Bijan Shahrokhi 
Hey there! Want to land your dream product manager job? We’ve got you covered.
Check out our 2,500+ product manager interview questions database with answers from expert product managers.
Article Contents
Product design questions are a considerable portion of a product manager job interview. These questions are designed to get answers about if you have the product sense to build something useful. Your creativity and ingenuity are put on the stand here, and you need to be ready to prove what you’ve got.
To go in-depth with product design questions, you can check out our product design interview guide to prepare for each of these questions. There’s no need to hesitate when answering if you do the proper prep work.
Here are eight questions that are regularly asked in PM job interviews today. They can be addressed in creative and solution-based ways that show the interviewer what you can deliver for them.
1. Design a Product for Facebook to fight COVID-19
To answer this question appropriately, you need to familiarize yourself with the types of people negatively affected by COVID-19 and understand their needs as a consequence. Ask yourself questions like:
- Are they staying home more?
- Are they not socializing as much as before?
- Have they lost access to child care?
- Etc.
Starting with your customer’s pain points will allow you to design a product to mitigate them.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
2. Design a Vending Machine for Blind People
There is plenty of technology out there that makes accommodations for the blind. This is your chance to apply it to something new and demonstrate how you apply things that already exist to new ideas.
Ask yourself, “what are the unique needs of the blind? How do they interact with physical devices, and how can you enhance that experience? Don’t be afraid to get creative when designing a vending machine that reimagines the experience for this group of customers.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account. Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
3. How would you redesign the carwash?
Sometimes you’ll get questions that seem like they do not need improvement; “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But while that may be true for some things, companies like Uber and Airbnb, for example, have shown that every product or industry can be disrupted. After all, like Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Like before, you need to put yourself in a customer-centric point of view. Think about the end-to-end user journey when someone goes to a car wash. What pain points aren’t being addressed? Then think of creative solutions to these problems in a new car wash.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
4. How would you design a “Google Refrigerator”?
If you learn one thing from this article about product design, it should always start with the user experience. In this instance, what is the refrigerator experience now, and what are its limitations? Once you have identified a few, you can begin to think of solutions to address them. The solutions should reflect Google’s core business: data. In other words, the question could be rephrased as “how would you design a fridge through the lens of data management or data organization?”
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: Some answers require a paid account.
5. Design a library for the future
While the world is changing and rapidly digitizing, books will always have a place in popular culture. But that doesn’t mean libraries can’t be improved! Just as before, start by thinking about the expectations and experiences of readers that go to the library. What problems do they have? For example, one solution for a post-COVID world could be an Amazon Go-like experience, where visitors are tracked through their apps and never encounter a librarian.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
6. How would you design a consumer application for a scooter-sharing business?
There are plenty of these companies that already exist. If you have done your research, you’ll know that some are highly successful and some aren’t. It’s up to you to find out what works for some of them that don’t work for others. This is the best way to come up with the correct answer.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
7. How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?
While we go into this on our site in much greater detail, here is a quick glimpse.
It all comes down to identifying the needs of the tourists. You should know exactly what to apply to the renting app if you know what the tourists are looking for. Think of your target customer and translate their needs into new features for the application.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
8. Build a product to buy and sell antiques
Like the previous question, you need to target the customers’ wants and appropriately answer this question. In this example, however, you have two different groups: buyers and sellers. Each group has their unique needs and “jobs to be done.” Try to solve the biggest problems for each group.
This is a complex answer that demands you bring together a broad audience of needs. To look further into this question, our website has in-depth answers to all of the questions you could have.
See how our community answered this question here. It’s free to sign up for an account! Note: For some questions, you need to upgrade your account to view the complete answers.
Final Thoughts
While the questions above are specific, there is a general formula to answer any product design question. When it comes down to it, product design questions are meant to showcase a candidate’s ability to understand the customer experience, identify their pain points, and solve them using the core competency of the company they are interviewing for.
By studying each question in detail and understanding the broad overview of how to answer any product design question, you can walk into your following interview with complete confidence. Check out the product design question and answer section at PM Exercises for help on answering any of these questions with ease.
