Product design question
Add food ordering capability to Amazon Echo. How would you go about designing the product?
- Amazon
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for adding a new capability to an existing hardware device, weighing ecosystem fit and a genuinely new user need against feature creep.
How to approach it
- Clarify the trigger: is this driven by user demand for voice-based ordering, or a business goal to grow Amazon's food delivery or restaurant partnerships.
- Segment users: hands-busy moments (cooking, driving, holding a baby) where voice ordering has a real advantage over tapping through an app.
- Identify the core design challenge: food ordering has high decision complexity, menus, customization, substitutions, which voice-only interfaces handle poorly.
- Propose a hybrid flow: voice initiates and handles simple repeat orders, while complex customization or new restaurant discovery falls back to the companion app or screen device.
- Address trust: users need confirmation before an order with real money is placed, so add an explicit verbal confirmation step.
- Define success as completed-order rate via voice and repeat usage for the same order, not just voice session starts.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies voice's real advantage, hands-busy moments and repeat orders, rather than treating voice as a universal interface.
- Proposes a hybrid voice-plus-screen flow instead of forcing complex menu navigation into voice-only, which is a known UX failure mode.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume 70% of repeat orders are for the same handful of items, making voice reordering the highest-value use case.
- Addresses the trust and error-prevention need explicitly, since a misheard order with real payment is a serious failure mode.
Common mistakes
- Designing a fully voice-only ordering flow that ignores how poorly voice handles complex menu customization.
- Not addressing order confirmation and error correction before payment.
- Ignoring that this requires restaurant and delivery partnerships Amazon would need to build or acquire.
Likely follow-up questions
- How do you handle a misheard order before payment is charged?
- What's the MVP scope, repeat orders only, or full menu browsing?
- How would you measure trust in the voice ordering flow?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop