Product design question
Design a mapping app for a school.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a niche indoor navigation problem: can you scope a mapping app to a school's specific needs rather than a generic outdoor map.
How to approach it
- Define users: new students, visiting parents, and substitute staff who do not know the building layout, since regular students and staff already know their way.
- Identify the core need: indoor wayfinding to classrooms, offices, and facilities, which standard outdoor maps like Google Maps do not cover well.
- Prioritize a simple indoor floor plan search over real time location tracking, since search by room number or name is the most common actual need.
- Design the core feature: a searchable digital floor plan with step by step directions between rooms, plus event day mode for things like open houses or exams in unusual rooms.
- Consider accessibility, ensuring routes can be filtered for elevator or ramp access for those who need it.
- Define success as successful searches leading to a completed route, and reduced front desk requests for directions.
What a strong answer includes
- Scopes tightly to indoor wayfinding, the actual unmet need, rather than rebuilding a generic outdoor map for a school.
- Identifies a realistic, narrow user base (new students, visitors, substitutes) instead of assuming all students need it daily.
- Uses a concrete operational metric, front desk direction requests dropping, tied to the real world pain point.
Common mistakes
- Designing outdoor navigation to the school, which most users already handle fine with existing map apps.
- Ignoring accessibility needs like elevator access routes.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep the floor plan data updated as the building changes?
- How would this work for a multi building campus versus a single building?
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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