Product design question
Design a globe.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Basic product design instincts applied to a physical/educational object: can you find a real user and pain point instead of just describing a globe.
How to approach it
- Pick a user: a classroom student learning geography, versus a home-office decorative buyer.
- Define the job: quickly and accurately understand where places are relative to each other, and learn facts about them.
- Identify the pain point with static globes: outdated borders/names, and no way to explore beyond what's printed.
- Propose an improvement: a globe with a companion app or AR overlay that layers live info (population, weather, history) via a phone camera.
- Address cost/complexity tradeoff: keep the physical globe simple and put intelligence in the free companion app, not embedded electronics.
- Define success: how it would be measured, e.g. classroom adoption or engagement time with the app layer.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks a specific user (student) rather than designing for a vague 'anyone who wants a globe'.
- Solves the real weakness of physical globes, staleness, without over-engineering the object itself.
- Keeps hardware simple and pushes complexity to software (AR app), which is cheaper to update and iterate on.
- Names a believable success metric tied to the actual user (classroom engagement), not just units sold.
Common mistakes
- Designing a globe crammed with built-in electronics and screens, ignoring cost and durability for a classroom setting.
- Not naming a specific user, making the whole answer generic.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep the AR content up to date without much ongoing cost?
- Who's the buyer versus the user here, and does that change your design?
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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