Product design question

As a PM for Apple and Google engineers, how would you design the contact tracing app to help the world transcend the COVID-19 pandemic?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Whether the candidate can design a sensitive, public health product with privacy and adoption as co-equal design constraints.

Clarify the goal: alert users who have been in close contact with a confirmed case, quickly enough to break transmission chains.
Identify the core tension: effectiveness requires broad adoption and accurate proximity data, while trust requires strong privacy guarantees.
Prioritize a privacy-preserving design: on-device, decentralized exposure logging (similar to the real Apple/Google Exposure Notification API) rather than centralized location tracking.
Address adoption barriers: opt-in consent, clear communication of what data is and isn't collected, and integration with public health authorities for verified test results.
Define success as adoption rate needed for effectiveness (public health research suggested roughly 60 percent for strong impact) and speed of notification after exposure.

Grounds the design in the real decentralized, privacy-preserving Bluetooth proximity model rather than proposing centralized GPS tracking.
Names the adoption threshold needed for population-level effectiveness as the key success metric, not just download count.
Addresses trust explicitly, since low adoption due to privacy fear was the real-world failure mode for many contact tracing apps.

Proposing centralized location tracking without addressing the privacy backlash it would cause.
Ignoring the adoption threshold needed for the app to be epidemiologically useful at all.

How would you drive adoption without making it mandatory?
What would you do if adoption plateaus well below the threshold needed for effectiveness?