Product design question
Design a platform or dashboard for sellers on Amazon. Also talk about the success metrics for such a platform/dashboard.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Dashboard and platform design skill: translating a seller's operational needs into a clear interface plus the metrics that prove it helps.
How to approach it
- Confirm scope: a dashboard for inventory, sales, or advertising performance, or all three combined.
- Segment sellers: new sellers needing guidance versus established sellers needing efficiency at scale.
- Identify the top pain point: sellers cannot quickly tell why sales dropped week over week.
- Prioritize a sales health view that surfaces the biggest driver of change, such as stockouts or lost buy box.
- Design the dashboard around one clear headline metric with drill down into likely causes.
- Define success with time to diagnose an issue and the percent of sellers taking a corrective action from the alert.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks one sharp pain point, unclear reasons for sales drops, rather than a kitchen sink dashboard.
- Designs around a headline metric with drill downs, mirroring how real analytics tools like Amazon's own Seller Central work.
- Sets a specific success metric, time to diagnose an issue, tied directly to the redesign's purpose.
- Assumes an illustrative baseline, such as sellers today taking over a day to spot a stockout.
Common mistakes
- Designs a dashboard with every possible metric and no clear priority.
- Skips defining what action a seller should take after seeing the data.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prioritize alerts so sellers are not overwhelmed?
- How would this differ for a seller with one SKU versus one with thousands?
- What would you measure to know the dashboard actually changed seller behavior?
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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