Product design question
Assume Google Books didn't exist. How would you design Google Books?
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests first-principles product design: rebuilding a familiar product's value proposition from scratch and identifying what core problem it should solve today.
How to approach it
- Identify the core need: readers and researchers want to search, discover, and access the content of books, especially out-of-print or hard-to-find ones, without owning a physical copy.
- Identify pain points today: physical libraries have limited catalogs and hours, and existing e-book stores focus on buying whole books rather than searching within them.
- Prioritize the core problem: full-text search across a massive catalog of books, so users can find the specific passage or book relevant to their need, is the differentiated value.
- Propose the solution: a searchable digital library with snippet previews, links to purchase or borrow the full book, and deep integration with academic or citation tools for researchers.
- Address the constraint: copyright and publisher relationships are the hardest, most sensitive part of this design, so a preview-and-purchase model (not full free access) protects rights holders.
- Define success: search queries resulting in a book discovery or purchase, and researcher or student adoption as a core user segment.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies full-text search and discovery, not simple e-book sales, as the core differentiated value, matching what actually made Google Books distinctive.
- Addresses the copyright and publisher relationship constraint directly, since that has historically been the single hardest part of this exact product.
- Proposes a preview-and-link model that respects rights holders while still solving the discovery problem, a real, workable middle ground.
- Targets researchers and students as a specific high-value segment, not just general readers, sharpening the design.
Common mistakes
- Designing a simple e-book store without addressing the actual differentiated value of full-text search and discovery.
- Ignoring copyright and publisher relationships, which is the central real-world constraint on this exact product.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you convince publishers to participate given past legal disputes over book scanning?
- How would you measure whether the product is actually helping research, not just casual browsing?
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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