in rupees, which sounds alarming. Dividing each line by opening ARR turns the bridge into points of growth, and on that basis the churn rate improved from 8% to 7.5%. New logos were 32 points last year and 20 this year, only because Rs 8 crore sits on Rs 40 crore instead of Rs 25 crore. Expansion collapsed from 36 points to 12.5. Net revenue retention, opening ARR plus expansion minus churn over opening ARR, fell from 128% to 105%.

Yes, but a smaller and more predictable one. To keep new logos at 32 points on a Rs 40 crore base, Kodvik would have needed Rs 12.8 crore of new-logo ARR, 60% more than it booked. Every growing company faces this: the same sales team adds fewer points each year unless it grows too. Had expansion held at 36% of the base, it would have added Rs 14.4 crore instead of Rs 5 crore, and growth would have been about 49%. The expansion miss is the surprise; the base effect was arithmetic you could have forecast a year ago.

Go to the customers who stopped expanding. Ask for expansion by cohort and by customer size: did last year's big expanders hit a ceiling, or did a pricing change stop seats from being added? A code testing tool usually expands as customers hire engineers, so a hiring freeze among tech customers would show up exactly here and could reverse. A competitor winning the second team inside each account would not reverse. Those two explanations lead to different valuations, and the interviewer wants to see you ask for the data that separates them.